Tag-Archive for ◊ linux ◊

Some more Openfiler
Thursday, May 30th, 2013 | Author: Ozzik

Heeeey….
It’s been almost two years since I wrote the last time. I guess I had nothing to say until now;)
No, that’s not true, just didn’t have the time or the energy.
But the last couple of days pushed me towards posting some more about Openfiler.

This project is quite controversial. On one hand, it’s good. It combines most of the features, stability and quality you want for the storage without paying a cent.
On the other hand, the dev team is odd. To say the least. Their thing is that they don’t talk to the users. They used to, but they don’t anymore.
They had promissed to release the version 3.0 about 3 years ago, since then they keep it silent.
Now, I totally understand the “it’ll be released when it’s ready” attitude, a lot of open source (and only) projects do that. But at least talk to your community, tell them approximately what’s going on, something.
A lot of people just said goodbye to the project because of this. But it doesn’t seem to effect the principle - to disregard the community.

Anyway, personally, when choosing the storage for the mid-size company I’m still choosing the OF, because I know it pretty well, it proved to be stable enough and it has all the features a company may need.
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DNS resolving in Openfiler
Thursday, August 04th, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

Just a small issue I had today.
Since I run rsync scripts at night and get email about their execution, I noticed that email came with:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname SERVERNAME: Name or service not known
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(635) [receiver=3.0.3]

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Organize your IT equipment with RackTables
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
So I found a new toy to play around with: RackTables.
The purpose of this software is to help you organize your IT equipment, including servers, switches, routers, patch panels into visual racks.
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Expand RAID6 with 3ware and Openfiler
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
Had some problems last week with expanding the RAID6 I have on a storage with Openfiler. This is what was needed to be done:
I have a storage with 16 hard drives for storage+2 for the OS. When I built it almost 3 years ago the idea was to have 1 RAID6 with 14 drives and 1 RAID1 with 2 drives obviously. Don’t ask me why - it was stupid to begin with and thus was never really used (the RAID1 that is). But came the time when we needed that additional space of 2 drives and the decision was to cancel the RAID1 and add the spare drives to the main RAID6, expanding the existing space.

The RAID controller is 3ware 9650se and after reading the manual it seemed pretty simple: delete the RAID1, have the spare drives and do the RAID6 migration to include them. After the initialization(is this the right word?) I was supposed to have the 25-26TB of space instead of the existing 22.
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Dealing with winmail.dat on Linux
Friday, October 08th, 2010 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
if you’re a bit old-fashioned like me you’re still using a desktop mail client like Thunderbird and not web interface, like Gmail.
But sometimes there are glitches. And while some of them are client related, others are well - MS fault.
Like this one. For some time now I’ve been getting some emails from the same source with an attached winmail.dat file. There was no way to open it and frankly, knowing the source, I didn’t care too much.
But a few days ago I logged in to Gmail’s web interface and saw the actual file behind it - it was a pdf. Now, when I can’t get a pdf by email, I start to get a bit nervous. So I googled it and came to a conclusion that it’s, of course, MS fault. See, their outlook sends out some emails in tnef format, which can’t be read by some clients.

There are few solutions. For every OS actually. Some are scripts, some are add-ons, some are apps. At first I installed the tnef program from the repositories in Ubuntu, but it did nothing, so instead of starting digging I just installed the LookOut add-on for Thunderbird and voila! I see the original pdf as the attachment.
Now, in case it doesn’t work for you, maybe you should try this:
http://blog.andrewbeacock.com/2007/07/opening-winmaildat-tnef-files-in.html

Hope it helps!

Ozzik.

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Linux vs. Windows - my 2 cents
Sunday, November 01st, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,

So as you ALL know - Ubuntu 9.10 is out. Also, as you ALL know - Win7 is out. Actually, so is Snow Leopard, but I’m not an apple fanboy, so I don’t care much about that.

If you google any of these 2 words (win7 and ubuntu), you’ll find 7 billion posts telling you about all the new features, bug fixes, comparisons between the previous versions and of course, the most popular topic is the comparison between these two OS’s. And the most obnoxious eternal question is “Will this Ubuntu version be the windows killer?”
windows-vs-ubuntu
And since I’m being asked about this topic once every few days myself, I decided to post my personal opinion on this. Don’t expect it to be too objective, cuz I’m obviously a Linux fan. But don’t expect me to defend it no matter what, too.

First of all, if you’ve read my previous posts, you’d know that I’m using Linux Mint 7, based on Ubuntu 9.04. Plus, I run win7 in VirtualBox. I should also tell you that I only tried Ubuntu 9.10 for 15 minutes running in VMWare server on WinXP at work, so I don’t have much to say about this particular version. I’m waiting for Mint 8, since I like its polishing better than original Ubuntu’s.

So I’ll rather express my opinion regarding the general Linux vs. Windows issue than Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Win7.
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What to expect
Sunday, October 04th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hi,
Everyday I tell myself I have to post something, but it’s kinda hard to write after a long day at work, and I’m trying not to think about computers on weekends.
Anyway, till I do post, here’s some stuff that was released lately and some to be released very soon:

pfSense 1.2.3 is supposed to come out sometimes in October I think, but then again the guys are not in hurry with release cycles, they believe it should be released when it’s ready.
pfSense: The Definitive Guide - a book by Chris Buechler and Jim Pingle is about to hit the stores any day now.

Ubuntu 9.10 will be released October 29th. The beta testers say it will boot in 10 seconds.
Amarok 2.2 is already out and is believed to be pretty good - they’re catching up with all the functionality from 1.4.

I’m really looking forward for the 0.7 release of FreeNAS. Meanwhile there’s only an RC1. So hopefully it’ll happen real soon.
Untangle 7 is out, and while I never really used the distro myself, it’s supposed to be really good - at least the functionality list is pretty hot. Although I wouldn’t use it as a firewall, I would put it behind pfSense for every other task.
Warning: it’s not completely free - they’re licensing the multiwan and some other add-ons.

Some other great news arrived last month from Clear Foundation. It appears, they bought the ClarkConnect distro and in a couple of days will be offering it for free - even the former commercial add-ons - and they’re open-sourcing the whole thing. I actually used this distribution at home for about a year (until I found pfSense and FreeNAS) and was pretty happy with it. But when I installed it at work as a secondary gateway for the office, I faced some problems with the connection to my ISP. We bought the 1 year license of the office version or something. So I turned to the level 1 support and after some mailings the guy told me to look for some other distro as they can’t help me. I was pretty upset about that kind of treatment and like I said I did find another distro, which I’m recommending to everyone ever since - pfSense and FreeNAS. But now that it’s gonna be open source, including the multi-wan, it could be the time to test it again - for some other purposes.

I guess that’s about it.
See ya,

Ozzik.

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The server every admin needs, part 2
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

So, what’s next?
Let’s spend some time with the easier things.

Ntop. This one’s installed right from the standard repository (we already did so in the previous post).
The big question is why do you need it, right? Well, it’s a great tool that you can use for all kinds of purposes, but personally, I use it to monitor the Internet activity, or traffic loads to be exact.
The idea is very simple. If you have a setup like this: modem–>router–>firewall–>switch–>LANs, and you feel that the Internet is very slow, you just know that someone’s downloading something from the rapidshare.com or maybe even a new MS small DVD image of 3GB, how do you know who’s the asshole?
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The server every admin needs
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hi,

Over the years working in IT I came to a conclusion every admin comes to - you have to have a server that does all the things that sometimes you underestimate the importance of.  Those would be logging, monitoring, documenting, analyzing. If you’re not new to this field - you’ll sure know what I’m talking about, but if you are - this may very well be the guide to your future professional happiness:)

Anyway, there are tons, and I mean tons of software willing to do those tasks, so 9 out of 10 people will jump and say they use a better one. But the ones I’m gonna discuss here are the ones that worked for me for some specific reason, or maybe even without one;)

So what are we building? We’re gonna build a monitoring server that uses Xymon(ex-Hobbit) software, Syslog-ng logging, Ntop network traffic probe, Plone documentation server and Splunk log analyzer.  I also plan to add the Observer for SNMP or otherwise integrate SNMP into Xymon. But that’s later. Just FYI I built this server to serve my own needs about 2 years ago, starting only with Hobbit and adding all the other software according to the needs, but as the new versions of software and OS were released I decided to rebuild the whole thing instead of upgrading. This time I documented the whole thing too. So let’s get to it.
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Linux Mint 6 CE
Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Man, it’s been 2.5 months since I last posted here. I guess it’s about time now.

Well, I actually wanted to wait a bit with this one, but then I realized that it’s now or never, so here it is.

Linux Mint 6 Community Edition, which is KDE4.2 based was released last week. Something I’ve been waiting for for quite some time now. So I decided to post a few thoughts(like everyone else on the net this year, right?) and tell you about few tricks I had to do.

I’ve been a Linux Mint user for a couple of years now, on and off. Finally settling on a CE version, mostly because it combines the best of both worlds - Gnome and KDE, while being based on KDE itself. For those who don’t know and are too lazy to look it up - Mint is an Ubuntu based distro, but is a bit more polished and includes all the necessary codecs and such. More user friendly I guess. But while so, like every other distribution it still needs a bit of tweaking. Why? Well, because this is the purpose of Linux - you make of it whatever it is you think it should be.

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