Sysadmin Ramblings

On our kvm hypervisor we have several vm’s using fibre channel for storage. The hypervisor has to see all the devices, but each device has it’s own lvm so when the hypervisor boots, it tries to read all of them. Read the rest of this entry »

I was trying to get Songbird to recognise my ipod and it wouldn’t because the ipod was automounted under /media. I put the UUID of the iPod_Control partition in my fstab. I used blkid to get the UUID of that partition. Read the rest of this entry »

After installing SRSS we tried to setup a gnome kiosk session. There were no prototypes for this installed. After scouring the net we only found an example of something that didn’t work :-(. Read the rest of this entry »

We use a retired netapp as a backup with snapmirror. We don’t have support on the device anymore and one of the disks failed. I took the drive out and discovered it was a SEAGATE ST3146807FC. I found this site that said it was possible to flash the firmware on a generic drive for use in a network appliance. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest vlc seems to compile fine with only a few modest dependencies. Using qt4 instead of wxGTK helps out a lot. I started a fresh rpm this time and didn’t build upon the 0.8.6 spec. You’ll need a fairly recent ffmpeg compiled with —enable-swscale.

SPEC
src.rpm
i386 x86_64

I prefer a dark theme. I’ve lived with thunderbird doing a bad job of that for a while. I finally decided to fix it. I found this page which had what I wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like the interface for creating modules has changed a bit, and udev is the way to go. Here is a short, quick and dirty module that creates /dev/pi with anonymous major and minor using udev. Read the rest of this entry »

I followed the simple guide in the forum but was still unable to use my keys. Turns out my keys were DSA, and FreeSSHD only seems to know about RSA keys. I generated some RSA keys and everything was fine. Read the rest of this entry »

Trying to use sshfs to mount in an nfs mounted home directory and we were getting this error:
fusermount: failed to open mountpoint for reading: Permission denied
It must have something to do with userid’s, the solution was to make the mountpoint world readable and executable. The containing home directory is not world readable anyway… Hope that helps someone. PS - To umount the sshfs mounted filesystem, use fusermount -u

I’m having trouble resuming on my T60p. With gnome-power-manager if I sleep and resume within 5minutes everything is ok. If I sleep (close the lid) and wait more than 5 minutes the machine never comes back, the video remains black but otherwise it appears to be running, not crashed. Read the rest of this entry »