So the first stage of making our little garden suitable for barbeques, parties and general fun type activities was to clear all of the weeds and thorns, plus pruning back some of the more over enthuiastic trees.

It took around 4 hours to get from the last photos to those you see below, and the work had the added bonus of revealing a hidden path lurking under the gravel! It turns out that a few years ago, the entire garden had been covered with industrial plastic sheeting and gravel without removing any of the original features. So, while pulling up weeds (with shallow roots, thanks to the plastic covering) I happened across the path you see below, along with what could either be a flower bed or a border for a rotary dryer. Either way, it was a rather pleasant surprise, and helped my plans of putting a path running across to the shed along very nicely indeed!

The end result of the day’s work was around 8 garden sacks full of brutal rose bushes, tangled ivy-weed type combinations and those parts of the trees which didn’t get out of my way quickly enough. The only trees I left un-pruned were the apple and pear trees which you can see at the right hand side of the shed. They’re kinda pretty and heavy with fruit so I thought I’d leave them be until I can build a bootleg cider factory in the shed. For those of you reading who are oblivious to such things, that was a joke. Although we also found a pear which looked exactly like a bum. True story!

There are many plans now running through my brain for what to do next, listed below in no particular order:

• Repaint or stain the shed. I don’t like the existing blue colour.
• Lay a patio at the house end of the garden to extend the existing concrete slab you can just see at the lower edge of the pictures
• Outline some flower beds and border them in brick or the like
• Maybe make a gravel bed or two
• Get rid of the bulk of the gravel and lay down turf. This might have to wait until next year tho, seems a bit late in the year for turfing tho will investigate – never done it before!!
• Find plant for flower beds which cannot be killed by two people with not one green finger between them.

Watch this space!

Since i never write anything technical on this blog any more, I thought instead that I’d use the space to blog about my garden renovation. I’ve recently moved into a flat with my lovely girlfriend, which includes a rather overgrown garden. My task for this last bank holiday weekend was to vanquish the mass of weeds and thorns, with the eventual aim of restoring the garden to nice pretty loveliness. So, to start the story, here we go with the obligatory “before” pictures. One’s taken from the kitchen window which overlooks the garden, and the other is taken as you enter the garden, looking in the same direction. I’ll update with new posts as progress is made, with pics of course.

I recently had cause to produce a report on the membership of all our Mailman mailing lists, so rather than doing it manually I knocked together the following handy bash script…change mailman location and output file as desired

OUTPUTFILE="/tmp/mailman_report"

CURRMONTH=`date +%m-%Y`

LISTS=`/usr/local/mailman/bin/list_lists  | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v [!0-9]`

rm ${OUTPUTFILE}

echo "Mailman Report for ${CURRMONTH}" > ${OUTPUTFILE}

echo >> ${OUTPUTFILE}

for x in ${LISTS}

do

        echo "Members of List ${x}:" >> ${OUTPUTFILE}

        LIST_MEMBERS=`/usr/local/mailman/bin/list_members ${x}`

        for mems in ${LIST_MEMBERS}

        do

                echo ${mems} >> ${OUTPUTFILE}

        done

echo >> ${OUTPUTFILE}

done

/bin/mail -s "Mailman_Report_for_${CURRMONTH}" foo@foo.com -c blah@blah.com < ${OUTPUTFILE}

So we got a bunch of new hardware at work recently to build a crunch farm for all our heavyweight data processing. Part of that system is two very beefy servers which share a SAN (This one for those interested) for the majority of their disk storage. The SAN uses iSCSI, which was fairly straightforward to set up (I’ll document it here anyway) so I got that all set up and then made a nice big ext3 partition for the servers to share. All so far so good, the servers were talking to the SAN, could see the partition, read and write to it etc. The only problem seemed to be that when one server changed a file, the other server wouldn’t pick up the change until the partition had been re-mounted. What I hadn’t accounted for was that ext3 doesn’t expect multiple machines to share the same block device so it wasn’t synching changes.

I knew that filesystems designed for exactly this sort of sharing were available but hadn’t done much with them but after investigating for a bit, it seemed like the Oracle Clustered File System (linky) was the best option as it was already supported by the Linux kernel and was pretty mature code. The main problem I had in setting all of this up was that the available documentation was very much geared towards people who already had in-depth experience of OCFS whereas I’d never used it before. Hence this blog post, which details setting up iSCSI and then configuring both servers to talk to the same OCFS partition. The instructions are written for Ubuntu Server, but will work on any distro which used apt. Packages are also available for rpm distros, the only instructions you need to change are the package fetching ones.

Setting up iSCSI

* Install Open-iSCSI

apt-get install open-iscsi

* Edit the Open-iSCSI configuration file

The default configuration file could be located at /etc/openiscsi/iscsid.conf or ~/.iscsid.conf. Open the file and set the parameters as required by your iSCSI device. I’ve included the (mostly default) options I used for reference

node.startup = automatic
node.session.timeo.replacement_timeout = 120
node.conn[0].timeo.login_timeout = 15
node.conn[0].timeo.logout_timeout = 15
node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_interval = 10
node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_timeout = 15
node.session.iscsi.InitialR2T = No
node.session.iscsi.ImmediateData = Yes
node.session.iscsi.FirstBurstLength = 262144
node.session.iscsi.MaxBurstLength = 16776192
node.conn[0].iscsi.MaxRecvDataSegmentLength = 65536

* Save and close the file. Restart the open-iscsi service:

/etc/init.d/open-iscsi restart

Now you need to run a discovery against the iscsi target host which basically finds all the iSCSI targets the SAN can give us:

iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p ISCSI-SERVER-IP-ADDRESS

Finally restart the service again:

/etc/init.d/open-iscsi restart

Now you should see an additional drive on the system such as /dev/sdc. Look in the /var/log/messages file to find out device name:

Next, you need to use fdisk to create a blank partition on the device. This is pretty well documented so I’ll skip these steps, other than to say that I’ll assume the device was called /dev/sdc, and the new blank partition is called /dev/sdc1 for the remainder of this post. So now we’re talking to our iSCSI device and we’ve got a blank partition all ready to format as an OCFS drive. Next, how exactly we do that!

To be continued…

I’ve put together a script for creating DMG files without using OS X…it requires Linux, I’ve tested it on Kubuntu 7.10 but it should work on anything recent. The process will also be Wiki’d, but in the meantime, instructions are below for the curious!

Run the following commands:

# This gets and builds a patched version of Apple's diskdev_cmds package which will work on Linux
wget http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/mb_boot_tv/diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
wget http://www.ecl.udel.edu/~mcgee/diskdev_cmds/diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2
tar xzf diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
bunzip2 -c diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2 | patch -p0
cd diskdev_cmds-332.14
make -f Makefile.lnx

# Create symlinks to the mkfs and fsck commands for HFS+
sudo cp newfs_hfs.tproj/newfs_hfs /sbin/mkfs.hfsplus
sudo cp fsck_hfs.tproj/fsck_hfs /sbin/fsck.hfsplus

# Get and enable the hfsplus kernel module
sudo apt-get install hfsplus
sudo modprobe hfsplus

Now that's done, you can use the following handy bash script (must be run as root) I've written to create a DMG file which contains the contents of a directory you specify on the command line.

#!/bin/bash

# DMG Creation Script
# Usage: makedmg <imagename> <imagetitle> <imagesize (MB)> <contentdir>
#
# imagename: The output file name of the image, ie foo.dmg
# imagetitle: The title of the DMG File as displayed in OS X
# imagesize: The size of the DMG you're creating in MB (Blame Linux for the fixed size limitation!!)
# contentdir: The directory containing the content you want the DMG file to contain
#
# Example: makedmg foo.dmg "Script Test" 50 /home/jon/work/scripts/content
#
# Author: Jon Cowie
# Creation Date: 02/04/2008

if [ ! $# == 4 ]; then
	echo "Usage: makedmg <imagename> <imagetitle> <imagesize (MB)> <contentdir>"
else
	OUTPUT=$1
	TITLE=$2
	FILESIZE=$3
	CONTENTDIR=$4
	USER=`whoami`
	TMPDIR="/tmp/dmgdir"

	if [ ${USER} != "root" ]; then
		echo "makedmg must be run as root!"
	else
		echo "Creating DMG File..."
		dd if=/dev/zero of=${OUTPUT} bs=1M count=$FILESIZE
		mkfs.hfsplus -v "${TITLE}" ${OUTPUT}

		echo "Mounting DMG File..."
		mkdir -p ${TMPDIR}
		mount -t hfsplus -o loop ${OUTPUT} ${TMPDIR} 

		echo "Copying content to DMG File..."
		cp -R ${CONTENTDIR}/* ${TMPDIR}

		echo "Unmounting DMG File..."
		umount ${TMPDIR}
		rm -rf ${TMPDIR}

		echo "All Done!"
	fi
fi

Hope it’s useful!

Yon chils at Wikipedia hev pit up a Scots vershun o’ the site…’er isnae ‘at mich on ee noo but wit is there is bonnie ‘an guid…ah’m sure ee bonnie lads and lassies north o ‘ee border will fix ‘at richt quick!

Ee Link

I came across some interesting news today (Linky) that said Neterion is releasing a fairly hardcore network card designed for offloading VM Network management from the Hypervisor. I think this has the potential to be quite an interesting field in the future…in small scale Virtualisation deployments it’s not such a big deal that the Hypervisor has to do all the legwork for IO, but when you scale up to much larger deployments, network IO has the potential to be a significant bottleneck. You can mitigate this somewhat by utilising the physical network card, but this in turn shifts the load onto the host OS. It should be interesting to see in future what else hardware manufacturers come up with along similar lines: VM aware disk & memory controllers, for example…Intel have already made strides towards VM aware CPUs with VT as well.

Being a rather geeky type, I’m quite excited to see what all these clever hardware types come up with in the next few years…wouldn’t it be nice to be able to buy a server full of VM aware kit which lets you run multiple VMs as quickly as if you were using just one host OS? I can’t see virtualisation going away any time soon, it’s just too damn useful – so I reckon this might be something just around the corner.

I happened across a really cool script for doing some clever stuff with your Bash prompt….check out the link, and if you like it then sling it into your .bashrc file Clicky…

So with my pending move to a Web 2.0 friendly company I thought I probably ought to start updating my blog, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages! I’m going to be working as a System Engineer for Trampoline Systems who are doing some very funky stuff to allow large organisations to enable more natural communication…the theory is that most organisations make humans try to communicate like computers, which stifles our natural instincts. Anyway, go check them out, it’s all very exciting! In other news, 8 days until I say bye-bye to the premium rate telephony sector.

And now for some stuff I like…