Matthieu | Blog » server

System failures à go go

Matthieu — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:41:44 +0000

Today was quite the day. As the title says, systems were failing all over the place. Our main switch at work (a Cisco 6509) crashed about 3 times this week, causing our vSphere environment to crash repeatedly, taking all the guest VMs with it. We searched for a long while before discovering that a faulty UPS battery was to blame for the switch’s instability. Meanwhile, we’re left with a misconfigured iSCSI SAN and 3 ESX hosts with no storage.

At home, my crazy MythTV/OpenVZ/KVM/PBX/Windows 2003/Seedbox/RADIUS server had to be shut down when my home network started acting up. DHCP stopped working, and the machines that were left had difficulty pinging each other. This time, a Cisco device was to blame. A WRT610N router that I use as an ABGN Access-point running DD-WRT had somehow bricked itself and started broadcasting packets on the network, thus flooding my routers and other computers. Then, I tried booting up my server again. MythTV and OpenVZ started up OK, but the qemu-server/kvm machines didn’t start, throwing “can’t open lock for VM 107 ‘/var/lock/qemu-server/lock-107.conf’ – No such file or directory”. Weird error. The fix is to create the /var/lock/qemu-server folder.

And finally, everything at home is up and running again. We’ll see tomorrow morning how things go at work. David was staying late today on the phone with Dell EqualLogic specialists, so fingers crossed!

New Intel 64-core server

Matthieu — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:50:43 +0000

http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server;jsessionid=7DEDBC5B817E1796D3DF5D5D3F1550D7.node5COMS?view=blog

OMG

Migration to iWeb and Ubuntu+Proxmox how-to

Matthieu — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:56:40 +0000

My faithful readers (all 0 of them) may notice that the site is considerably faster now. My blog is now hosted on a proper server over at iweb in Montréal instead of on my home server, leaving it free for other tasks.

As seen previously, I was attempting to set up a combination MythTV/OpenVZ server. Well, I finally got it working:

Install Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04, 64-bit) and update until the update manager won’t update no more
Install and configure MythTV backend. This step’s difficulty may vary depending on the tuner card. My Hauppage HVR-1600 was supported by Ubuntu out-of-the-box.
Add the Debian Lenny stable and update repos to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get update.
Download Linux driver for Intel Pro 1000 PCIe card.
Install vzctl, linux-image-2.6-openvz-amd64, linux-headers-2.6-openvz-amd64, update-grub if necessary.
Reboot, make sure openvz kernel is running.
Make && make install Intel e1000e driver.
(Optional) Install Proxmox VE by adding proxmox repo.
(Optional) Install mercurial and hg clone v4l-dvb. The main branch was broken, so I used one of the dev’s personal repos. make && make install v4l-dvb; cx18 now works again.

Upgrading Proxmox VE kernel

Matthieu — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:19:20 +0000

I currently am running this blog from an OpenVZ server managed via Proxmox VE. One issue I had with this setup is that the Proxmox 1.3 installer by default comes with a relatively old kernel (2.6.24), and I want a newer kernel (>=2.6.26, so that I can use my cx18-based TV tuner). Fortunately, Proxmox is just a customized version of Debian Lenny, so I just installed the linux-image-2.6.26-2-openvz-amd64 package from apt, then ran update-initramfs -u and update-grub.

After updating the kernel, however, I was unable to start any of my virtual machines from the Proxmox Web UI. Looking at the system log showed a message about vzctl being 32-bit; problem solved by updating vzctl via apt.

Now I’m attempting to compile v4l-dvb…. fingers crossed!

hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb