Requiescat In Pace
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve Jobs.
Hi-Track read timed out
Trying to investigate a nasty problem. Every day during seemingly the same hours, i.e. from 4 to 8 a.m., Hitrack reports that one of the controllers in the array it monitors is not responding. During the second consecutive check the problem resolves and the array stays healthy for the rest of the day. Next day it all starts over. The disk array (AMS2100) has the latest firmware installed and no errors or packet drops have been caught in the network. But Hitrack’s logs clearly show that there is a problem and as soon as it reports “Read timed out (2)” twice in a row the aforementioned alert hits the road. Hope, I could find the answer before my head cracks.
Update. Once we had migrated our HCS (HDvM and HTnM) from Windows to Linux the issue miraculously just gone away. And that wasn’t just a coincidence. We didn’t wiped out our Windows installation straight away but just powered it off. And then we turned it back on, guess what? Yes, the original issues had started to pop up again.
WordPress from iPhone
Gosh! Almost two months have passed from my last post and I didn’t have time to write a single word after that. I even had to install a wordpress application on my iPhone in hope it would help to me to update the blog more frequently. I’m not complaining and to tell the truth that is exactly I was craving for when I had began searching for a new position. My new job is lovely and I can’t get enough of it even at times I have to work long hours. Well, actually all of us here are so passionate about our job so I doubt that anyone feels negative about doing the overtime work.
Anyway, I’m doing well, learning new things mostly about VMware (ESX and its Perl API), HDvM and HTnM and feel myself utterly energetic and happy. Hope all of you, my friends, are doing well. Peace!
New position
After three years at CBOSS it’s time to seek for something new. The time I’ve spent working as Unix engineer were indeed fruitful and very positive and I don’t regret a second. I’ve met incredible people and have learned awfully a lot during this period. But now I’m turing a page a moving forward. At full throttle. I’m not going to change my professional orientation and still will be playing in a premier Unix league. But this time it’s going be a more vibrant and vitally critical financial environment. Wish me luck… ;-)
My second trip to Vladivostok
Last week I had a privilege to visit Vladivostok for the second time just one month after I’d been there for the very first time in my life. That’s a pitty, but I didn’t have enough time to go around the city extensively as I had planned initially: that was a classic “man proposes but God disposes” case. Anyway, I had a chance to visit a lighthouse sightseen point, a local Oceanarium and the Vladivostok’s castle museum. Very, vert impressive.
It’s sad to realize that due to the upcoming changes I’m not sure if I have another chance to visit this lovely city.
Finally got something to read
Hurray!
Just received a long awaited DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD book. From the very begining, even before I had pre-ordered it from Amazon, I knew it would be another great work made by Brendad Gregg and Jim Mauro. And I wasn’t mistaken. If you don’t trust me I strongly encourage everyone to read a sample chapter generously provided by Brendan – DTrace book sample chapter: File Systems.
Hapy reading and mastering Dtrace.
Vladivostok
Here are some photos that I was able to shoot during my last trip to Vladivostok. Nothing special…
When no documentation is better than a bad one.
I’ve just returned from Vladivistok where I spent a day replacing a battery in Sun’s SE 6120 disk array. What could be easier than that? True, unless you’ve been misguided by a broken documentation. Here is a quote from Sun/Oracle’s official document (Sun StorEdgeTM 6020 and 6120 Arrays System Manual):
Once a battery has been physically replaced in a given PCU and that PCU has been reinstalled in the tray, no further action is required. The system updates the battery FRU information as needed without operator intervention.
Piece of a cake – just swap a faulty battery and you’re good to go. Not really. When the battery was replaced “refresh -s” still complained that it was failed. “refresh -c” wasn’t a friend in that situation since if there is even a single faulty battery in a unit – the test would not start.
Just to be on a safe side I tried the second battery (all of them were original and new) and even a new PCU – but the end result was identical. Since I knew that the batteries were good I had to use special dot commands to fix that issue:
# sun # password: # .bat -c u1pcu2
Doing that I’ve just cleared the battery’s status so now “refresh -s” was reporting that it was “normal” and the battery started charging. As soon as it was completely charged
# .bat -i u1pcu2
was run to initialize battery warranty date and now it was time for “refresh -c” to place it under the test.
The end result – don’t blindly trust any documentation untill you’ve verified it through your experience.
P.S. I was told by the client that last time when they observed exectly the same behavior they simply turned of the array and all the dependent services.
Password and group caching
If you have a NIS client on HPUX and you’ve spent a few hours already trying to understand why on the earth “id” command keeps telling something like this:
bash-3.2# id sergeyt Can't find user sergeyt
And you’ve already checked all the pieces where NIS could brake, i.e. nsswitch.conf, ypwhich -m, ypmatch user_name passwd, nsquery, then try to ‘/sbin/init.d/pwgr stop’ and see if that would make a difference. Linux has a similar service called nscd (name server cache daemon) that has caused me a lot of trouble similar to the one mentioned above because both nscd and pwgrd cache not only positive but a negative responses as well.
Edit /etc/rc.config.d/pwgr file on HPUX server if you prefer this service to be disabled even if the server is rebooted.
Where is my mind
Just can’t stop listening that. For the last two days I’ve been spining this song all over and over again. Brilliant and truly talented lad.