Resizing/Adding VMware disk + Linux guest

You have Linux guest running on top of a (recent) VMware esx and you want to extend one of the disks (Not the root fs) ? You can do it without a reboot/downtime

- Resize the disk on VMware (e.g via virtual center)
- Go to the Linux guest os and run:

echo "1" > /sys/class/scsi_device/your_device/device/rescan

Check with dmesg is the kernel sees the new size. Should show something like this:

SCSI device sda: 209715200 512-byte hdwr sectors (107374 MB)
sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sda: cache data unavailable
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: detected capacity change from 85899345920 to 107374182400


Now you can use parted or some other tools to resize the partition+filesystem.

Suppose you added a disk to a running VMware instance. No problem

- From within the Linux guest OS run:

echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

Check with dmesg if the system sees the new disks


Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
0:0:1:0: mptscsih: ioc0: qdepth=32, tagged=1, simple=1, ordered=0, scsi_level=3, cmd_que=1
target0:0:1: Beginning Domain Validation
target0:0:1: Domain Validation skipping write tests
target0:0:1: Ending Domain Validation
target0:0:1: FAST-40 WIDE SCSI 80.0 MB/s ST (25 ns, offset 127)
SCSI device sdb: 1048576000 512-byte hdwr sectors (536871 MB)
sdb: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sdb: cache data unavailable
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdb: 1048576000 512-byte hdwr sectors (536871 MB)
sdb: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sdb: cache data unavailable
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: unknown partition table
sd 0:0:1:0: Attached scsi disk sdb
sd 0:0:1:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0

Another interesting (related) read: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf

March 11th, 2010 - Posted in vmware | | 0 Comments

Opening hours (standard) format

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there an (XML based) standard to advertise opening hours of a shop? The way it should work in an ideal world for me: Every shop has a simple file somewhere on their website (e.g http://www.shop.be/openinghours.xml) which contains the opening hours in a standardized (preferably XML) format. That way I can easily import all these XML files (like a feed) in an application (e.g on a mobile device) and no longer have to wonder if a shop is open or not.

Thanks!

December 12th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments

Nomad

In the latest versions of the OpenSUSE 11.1 beta a new cool feature/innovation was added and it goes by the name of ‘Nomad’.
Make sure you check the OpenSUSE wiki page to learn more about it.

November 29th, 2008 - Posted in opensuse | | 0 Comments

Make your NCP volume highly available with heartbeat

I wrote a Heartbeat2 resource agent to make your NCP volumes on an OES2 Linux server highly availble if you don’t want to use Novell Cluster Services (NCS).

This only works for NCP volumes that do _NOT_ reside on NSS!

Take the resource agent and drop it in /usr/lib/ocf/resource.d/heartbeat/

Create an IP resource (IPaddr2), a filesystem resource and a NCP Volume resource (NcpVolume) and put them together in one group.

If you are interested drop me an email and I’ll provide you a complete INSTALL/README document.

August 27th, 2008 - Posted in ha, oes | | 0 Comments

Grrrr(eat) samba

Warning *RANT*

First off all let me start this post by stating that samba is a great and very powerful piece of software BUT
configuration and management can be a real PITA

Let me give some examples of what I mean

- Samba + LDAP

If you’re setting up a samba as a PDC in a bigger environment you’ll probably go for LDAP but which LDAP schema will you use? The samba3.schema, gosa.schema or some cusom schema? Standardization anybody?

Which tool will you use to manage your LDAP users? phpLDAPadmin, LAM or maybe the smbldap-tools package.
But all those tools have their own set of problems and shortcomings… How do we find out the next available uid and rid? via a special attribute in LDAP (which requires a certain schema!) or by just doing a lookup or by using an internal range of available uids or still another way *sigh*

Ok so when we create a new (samba) user we also want to make this user an FTP and Mail user. No problem you would think. Think again. Frontend X is not written to fill in the necessary attributes for application Y so you’ll have to use 2 or 3 different front ends or end up with a generic LDAP front end (which is really NOT the tool you want to give to unexperienced users/admins)

- General configuration

Your entire samba configuration is stored in smb.conf (which contains an ini alike format). The biggest problem here is that you have Sooooo many options to configure the entire thing and to make it even worse you can have different options that will achieve the same results.
E.g: to make a certain share writeable you could say “writeable = yes” or “read-only = no”. And don’t get me started on all the other options which can be used in the global section. (man 5 smb.conf)

There is not really a good front end to configure all this stuff. (Swat is not an alternative for me).So you’ll end up with vi smb.conf.

Did you ever tried to configure a share? How do you protect it? With Linux permissions, in the share definition or via a windows workstation (with acls)? Again so many options which makes it very hard to debug in case of problems. And next to the access configuration of a share you still have a number of options to configure other share related stuff. “csc policy”, “dos filemode”, “fake oplocks”, … Waaah! I don’t care, I just want a share and be able to put some data and permissions on it!

- Tools

The entire samba suite comes with a number of command line tools like pdbedit, smbcacls, testparm, tdbdump… which are not always very user friendly.
Ever played with the “net” command and one of its options? Or tried to configure acls via smbcacls? Even setfacl is more user friendly!

All this stuff requires me to have an almost custom samba configuration on every installation ;(

If we really want companies to migrate their existing Windows file server to a Linux alternative this lack of decent management and configuration tools is really something that need to be worked on.

My 2 cents.

August 1st, 2008 - Posted in linux | | 2 Comments

Puppet with zypper

Title says it all
For people that use puppet on OpenSuSE there was a small problem since 10.2 because from that release on OpenSuSE did not include the rug command anymore to manage software…. but it’s still the default package provider for puppet (OpenSuSE switched to zypper).

So this weekend I wrote an initial zypper package provider (based on the rug package provider).
Drop this file in puppet/providers/package/ and you are ready to start using “provider => zypper” in your manifests

July 28th, 2008 - Posted in opensuse | | 0 Comments

Application virtualization

Today I saw a presentation from Acresso, the guys from AdminStudio and InstallShield.
The topic was Application Virtualization with products like Thinapp (formerly Thinstall) and Citrix.

I learned that with these kind of technologies it’s possible to create an executable of any (windows) application (msi) which also contains all the dependencies that this app needs (dll, registry keys,…) to executed. The advantage is that you can create an executable and run it everywhere (from a USB disk,..) and on every machine (win9x, XP, 200x,..)

This got me thinking…

Would it be possible to create a virtual application (e.g Photoshop) and run this under Wine?

July 10th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments

MagicBox

Today I received the openSusE 11.0 (DVD) Box.

It contains a DVD, Start-up guide and 2 stickers.

(Contributors to the project receive this gift as a way to thank them for their participation)

Thanks Novell/SuSE!

July 9th, 2008 - Posted in opensuse | | 0 Comments

VMware Infrastructure Client on Linux

Dear VMware,

Please release a version of the VMware Infrastructure Client for Linux.

(As a bonus the license server and VirtualCenter on Linux would make it complete)

I know you can do it, you proved it already with your ESX product.

My eternal respect will be your reward

Thanks,

Leo

June 26th, 2008 - Posted in vmware | | 6 Comments

iFolder and Novell client on openSUSE 11.0

You can get both applications to work but it requires some manual work (On my laptop I did an upgrade from 10.3 to 11.0)

It’s very important that you install the right version of log4net. iFolder and simias requires version 1.2.9 while openSUSE 11.0 ships with 1.2.10 in order to fix this you need to remove the log4net package and (re)install a 1.2.9 rpm (which is available on software.opensuse.org)

The /etc/init.d/novfsd script tries to compile the novfs module, this will fail due to a lot of changes in the kernel. This compilation is not necessary as you can use the novfs module which is in the kernel package.
> rpm -qf /lib/modules/2.6.25.5-1.1-default/kernel/fs/novfs/novfs.ko
kernel-default-2.6.25.5-1.1

To disable the attempt to compile to module every time the script is started just comment the following 2 lines in the /etc/init.d/novfs script
#cd /opt/novell/ncl/src/novfs
#./mk_novfs

June 24th, 2008 - Posted in opensuse | | 2 Comments