a view through my own eyes

Thursday saw the return to the cornea consultant. Once again he had a good peer round, proclaimed that the cataract can wait for as long as he feels like and then announced that the last five stitches were coming out.

So now George and I are alone with no physical ties to bind us together.

I suppose that I should remember not to look down in case George falls off.

Is what I said to my manager yesterday.

As part of a move at work to move from a traditional many (over specced) servers in racks for services, we are moving to fewer (very well specced) blade servers in racks with storage from a SAN (storage attached network) running VMware infrastructure. The theory being we can run lots of little virtual servers specced to do the job that they need to do and nothing else. This means that we can claw back some space in the data centers and also to play the green card by having fewer physical machines.

One of the tasks that I am involved in, is getting VMware installed onto the blade servers, although there are shiny GUI tools that the point n click boys like, there is also a service console based around Red Hat Linux – which to be honest is a darn sight easier to drive when configuring a virtual network infrastructure – mainly on the grounds that it can be scripted. On the grounds that we want in the long term it to be as little effort as possible we are looking at Altiris Rapid Deployment Manager (RDP). The idea being that our asset database can feed enough info to RDP so that when a brand new blade is inserted into a chassis on first boot it will automatically be installed with VMware, patched, networking configured and other bits done – with no sys admin work required.

A couple of days ago we pretty much had it working, then it did not. When I say working we had got to the point where the VMware install worked and ran our customisation scripts. Admittedly the scripts were still being tweaked to auto setup the virtual network infrastructure – but that really is trivial stuff the hard bit had been done. Two days ago we also started looking at making the SAN storage available to the VMware hosts to run the virtual machines.

Yesterday when testing the build scripts they failed every time, installation of the OS was just not happening. It was as if the storage had vanished. Then it occurred to us that at different points of the blade boot and installation process that the hardware storage is not necessarily available at the same place consistently.

So although there are internal disks in the blade and they are enumerated 0 and 1 at the BIOS level within the blade, it gets forgotten about when an OS is installed. Taking the boot process, the blades are configured to do a network (PXE) boot and should that fail to boot off the internal disks. Back to the PXE boot part, the RDP software knows which blades it has installed and should it see a new blade, it then sends the installation OS down the network which then runs on the blade which tells it how to build itself with VMware. Once it has done this, it ignores that blade since it knows that it has provided an installation and the blade should then boot of it’s own disks.

In our case the machines did a PXE boot and as they were new received the installation OS which did its stuff, they then rebooted but failed complaining of no system disk being available. After some (around a day of) head scratching it dawned on us that with other testing going, on a LUN from the SAN was being presented to the blades; the machines PXE booted, received the install OS which knows about SAN LUNs and so spotted the presented SAN and enumerated its disks as LUN, disk 1, disk 2; consequently the install OS installed VMware onto the LUN rather than the internal disks and so the blade boot failed as the OS was not actually on the blade.

Where in the manual it says: “Do no present a LUN from the SAN to the VMware servers prior to the VMware installation”, it tends to do so for a reason.

This part of the manual was read by myself and a colleague some time ago, and we both noted that it was clearly rather important and that it must be a silly thing to do.

The stupid thing is I was burnt on something similar years ago with Sun kit when performing a Solaris 7 to 8 upgrade where the internal disk structure had been added to over the years. The documentation then said ensure that you do an upgrade rather than a fresh install – so we did during testing and completely ignoring it for the live system.

dmc: path_to_inst

Yup it is another Dalziel & Pascoe from the job lot, this will be the last for a while as I need a change of scenery. Although I started this one on New Years Eve I finished it a few days ago so it counts as one of this years.

There is a serial killer on the loose, known as The Choker due to the method of killing. Add into the mix a randy bank manager, a dodgy garden centre, the country fair, an aeronautics club, a travelling band of gypsies and fortune tellers offering their services to the police and once again we have a corker of a who dunnit.

I have to admit that I did have suspicions as to the who fairly on but could not figure out the why and that left me confused about the who.

However based on the previous D&Ps that I I have read recently I feel that maybe it is not too difficult to work out the who, not because it is obvious (i.e. Johnson was seen walking away from the body with a hammer dripping in blood) but more because of the way that Hill does not write for that character almost as a way to deliberately leave them on the periphery and so reduce the amount of attention that they receive.

I will try and remember to put this to the test with the next one I read later in the year, for the moment though I am having a change of genre and the current book is a monster.

Many thanks to Chris and Jeanne for the T Shirt that arrived in the post this morning, with the phrase:

rm is forever

emblazoned on the front. I laughed mightily and then explained the joke to mrspao who looked baffled. I will wear it with pride to work on Monday and expect the point n click boys to not have a clue…

Chris & Jeanne also deserve the ‘buggering up the Christmas break plans’ award, for sending us a circular 1000 piece jigsaw of cats. My grandmother was so impressed that she wagered us 10 pounds that it would not be completed by Christmas 2009. So red rag to a bull as it was, we did it by New Year’s Day. Progress reports and photos can be found on mrspao’s blog. Several late nights were involved along with every minute not doing something else far more interesting – thanks guys.

Revenge will be sweet.

It has occurred to me that every now and again I make a list of things to do. Usually this takes the form of a list scribbled onto the back of an envelope and placed in my wallet. For some reason that I cannot explain it is important to me that the list goes on an envelope, perhaps this is out of spite of PDAs and other organiser software.

In the past various lists have been made, one was the wedding list of jobs that I had to do for sorting stuff out like: hire car/bouncy castle/ice cream van/best mens inside leg and so on; most items were done, a couple were not but on the whole mostly successful.

Another list made when I was redundant from work at the end of 1992 had the following items: improve education, get job, somewhere to live, BONUS ITEM:girlfriend. I think I can claim to have completed that list.

Since we are at the early part of 2009, it is time for a list of things to do over the next year, none of which are enormously exciting but do give me a chance to set some targets – nothing particularly personal will go on this list as it is after all a public list so apologies if my aims appear low, the loftier and personal goals are listed elsewhere (probably on an envelope); none of the following items are work related.

So, in no particular order:
-tidy the garage so the car can go in there
-varnish the rest of the window frames
-wash the car at least twice
-play (and complete) Zelda on the Game Cube – finally
-sell one of my photographs
-change the theme of this blog to a design I actually like
-read more books for leisure than last year (30 – so will be resetting the counter for this year)
-go and visit my brother and his family (terrible that has to go on this list – but it is said publicly now)
-visit all the pubs in the surrounding villages and walk to them from home as part of that task (a map etc will be sorted out for them in due course)
-lose some weight (I know this is a classic for this time of year but I want to do this through some basic lifestyle changes rather than a sudden fitness/diet crash plan)
-fix the loo in the en-suite bathroom (this will please mrspao)
-tidy and sort out the garden
-make a photobook
-arrange a game of Civilization (the board game), it only takes around 16 hours for a game and has been sat on the shelf for a few years so it is about time that a game was played.
-host a murder mystery evening (the game has been provided – now to pull finger out and actually do so)

I think that will do for now, will blog as and when things are done or abandoned – if I remember.