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….want to go home, I’m feedup working here…

Jorg has released an OpenSolaris based LiveCD http://schily.blogspot.com/2005/06/schillix-is-real-now.html

Wow!

Following on from my now broken grepmaster mug (from http://www.thinkgeek.net), I want one of these: You can buy it here, and see the rest of the stuff here: http://www.cafepress.com/cuddletech[ ]1 All from a new blog find, http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/

Yeah, I know it’s everybodies favorite buzz word, but here’s some software that will try and free you from buying Windows Servers, Group Policies are good http://www.nitrobit.com/GroupPolicy.html To me, the idea behind the Open Source Enterprise is to reduce cost, improve flexibility & maintainability. It’s likely that there will always be a need for Windows desktops in most SMEs, unless it’s a clean sheet site & you can avoid getting locked in at the start.

One of my favourite features of Solaris 8 and above is DiskSuite, when igb first showed me the beautiful simplicity of metainit, metattach et al, I was simply blown away (having previously only worked with Windows NT4’s crude mirroring). Last night was a perfect example, we have a Sun E220 with an A1000 � a couple of D1000’s hanging off it, I had been playing with some spare disks and managed to get the metadb (metadb keeps track of what metadevice is built from what physical devices) in a bit of a state, if we ignore the fact that I managed to get the metadbs in a mess, the recovery is remarkable smooth, considering that our local Sun support team could only suggest that we wiped everything � restored from tape.

I have a tricky problem on a Solaris/Veritas/Dell-EMC cluster I’m working on. The Solaris machines need to be rebooted twice to be able to use a LUN presented from the SAN. Now I’m not sure where the problem lies, I think the first reboot is for Solaris to see the devices, once you can see the devices you can use EMC’s PowerPath tools (powermt) to determine the managed device for the LUN (this is managed in that powerpath presents you with a virtual device, usually something like /dev/rdsk/emcpowerXX, access to this device is used to load balance access across the physical paths to the SAN, and handle when a path my become unavailable).

Once the virtual device is there, you then need to put a VTOC on the device so that Veritas Volume Manager can see the device, it can’t use it until you reboot tho’, which is a major grumble. VEA shows the disk as “Not Setup”, it won’t allow you to Initialize the disk until the box has been rebooted.

After the reboot, VEA will show the disk as “Not Initialized”, you can now use the disk (i.e. Add it to a Disk Group etc)

The SAN is all Dell/EMC based, which means it runs on Windows, can you imagine the flack I’m getting from the Windows boys over having to reboot twice to use a LUN!

Just seen an excellent example of this over at http://wanderingbarque.com/everfixedmark/2005/04/16/the-things-they-married/trackback/

http://www.scalix.com/index.html

As my mother would say (sarcasticly) “sad in one so you”. I have a terrible memory, I forget things very easily (luckily my wife has the patients of a saint!), I’ve been finding a lot of interesting blogs recently & have been merrily using Blogroll It! to add them to my blog for easy reference. I’ve just discovered that I hadn’t been selecting my Blogroll as the destination, so all the links I added recently have just disappeared 🙁 I also have no idea what links I have just lost.