Phasor Burn

Warning: Do not look into phasor with remaining eye.

About

Yet another collection of random crud found on other sites, interspersed with the rantings of a not-quite-greybeard unix geek. Pass the Guinness and Grecian Formula.

Archive for the 'Work' Category

Dr. Hyde / Sports Reporter

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Location: Kelowna B.C.
Position SPORTS REPORTER

This is a full time union position reporting to the Managing Editor.

The successful applicant must:
- Have the ability to be both an aggressive self-starter and a person who reacts well to direction.
- Be capable of generating good leads and following them through with flair
- Be proficient in page design and layout.
- Be able to produce photos with a digital camera that are of a quality fit for publication
- Have his or her own transportation.
- Have a knowledge of the area.

[ . . . ]

In other words, working for a small town newspaper requires a split personality, ocd, and other unmentioned mental disorders.

Cool.

Software vs Hardware boot disk mirroring

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

One of my pet peeves has been with Sun’s smaller sparc based servers not having simple onboard raid1 mirroring for their boot drives. You have to muck around with a great number of prone-to-fumble-finger commands to both build the mirror, and to recover if one of the two drives goes down.

Compare to what HP (Dell, IBM and even Sun on their x86 kit) have done for years. Hardware mirroring available via a bios setting. Set it and forget it.

Drive goes bad? Pull out the one with the fault LED lit, put new one in, walk away.

Cloning a new system? Bring the master system down cleanly, replace one drive with a blank, power it on. Wait 10 min for the mirror to rebuild.

Once you are happy that the master is 100% mirrored, go to your new machine and insert just the drive from the master. Boot to single-user and fix the hostname/ip/etc. Go multiuser. Insert a blank in the other bay. Watch it mirror.

Really fall-off-log simple and something Sun needs for their sparc systems.

Now, I have to get back to recovering a Sun V210 that had one of it’s two boot disks go bad.

Hope I don’t fuck it up; It’s a live system.

Update: I appear to have successfully initiated the rebuild.

Logs follow :


http://sysunconfig.net/unixtips/Disk.Replacement.Procedure-SDS4.2.pdf

c1t1d0 is the bad disk

c1t0d0 is the good disk and has this configuration

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 207 - 1237 5.00GB (1031/0/0) 10491456
1 swap wu 0 - 206 1.00GB (207/0/0) 2106432
2 backup wm 0 - 14086 68.35GB (14087/0/0) 143349312
3 unassigned wm 1238 - 1239 9.94MB (2/0/0) 20352
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 unassigned wm 1240 - 14086 62.34GB (12847/0/0) 130731072

------------------------------------------------------------

bash-3.00# metastat
d30: Mirror
Submirror 0: d31
State: Needs maintenance
Submirror 1: d32
State: Needs maintenance
Pass: 1
Read option: roundrobin (default)
Write option: parallel (default)
Size: 130731072 blocks (62 GB)

d31: Submirror of d30
State: Needs maintenance
Invoke: metasync d30
Size: 130731072 blocks (62 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t0d0s7 0 No Okay Yes

d32: Submirror of d30
State: Needs maintenance
Invoke: metareplace d30 c1t1d0s7
Size: 130731072 blocks (62 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t1d0s7 0 No Maintenance Yes

d20: Mirror
Submirror 0: d21
State: Needs maintenance
Submirror 1: d22
State: Needs maintenance
Pass: 1
Read option: roundrobin (default)
Write option: parallel (default)
Size: 2106432 blocks (1.0 GB)

d21: Submirror of d20
State: Needs maintenance
Invoke: metasync d20
Size: 2106432 blocks (1.0 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t0d0s1 0 No Okay Yes

d22: Submirror of d20
State: Needs maintenance
Invoke: metareplace d20 c1t1d0s1
Size: 2106432 blocks (1.0 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t1d0s1 0 No Maintenance Yes

d10: Mirror
Submirror 0: d11
State: Needs maintenance
Submirror 1: d12
State: Needs maintenance
Pass: 1
Read option: roundrobin (default)
Write option: parallel (default)
Size: 10491456 blocks (5.0 GB)

d11: Submirror of d10
State: Needs maintenance
Invoke: metasync d10
Size: 10491456 blocks (5.0 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t0d0s0 0 No Okay Yes

d12: Submirror of d10
State: Needs maintenance
Invoke: metareplace d10 c1t1d0s0
Size: 10491456 blocks (5.0 GB)
Stripe 0:
Device Start Block Dbase State Reloc Hot Spare
c1t1d0s0 0 No Maintenance Yes

Device Relocation Information:
Device Reloc Device ID
c1t0d0 Yes id1,sd@SFUJITSU_MAP3735N_SUN72G_00Q0FHNW____

————————————————————

bash-3.00# metastat -p
d30 -m d31 d32 1
d31 1 1 c1t0d0s7
d32 1 1 c1t1d0s7
d20 -m d21 d22 1
d21 1 1 c1t0d0s1
d22 1 1 c1t1d0s1
d10 -m d11 d12 1
d11 1 1 c1t0d0s0
d12 1 1 c1t1d0s0

————————————————————

bash-3.00# metadb -i
flags first blk block count
a m p luo 16 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3
a p luo 8208 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3
r - replica does not have device relocation information
o - replica active prior to last mddb configuration change
u - replica is up to date
l - locator for this replica was read successfully
c - replica’s location was in /etc/lvm/mddb.cf
p - replica’s location was patched in kernel
m - replica is master, this is replica selected as input
W - replica has device write errors
a - replica is active, commits are occurring to this replica
M - replica had problem with master blocks
D - replica had problem with data blocks
F - replica had format problems
S - replica is too small to hold current data base
R - replica had device read errors

————————————————————

bash-3.00# dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2 of=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2 count=16

c1t0d0
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 207 - 1237 5.00GB (1031/0/0) 10491456
1 swap wu 0 - 206 1.00GB (207/0/0) 2106432
2 backup wm 0 - 14086 68.35GB (14087/0/0) 143349312
3 unassigned wm 1238 - 1239 9.94MB (2/0/0) 20352
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 unassigned wm 1240 - 14086 62.34GB (12847/0/0) 130731072

c1t1d0
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 root wm 207 - 1237 5.00GB (1031/0/0) 10491456
1 swap wu 0 - 206 1.00GB (207/0/0) 2106432
2 backup wm 0 - 14086 68.35GB (14087/0/0) 143349312
3 unassigned wm 1238 - 1239 9.94MB (2/0/0) 20352
4 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
5 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
6 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0
7 unassigned wm 1240 - 14086 62.34GB (12847/0/0) 130731072

————————————————————

bash-3.00# metadb -i
flags first blk block count
a m p luo 16 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3
a p luo 8208 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3

bash-3.00# metadb -a -f -c 2 /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s3

bash-3.00# metadb -i
flags first blk block count
a m p luo 16 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3
a p luo 8208 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3
a u 16 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s3
a u 8208 8192 /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s3
r - replica does not have device relocation information
o - replica active prior to last mddb configuration change
u - replica is up to date
l - locator for this replica was read successfully
c - replica’s location was in /etc/lvm/mddb.cf
p - replica’s location was patched in kernel
m - replica is master, this is replica selected as input
W - replica has device write errors
a - replica is active, commits are occurring to this replica
M - replica had problem with master blocks
D - replica had problem with data blocks
F - replica had format problems
S - replica is too small to hold current data base
R - replica had device read errors

————————————————————

bash-3.00# metastat | grep replace
Invoke: metareplace d30 c1t1d0s7
Invoke: metareplace d20 c1t1d0s1

Invoke: metareplace d10 c1t1d0s0

bash-3.00# metareplace -e d30 c1t1d0s7
metareplace: pod11fw: d30: resync in progress

bash-3.00# metareplace -e d20 c1t1d0s1
metareplace: pod11fw: d20: resync in progress

bash-3.00# metareplace -e d10 c1t1d0s0
metareplace: pod11fw: d10: resync in progress

————————————————————

bash-3.00# metasync d30
bash-3.00# metasync d20
bash-3.00# metasync d10

bash-3.00# metareplace -e d30 c1t1d0s7
d30: device c1t1d0s7 is enabled

bash-3.00# metareplace -e d20 c1t1d0s1
d20: device c1t1d0s1 is enabled

bash-3.00# metareplace -e d10 c1t1d0s0
d10: device c1t1d0s0 is enabled

————————————————————

bash-3.00# metastat | grep -i progress
Resync in progress: 2 % done
Resync in progress: 75 % done
Resync in progress: 10 % done

I’d really rather have simple hardware mirroring instead of the above bullshit.

Interview with a Dodo Bird

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Do not bring in a one inch thick document that is a copy of your last project at employer X.

Do not let the prospective new employer idly flip through it during the interview and see that you did not scrub the document for sensitive information such as ip addresses, account names, passwords.

Do not let them see the network topology that would help once the perimeter was breached.

Massive FAIL.

If you are going to bring in a sample of your work, copy the visio etc and scrub all the information first. Change all the host names, ip addresses, account names, passwords to dummy values.

MobileMe - Push Email

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Well, yes it is. Between the MobileMe cloud (when/if it is working for you) and the iPhone, updates are PDQ indeed.

Approximately three seconds after typing this and hitting ENTER

$ echo “hello there” | mailx -s “no subject” redacted@me.com

it lands in my iPhone’s MobileMe account, complete with mail arriving ding/buzz alert.

I’m switching over to this instead of email-to-sms for my Nagios pages and see how that goes. I suspect it may be more reliable (snicker) and timely than going via my providers oft-overloaded email-to-sms gateways.

I’ve had messages by the old email-to-sms path delayed minutes, hours, days, or lost entirely. Almost exactly like what can happen with email, but I am pretty sure most of my delayed/lost Nagios pages were due to the sms gateway itself.

Anyways, we’ll have to wait for the next time the on call support person fails to tend to a Nagios alert right away. I’ve got it set up to start nagging me something like 45 min after it has been nagging the on call phone without being taken care of.

Referral Bonus

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

What’s that smell?

Hello Team,

I would like to bring to your attention that [redacted] offers an employee referral program. If you refer a person and he/she passes the three month probationary period, a bonus of $500 will be paid to you.

In order to help you take advantage of this program, I have attached our current job postings for Web UI, Java, and QA persons to this email. You may also direct your friends to view the careers page on our website (found under About us) at http://www.[redacted].com.

Oh sure, a $500 gift horse shouldn’t be looked in the mouth.

However, if that piddly amount is all that motivates a recommendation, then the existing employee isn’t being paid enough.

I’d rather have cow-orkers recommend someone based on knowing they would be able to work with said person, and that the person is a gain, not a drain, for the company.

Maybe I’m just funny that way.

Aa referral program / plea for help smells more like desperation to me than anything else.

As I always tell the head hunters when they call me…

I’m busy.

No, I don’t know anyone else who could do it.

Everyone I know who is any good at all already has enough work. The rest, you don’t want to be associated with. Trust me.

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