If you like Anne Geddes, you need to check out Mila's Daydreams. A mother taking pictures of her dreaming baby in an arranged background, resulting in some surreal photos.

Proxmox OpenVE looks the closest to a VMCenter/VMSphere alternative based purely on Linux (Debian to be more precise). You can add pure virtualized environments a la VMware guests, or run container based Linux(-only) guests. It comes with a cluster option with live migration possibilities.


Two disadvantages on first sight :

1. It's 64bit only


2. It comes only in the form of an appliance-based installation (which will wipe your /dev/sda)

Apart from that, very promising.

The Ben Nevis distillery, now overtaken by the Japanese Nikka distillers, is named after & located at the foot of the highest mountain in Scotland (1334m). For one or other strange reason, Ben Nevis is called the Banana Whisky. My interest in Ben Nevis was sparked by my colluegue Peter B., who refers it as one of the best whiskies ever made, and very difficult to find. However, I had no problem locating it in my favorite dram shop.


The color : dark amber
The nose : orange with chocolate flavors. Some maltiness, then spices are flowing in.
The taste : *Very* malty, quite spiced, bit of pepper. Lots of dark chocolate, the very bitter taste of orange zest. Bit of spice & smoke. Smooth but very firm. Not complex at all, warm.


Where are the bananas ? Probably a referral to the littering of banana peels on the peak of Ben Nevis ?
This whisky has a very strong taste, especially empowered by the malty taste in combination with the bitterness of chocolate and orange. I'm sorry, Peter, too bitter for my cup of tea.

Temperatures are soaring outside, not really the time for a dram. Or is it ? Some people drink whisky at any season, others prefer a warm fireplace while the rain is pouring outside. Count me in the last group. However, duty calls, so here's a new tasting note. Springbank is the oldest independent distillery in Scotland, and created in Campbeltown. From a traveller's perspective, visiting the Campbeltown area is a small nightmare. One has to make a long trek to the Southern tip of the Kintyre peninsula on the Western coast of Scotland to reach Springbank - or the nearby Glen Scotia distillery. Except for the distilleries, there's not much happening in Campbeltown. And even for the people that want to 'get away from it all' for a few days, Springbank is a fairly poor destination. It's one of the few distilleries that isn't surrounded by the lush Scottish countryside - located in the middle of a busy town.


Springbank CV is an unusual whisky, for several reasons : first, it’s not quite clear what ‘C.V.’ used to mean. Some say ‘Chairman’s Vat – or Vatting’, others ‘Curriculum Vitae’... It contains a blend of different single malts between the age of 8 and 30, therefore presenting a 'taste visiting card' of Springbank. Then, there’s been several versions, notably an earlier ‘white cap’ version that’s the one we’ll have right now, and then a more recent ‘gold cap’ version. Second, it has a quite complex tasting :


Color : *very* pale gold, almost white wine.
Smell: complex. Spirits and grain. Spicy. Adding drops of water emerges a burst of pepper. Is that fruit there hiding in the back ?
Taste : oily, malt and more spices. So much pepper, it makes my mouth tingle ! Tears in me eyes. Again some fruit (lemon ? Pear ?) hiding in the pepper cloud. Lots of other stuff too, like liquorice, peat and some bitterness but almost killed immediately by spice and pepper.


Aaa-choum ! Did I mention the pepper ? This could have been a balanced complex whisky, but unfortunately too spicy for me.

Een kievit komt regelmatig in onze tuin op bezoek. Van ver lijkt hij op een zwart-witte duif met een uitgesproken kuifje. Bij het inzoomen echter blijkt dit vogeltje een mooi metalig grijs-groen vederkleed te hebben. Je treft hem aan in vochtige weilanden met kort gras, waar hij ook graag in nestelt. De kievit komt in het najaar in grote groepen samen om naar het warme zuiden te trekken, tijdens dewelke hij zwaar bedreigt wordt, gezien hij graag geschoten wordt, voornamelijk in Denemarken en Ierland. De naam is vernoemd naar zijn 'kievit'-achtige roep.

With flights STS-133 (launching at October 29th 2010) and STS-134 (Febrauary 29th 2011), the space Shuttle program will come to a halt. The program started in 1981, and was meant to provide a cost-saving alternative for the 'throw-away' Saturn rockets which were used in the 60ties and 70ties. The space shuttles Discovery and Endeavour will be the last shuttles going into space, delivering new scientific equipment to the International Space Station.


If you want to 'participate' in the last two shuttle missions, you can : through the Face in Space website, you can upload your picture, which will be taken on the shuttles, thereby be launched into orbit and "become a part of history".

We've tackled previously how to look at kernel dumps on HP-UX, let's have a look now how to perform them same on OpenSolaris. The kernel debugger is actually 'quite' user-friendly, and gives you mostly enough information how to handle a crash. If your Solaris is too stable to generate crashes, then use the

savecore -L 

command to generate one on the fly. This will generate a dump in /var/adm/crash. Let's have a look at it with mdb :

# mdb -k unix.0 vmcore.0 

Loading modules: [ unix krtld genunix specfs dtrace cpu.AuthenticAMD.15 uppc pcplusmp ufs ip sctp usba lofs zfs random ipc md fcip fctl fcp crypto logindmux ptm nfs ]

>

The ::status command will display high level information regarding this debugging session. This is mostly a one-liner, which reveals the reason of the crash.

> ::status

debugging crash dump vmcore.0 (64-bit) from hostname

operating system: 5.11 snv_43 (i86pc)

panic message: BAD TRAP: type=e (#pf Page fault) rp=fffffe80000ad3d0 addr=0 occurred in module "unix" due to a NULL pointer dereference

dump content: kernel pages only

The ::stack command will prove you with a stack trace, this is the same thing trace you would have seen in syslog or the console.

> ::stack

atomic_add_32()

nfs_async_inactive+0x55(fffffe820d128b80, 0, ffffffffeff0ebcb)

nfs3_inactive+0x38b(fffffe820d128b80, 0)

fop_inactive+0x93(fffffe820d128b80, 0)

vn_rele+0x66(fffffe820d128b80)

snf_smap_desbfree+0x78(fffffe8185e2ff60)

dblk_lastfree_desb+0x25(fffffe817a30f8c0, ffffffffac1d7cc0)

dblk_decref+0x6b(fffffe817a30f8c0, ffffffffac1d7cc0)

freeb+0x89(fffffe817a30f8c0)

tcp_rput_data+0x215f(ffffffffb4af7140, fffffe812085d780, ffffffff993c3c00)

squeue_enter_chain+0x129(ffffffff993c3c00, fffffe812085d780, fffffe812085d780, 1, 1)

ip_input+0x810(ffffffffa23eec68, ffffffffaeab8040, fffffe812085d780, e)

The ::msgbuf command will output the message buffer at the time of crash; the message buffer is most commonly used by sysadmins through the "dmesg" command.

> ::msgbuf

MESSAGE

....

WARNING: IP: Hardware address '00:14:4f:xxxxxxx' trying to be our address xxxx

WARNING: IP: Hardware address '00:14:4f:xxxx' trying to be our address xxxx



panic[cpu0]/thread=fffffe80000adc80: 

BAD TRAP: type=e (#pf Page fault) rp=fffffe80000ad3d0 addr=0 occurred in module "unix" due to a NULL pointer dereference



sched: 

#pf Page fault

Bad kernel fault at addr=0x0

One of the coolest commands is the cpuinfo -v command, which will show more information about the running processes at the time of the crash, including some nicely ascii-art style formatting :

>  ::cpuinfo -v

 ID ADDR             FLG NRUN BSPL PRI RNRN KRNRN SWITCH THREAD           PROC

  1 ffffffff983b3800  1f    1    0  59  yes    no t-0    fffffe80daac2f20 smtpd


            RUNNING <--+    +-->  PRI THREAD           PROC

              READY                99 fffffe8000bacc80 sched

           QUIESCED

             EXISTS

             ENABLE

Other interesting commands are the ::ps (info about running processes), and ::panicinfo, which will reveal thread information, which you can further investigate with the ::walkthread option.

In a following article, I'll write about the Solaris Core Analyzer, which is a Q4 comparabe tool on Solaris to walk through kernel dumps.

A crashing Unix server should be a seldom event, which means that postmortem investigation is something you will rarely do. Kernel debuggers are not much fun, and require you basically to have a good knowledge about the kernel internals. Not too difficult if you're a guru in a specific Unix flavour, but if you're housing 3 Unices, each with different kernel versions, then you're into a whole different game ! Luckily, there are admin-friendly scripts nowadays which help you with the task of digging out why your machine crashed.

Let's have a look at HP-UX : this features the adb kernel debugger, but also the Q4 package. This will generally be default installed in the /usr/contrib/Q4 directory. Before first use, you need to copy the initializing script to your homedir :

cp /usr/contrib/Q4/lib/q4lib/sample.q4rc.pl /root/.q4rc.pl

Then you're ready to start up the tool itself :

# q4 -p



HP KWDB 3.2.3 for HP Itanium (32 or 64 bit) and target HP-IPF 11.2x.

Copyright 1986 - 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Hewlett-Packard KWDB 3.2.3 12-May-2009 21:15 is covered by the

GNU General Public License. Type "show copying" to see the conditions to

change it and/or distribute copies. Type "show warranty" for warranty/support.

..

crashdump information:

  hostname  anduril

  model     ia64 hp server Integrity Virtual Machine

  panic     gexcp_hndlr: Unresolved priv 0 interruption.

  release   @(#) $Revision: vmunix:    B.11.31_LR FLAVOR=perf 

  dumptime  1277458512 Fri Jun  25 11:35:12 METDST 2010

  savetime  1277459539 Fri Jun  25 11:52:19 METDST 2010

  dumptype  Non Compressed 



Event selected is 0. It was a panic

#0  0xe000000001da26c0:0 in panic_save_regs_switchstack+0x110

    (0x4000000000000692, 0xe000000001d9d640, 0x144000206c61009f

The Q4 package contains lots of scripts which can be used for providing you with extra information. The most interesting ones are analyze.pl and whathappened.pl. Beware that these scripts can barf out loads of output ! (you can always redirect the output to a file, as if you were on the command prompt)

q4> include analyze.pl

q4> include whathappened.pl

q4> run Analyze AMUP

...

q4> run WhatHappened

System Name:    HP-UX

Node Name:      anduril

Release:        B.11.31

Version:        U

Model:          no

Machine ID:     123456789

Processors:     1

Architecture:   IA-64

Physical Mem:   1571536 pages



This is a 64 Bit Kernel

The system had been up for 44.12 days (381190776 ticks).

Load averages: 0.76 0.77 0.48.



System went down at: Fri Jun 25 11:35:12 2010



+--------------------------------------------+


+--------------------------------------------+

Found adjacent data tr. Growing size.  0x240d000 -> 0x640d000.

Loaded ACPI revision 2.0 tables.

MMIO on this platform supports Write Coalescing.

...

gexcp_hndlr: Reserved Register/Field or Unimplemented Address fault occurs in kernel mode.

gexcp_hndlr: unimplemented data address fault, ISR.ir = 0,

      data memory reference to unimplemented address

******************************************************************************



reg_dump(): Displaying register values (in hex) from the save state at

  ssp  87ffffff_5ffe7200 return_status/reason/flags  0000/0054/00000001



Interruption type: Unimplemented Data Address Fault

panic: gexcp_hndlr: Unresolved priv 0 interruption.



Stack Trace:

  IP                  Function Name

  0xe000000001dea710  gexcp_hndlr+0x2d0

  0xe000000001c0a780  bubbledown+0x0

  0xe000000000afed90  kmem_lpc_alloc+0x2b0

  0xe000000000d6ead0  get_kmem+0x290

  0xe000000000d66070  kmem_arena_xlarge_alloc+0x2f0

  0xe000000000c24e90  kmem_arena_varalloc+0x2d0

  0xe000000000df31c0  vfork_buffer_init+0xb0

  0xe000000000d0b7c0  newproc+0x11f0

  0xe000000000a12930  vfork+0x1440

  0xe000000000c261a0  syscall+0x560

End of Stack Trace

It's not always guaranteed that you'll find an exact reason why the machine crashed (especially if it's really kernel related), but at least it can give you a rough idea what happened.

Since the Ubuntu Lucid upgrade, suspend/resume is not working any more on my desktop, which means I must powercycle every day. This leads to a higher fsck rate on my mounted filesystems, and as those are increasing in size over time, this takes a long time to boot. This is why I decided to migrate everything to ext4, thereby offering me faster fsck times, and an overall better performance.
The procedure to migrate ext3 volumes to ext4 is quite straightforward :

For non-root filesystems :

First, unmount the partition.

umount /dev/sda5

Next, run a filesystem check on it to make sure it is in sane condition. We are still on ext3.

fsck.ext3 -pf /dev/sda5

Enable new features of ext4 on the filesystem.

tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda5

Option "extents" enables the filesystem to use extents instead of bitmap mapping for files, "uninit_bg" reduces file system check times by only checking used portions of the disk, and "dir_index" allows storing the contents of large directories in a htree for faster access. Option "dir_index" is also supported by ext3, so you may already be using it, but it makes no harm to specify it here.
Run a filesystem check. It will find errors. It is normal. Let it fix them.

fsck.ext4 -yfD /dev/sda5

The "-D" parameter will actually enable the "dir_index" option by rebuilding directory index. It can be rebuilt (optimized) at any later time by running the check with the parameter.
Now edit your /etc/fstab file to say "ext4" instead of "ext3" for /home. Other options may differ for your system.

/dev/sda5 /home ext4 defaults 0 2

Try to mount your new ext4 filesystem.

mount /home

If it succeeds, congratulations.
It may seem that the migration from ext3 to ext4 is now complete, and it is almost true. Except that any old files created before the conversion will continue using the bitmap mapping of ext3 instead of extents of ext4. Files will eventually migrate to the new format as they are updated during normal system operation, because on next write they will be saved using extents. Unfortunately many frequently used files (like application binaries) are often read and rarely written to. The outcome is that the files will remain using the old format for a long time, and you will not be able to experience full potential of ext4. Modifying attributes with chattr can be done on multiple files. Although digging trough the entire directory system is not really feasible, so you can use some of the shell magic to accomplish the task.

For root filesystems :

You will need to use a Linux liveCD, or the installation CD that came with your distribution. You might want to check if the kernel on that installation medium has ext4 capabilities. Simply follow the above procedure, but don't forget to change /etc/fstab first, so your root partition is marked as ext4.

Dit weekend vindt het zomerconcert van de muziekschool plaats, en gisteren was de aftrap. Toch wel wat onder de indruk van de grootte van het evenement : 120 groepjes verspreid over 3 dagen spelen elk een ingestudeerd nummer. Waaronder ook ondergetekende, na 3 maand les en als eerste van twee solo muzikanten - de rest speelde allen met verscheidene mensen. Als concert vuurdoop kan dat tellen. Ik mocht niet klagen : slechts enkele kleine steken laten vallen, en dan voornamelijk omwille dat ik de muziek nauwelijks hoorde. Geleerde les : zelf eigen keyboard meebrengen volgende keer, dat bespaart een hoop geknoei met instellingen van een vreemd keyboard, dat dan nog eens minder toetsen heeft dan het mijne.
Soit, complimenten aan de organisatoren, puik gedaan voor zo'n groot event met een heerlijke sfeer !