Category: @Work

EMC^2/Legato Net­work­er 7.5.1.6 status

We updat­ed Net­work­er 7.5.1.4 to 7.5.1.6 as the Networker-Support thought it will fix at least one of our prob­lems (“ghost” vol­umes in the DB). Unfor­tu­nate­ly the update does not fix any bug we see in our environment.

Spe­cial­ly for the “post-command runs 1 minute after pre-command even if the back­up is not finished”-bug this is not sat­is­fy­ing: no con­sis­tent DB back­up where the appli­ca­tion has to be stopped togeth­er with the DB to get a con­sis­tent snap­shot (FS+DB in sync).

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SUN Open­Stor­age presentation

At work (client site) SUN made a pre­sen­ta­tion about their Open­Stor­age prod­ucts (Sun Stor­age 7000 Uni­fied Stor­age Sys­tems) today.

From a tech­nol­o­gy point of view, the soft­ware side is noth­ing new to me. Using SSDs for zfs as a read-/write-cache is some­thing we can do (part­ly) already since at least Solaris 10u6 (that is the low­est Solaris 10 ver­sion we have installed here, so I can not check quick­ly if the ZIL can be on a sep­a­rate disk in pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Solaris, but I think we have to wait until we updat­ed to Solaris 10u8 until we can have the L2ARC on a sep­a­rate disk) or in FreeB­SD. All oth­er nice ZFS fea­tures avail­able in the Open­Stor­age web inter­face are also not surprising.

But the demon­stra­tion with the Stor­age Sim­u­la­tor impressed me. The inter­ac­tion with Win­dows via CIFS makes the old­er ver­sion of files in snap­shots avail­able in Win­dows (I assume this is the Vol­ume Shad­ow Copy fea­ture of Win­dows), and the sta­tis­tics avail­able via DTrace in the web inter­face are also impres­sive. All this tech­nol­o­gy seems to be well inte­grat­ed into an easy to use pack­age for het­ero­ge­neous envi­ron­ments. If you would like to set­up some­thing like this by hand, you would need to have a lot of knowl­edge about a lot of stuff (and in the FreeB­SD case, you would prob­a­bly need to aug­ment the ker­nel with addi­tion­al DTrace probes to be able to get a sim­i­lar gran­u­lar­i­ty of the sta­tis­tics), noth­ing a small com­pa­ny is will­ing to pay.

I know that I can get a lot of infor­ma­tion with DTrace (from time to time I have some free cycles to extend the FreeB­SD DTrace imple­men­ta­tion with addi­tion­al DTrace probes for the lin­ux­u­la­tor), but what they did with DTrace in the Open­Stor­age soft­ware is great. If you try to do this at home your­self, you need some time to imple­ment some­thing like this (I do not think you can take the DTrace scripts and run them on FreeB­SD, this will prob­a­bly take some weeks until it works).

It is also the first time I see this new CIFS imple­men­ta­tion from SUN in ZFS life in action. It looks well done. Inte­gra­tion with AD looks more easy than doing it by hand in Sam­ba (at least from look­ing at the Open­Stor­age web inter­face). If we could get this in FreeB­SD… it would rock!

The entire Open­Stor­age web inter­face looks usable. I think SUN has a prod­uct there which allows them to enter new mar­kets. A prod­uct which they can sell to com­pa­nies which did not buy some­thing from SUN before (even Windows-only com­pa­nies). I think even those Win­dows admins which nev­er touch a com­mand line inter­face (read: the low-level ones; not com­pa­ra­ble at all with the real­ly high-profile Win­dows admins of our client) could be able to get this up and running.

As it seems at the moment, our client will get a Sun Stor­age F5100 Flash Array for tech­nol­o­gy eval­u­a­tion in the begin­ning of next year. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the tech­nol­o­gy looks to easy to han­dle, so I assume I have to take care about more com­plex things when this machine arrives… 🙁

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Fight­ing with the SUN LDAP server

At work we decid­ed to update our LDAP infra­struc­ture. From SUN Direc­to­ry Serv­er 5.2 to 6.3(.1). The per­son doing this is: me.

We have some require­ments for the appli­ca­tions we install, we want them in spe­cif­ic loca­tions so that we are able to move them between servers more eas­i­ly (no need to search all stuff in the entire sys­tem, just the gener­ic loca­tion and some stuff in /etc needs to be tak­en care of… in the best case). SUN offers the DSEE 6.3.1 as a pack­age or as a ZIP-distribution. I decid­ed to down­load the ZIP-distribution, as this implies less stuff in non-conforming places.

The instal­la­tion went OK. After the ini­tial hur­dles of search­ing the SMF man­i­fest ref­er­enced in the docs (a com­mand shall install it) but not find­ing them because the ZIP-distribution does not con­tain this func­tion­al­i­ty (I see no tech­ni­cal rea­son; I installed the man­i­fest by hand), I had the new serv­er up, the data import­ed, and a work­sta­tion con­fig­ured to use this new server.

The next step was to set­up a sec­ond serv­er for multi-master repli­ca­tion. The docs for DSEE tell to use the web inter­face to con­fig­ure the repli­ca­tion (this is pre­ferred over the com­mand line way). I am more a com­mand line guy, but OK, if it is that much rec­om­mend­ed, I decid­ed to give it a try… and the web inter­face had to be installed any­way, so that the less com­mand line affine peo­ple in our team can have a look in case it is needed.

The bad news, it was hard to get the webin­ter­face up and run­ning. In the pack­age dis­tri­b­u­tion all this is sup­posed to be very easy, but in the ZIP-distribution I stum­bled over a lot of hur­dles. The GUI had to be installed in the java appli­ca­tion serv­er by hand instead of the more auto­mat­ic way when installed as a pack­age. When fol­low­ing the instal­la­tion pro­ce­dure, the appli­ca­tion serv­er wants a pass­word to start the web inter­face. The pack­age ver­sion allows to reg­is­ter it in the solaris man­age­ment inter­face, the ZIP-distribution does not (direct access to it works, off course). Adding a serv­er to the direc­to­ry serv­er web inter­face does not work via the web inter­face, I had to reg­is­ter it on the com­mand line. Once it is reg­is­tered, not every­thing of the LDAP serv­er is acces­si­ble, e.g. the error mes­sages and sim­i­lar. This may or may not be relat­ed to the fact that it is not very clear which programs/daemons/services have to run, for exam­ple do I need to use the cacaoadm of the sys­tem, or the one which comes with DSEE? In my tests it looks like they are dif­fer­ent beasts inde­pen­dent from each oth­er, but I did not try all pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions to see if this affects the behav­ior of the web inter­face or not.

All the prob­lems may be doc­u­ment­ed in one or two of the DSEE doc­u­ments, but at least in the instal­la­tion doc­u­ment there is not enough doc­u­men­ta­tion regard­ing all my ques­tions. Seems I have to read a lot more doc­u­men­ta­tion to get the web inter­face run­ning… which is a shame, as the man­age­ment inter­face which is sup­posed to make the admin­is­tra­tion more easy needs more doc­u­men­ta­tion than the prod­uct it is sup­posed to manage.

Oh, yes, once I had both LDAP servers reg­is­tered in the web inter­face, set­ting up the repli­ca­tion was very easy.

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Some com­pa­nies do not want to get money…

The rea­son for our prob­lems with the phone @Work (see relat­ed posts) is known now. The com­pa­ny pay­ing for the phone lines changed the tax num­ber (fall­out of a require­ment to make busi­ness with banks here), informed the 2 phone com­pa­nies they are using about it, got a bill from one with the old tax num­ber and from the oth­er one with the cor­rect tax num­ber, informed the phone com­pa­ny which used the old num­ber again, got again a bill with the wrong tax num­ber, informed them again, … until the phone com­pa­ny cut the line (pay­ing the bill while there is the wrong tax num­ber on it seems to cause big prob­lems lat­er in the tax/money han­dling chain).

So there a sev­er­al kinds of phone com­pa­nies here. Those which want to make busi­ness with cus­tomers (e.g. Ver­i­zon in LU), and those which do not (e.g. P&T in LU).

Let us wait and see when we get work­ing phone lines and from whom… 🙂

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