Linux, what.
Have you ever needed/wanted to set up a single Red Hat Enterprise Linux server to sync all you servers to for package updates? 32 and 64 bit machines pointing to the same server? Different distros on the same server? Here’s how…
This tutorial is for setting up mrepo only. It’s the first part of setting up a Spacewalk instance to mirror RHN. If you’ve already completed this, go on to Part Two…(coming soon)
Part One: Setting up a mrepo server to mirror RHN’s Satellite repositories.
[Edit- mrepo tutorial has been posted. See here…]
Okay, a Primer, first.
Spacewalk is an open-sourced software suite for maintaining a number of Red Hat based servers. The Commercial version is Red Hat’s Satellite Server. SatServer has a few more bells and whistles, and the added benefit of support from the big Red Hat themselves, but also costs about $50,000 a copy. (Okay, I realize that number is off, depending on your situation, but my point remains. It’s expensive.)
What does it do? A lot, actually. You can use it for building new servers, and maintaining existing Continue reading Spacewalk as a viable replacement for Satellite
Bad idea: SAN storage on iscsi that mounts after fstab.
Worse idea: labeling them with /dev/sdX tags so they look like normal disks.
Worser idea: telling someone you’re adding disks to the raid array when you’re actually not- you’re adding it to a SAN the engineer still doesn’t know exists.
Mind numbingly worst idea: not having start/stop scripts on your Oracle RAC server because the whole “unable to mount the iscsi” drives configuration problem. Even with that whole mount/unmount problem- you SHOULD STILL HAVE A STOP SCRIPT so you don’t reboot a server with a live DB running.
I am not an “organized” person. I like to go with the flow, be spontaneous, and shoot from the hip. I fully acknowledge that is not always the best way to be in a profession such as computing, but it is what it is. In my professional capacity, I am a proponent of organization on a much larger scale than I could ever do in my personal life. I think Christy is to blame for that. 🙂
At any rate, I started my new job in May, and was thrust into a position where there are 6 datacenter-ish locations (5 DC’s and HQ has a server room with a fair number of live boxes)… still a far cry from the 3,000 Linux boxes we had at Fidelity. Continue reading On the need for structure in a budding Enterprise environment…
Apparently, multipathing with Powerpath requires a restart and module reload to add luns to an existing system. That also involves unmounting live filesystems to do so. That means an outage. Production does not like outages, and surprisingly enough, neither dev nor QA like outages either. Continue reading Lessons learned, re: EMC Powerpath