http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:42:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of my evening projects has been setting up OpenNMS to monitor a network primarily comprised of VENDORNAME switches. OpenNMS is being put in to replace a bundle of Nagios, Cacti, Smokeping, and Groundwork Fruity for Nagios configuration management. The existing system worked well enough, but the lack of autodiscovery ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/07/19/opennms-and-bugg-switches/ I just got a pingback on my earlier post, which was from a blog that indexes posts and articles with a particular word - acceptance - in it. Kind of an odd premise for a blog. UPDATE As per the comment, the author/owner of More Lyrics updated his blog to remove ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/07/04/weird-autoblogs/ It seems that the original subject of my post yesterday caught the eyes of much of the virtualisation community, including Simon Crosby, formerly from Xensource, and now working for Citrix. He's written a typically well thought out response, which covers off a lot of points: HP have a multi-hypervisor management tool already ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/07/04/citrix-on-xen/ Seems there's a bit of debate at the moment about the future of Xen within Citrix's product range, all sparked by this article by Brian Madden, which he clarified later on. Brian's followup clarifies his point: When I say that Citrix will drop Xen, I mean that Citrix will drop the ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/07/02/citrix-xenserver-xen-or-hyper-v-does-it-matter/ I'm very interested in the topic of network deployments of operating systems, specifically the various Microsoft OSs, as I can already install linux via PXEboot. There's two main groups of software in this field - unattended or scripted installs, and imaged installs. A while ago I found a tool called Unattended, ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/06/22/oss-network-imaging-install-services/ One of the servers I maintain is the jabber server at jabber.meta.net.nz. This is a free public service, anyone can use it, and it does get quite a wide range of use - for a long time we seemed to be very popular for south american users, possibly because of ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/06/22/using-monit-for-system-and-process-monitoring/ A couple of our clients have HP AiO1200 iSCSI systems. These are nice enough units, especially for entry level iSCSI SANs. They're in a slightly modified HP DL320s chassis, and run Windows 2003 Storage Server, as well as some custom built HP management tools. I've never had an easy run when ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/06/10/65/ I've used a few hardware based iSCSI stacks for Xenserver shared storage backends, but never had spare hardware to run up software based stacks. This is rather backwards from the usual way people would test things I guess, but it's how it worked out for us. However, we're now getting some ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/06/05/linux-iscsi-stacks-and-multiple-initiators-per-target-lun/ Over the last week I've been required to fix four different bugs relating to Xenserver. Not all were major bugs, not all were even Xenserver's fault. DVD drive missing The first bug, and actually one that first showed itself several months ago, is that the option to attach the server's DVD drive ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/05/06/week-of-xenserver-bugs/ I recently got a new laptop for work - the base model Macbook Pro. Slightly unfortunately, I got it about three weeks before the refresh, but I don't really care about the fairly minor changes. The slight CPU speed bump isn't really worth worrying about, although the new penryn based ... http://www.meta.net.nz/~daniel/blog/2008/03/24/thoughts-on-osx/