First – all systems are up and running! It is always exciting to make changes in productive environments because testing in a test environment is a bit “sterile” or “artificial”.
The resize operations on VMWare were straight forward as always but it took some time to backup the virtual harddrives before.
The really interesting thing was to shrink the ext3 partition on one of our OpenVZ servers, lvreduce the LVM logical volume, grow the ext3 to the maximum of the resized LVM logical volume and to implement DRBD for productive usage between to hot servers. Result: perfect! I decided to push up the syncer rate of DRBD (default 240K/sec.) to 20M/sec. The initial primary/secondary sync took about 30 minutes (20 G device).
Today the status is that the DRBD devices are in sync and the nighly reboot of the servers had no impact. I think I will make a little .deb package today for my management scripts of the OpenVZ containers (stratup). After that time is coming to copy our loadbalancer into the DRBD…..
Today I found the time to write a documentation (in German language for our work) about DRBD, a network (block device) based RAID 1 system. My target is finding a way to use normal LVM based devices and DRBD based devices in synergy on one host. Why? We have the requirement to build some containers fail save but not all. This means that we have an important central Apache based load balancer an some Tomcat based application server which we like to be online mirrored to another OpenVZ hardware node and if it is possible we will try to mirror over WAN from Austria to Germany.
I guess we will update the existing DRBD-OpenVZ wiki page which is a little bit outdated. Maybe I think we will contact Werner Fischer who we knew from the LinuxTag09 and who is the author of the wiki page.
In fact I learned a lot today and I also tested some scenarios (split brain, switch over,…) that make me think positive that it could work.
Stay tuned because I will post the translated documentation (German -> English) from our workplace at http://systec.blogsite.org/wiki.
Today we had a lot of discussions with different contents. All about organisation of different processes. A lot of talk…
But today we have also started with the installation of two “new” OpenVZ servers. Oh, they aren’t “new” in the meaning of high sophisticated hardware. They are new for us because they have 16GB ram and a fibre channel interface. which is really useful for us.
I am documenting the installation because I would like to post it on wiki.openvz.org and/or blog.openvz.org. We think it would be interesting for everybody who is using OpenVZ to know how we are managing our installations.
First facts: We are using Debian preseed, APT-Proxy, our own “add on” repository and Puppet. Well stay tuned!
As introduced on the blog.openvz.org site Boernie and I decided to help “curx” with the questions posted in the German part of the official OpenVZ forum. I think, if there are more people looking on the post, more people will come and ask a question. Really interesting stuff on the board.
Personal I hope that we have enough time to stay on the board – we will see.
Like last year, we are goining to the Linux Tag 09 next week. We will travel from Spittal to Vienna by car to catch the plane to Berlin. Yes this sounds a little bit crappy but so the tickes are much cheaper. The journey starts on Tuesday afternoon. Our flight to Berlin take off from Vienna at 21:30. Currently we are in contact with Kir Kolyshkin – the OpenVZ project manager!
I will try to make some picures from the atmosphere and maybe some videos. Stay tuned, because we have a little surprise for you related to OpenVZ and Kir!
The idea was to simply enhance the IBM Optical Library, so that a failure message (of an unreadable WORM), will automatically be saved (by a webcam) and then committed (by pressing the “Enter” button). In the following video you can see the Lego Mindstorms NXT hitting the “Enter” button after the failure message appears on the left monitor.
The program which is called by the shell-script on the Debian machine has been compiled and uploaded to the NXT with the NeXTTool.
Link to the NeXTTool on Sourceforge – Link
Why I am posting this? Last week an “interesting” news hit the web. Ken Starks from the heliOS project had close encounters of the third kind with a teacher.
The web is full of blogs, posts and comments of this -> you can read ahead on Ken Starks blog.
I read a lot of the comments, on the site above, on Slashdot and on Gulli.
There are a lot of comments which are extreme fanatic and dumb. I hate this. I think Open source protect us from a real live 1984, also Mac and BSD do.
Open source an Linux are more like democracy. It’s more a lifestyle and it’s worth to stand for.
Some years ago a Linux slogan contest takes place. The winning slogan says it all: Open Minds. Open Sources. Open Future!
