Add the following to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf and reboot:
console=tty0 console=ttyS0
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Enabling console access on fully virt guests (virsh/virt-manager)
Using virsh or virt-manager you can gain access to the console by editing grub.conf, this allows you to watch the machine boot from a terminal.
Add the following to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf and reboot:
Add the following to the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf and reboot:
Friday, May 21, 2010
Converting kvm guests from lvm to qcow2, base images and snapshots
lvm based kvm guests are fast but you lose some flexibility, playing with fedora/kvm on my laptop I prefer to use file based images. Converting from lvm images to qcow2 isn't hard but the documentation is sparse.
1. use qemu-img to convert from an lvm to qcow2 format:
2. edit the xml for the image
Creating images from with a base image allows quick rollouts of many boxes based on an single install - for example I have a 'golden image' of centos, I can stop that VM and create 2 servers using the original VM disk as a base file and writing changes to different files.
Taking this further I can then snapshot both images so once I start making changes, rolling back to a point in time prior to the changes is very easy:
references:
http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/how-you-can-use-qemukvm-base-images-be-more-productive-part-1
1. use qemu-img to convert from an lvm to qcow2 format:
qemu-img convert -O qcow2 /dev/vg_name/lv_name/ /var/lib/libvirt/images/image_name.qcow2If you want the image compressed add '-c' right after the word convert.
2. edit the xml for the image
virsh edit image_namemodify the disk stanza, adding a type to the driver line; on the source line change 'dev' to 'file' and modify the path:
driver name='qemu' type='qcow2' source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/image_name.qcow2'
Creating images from with a base image allows quick rollouts of many boxes based on an single install - for example I have a 'golden image' of centos, I can stop that VM and create 2 servers using the original VM disk as a base file and writing changes to different files.
qemu-img create -b original_image.qcow2 -f qcow2 clone_image01.qcow2 qemu-img create -b original_image.qcow2 -f qcow2 clone_image02.qcow2
Taking this further I can then snapshot both images so once I start making changes, rolling back to a point in time prior to the changes is very easy:
qemu-img snapshot -c snapshot_name vm_image_name.qcow2
references:
http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/how-you-can-use-qemukvm-base-images-be-more-productive-part-1
Thursday, November 12, 2009
DHCP hostnames
On my home LAN Windows and Ubuntu boxes push their hostnames into local DNS which makes them easily resolvable - my router lists the names associated with MACs in its web interface, this is one of those small things that is really convenient. For some reason my fedora boxes have not been doing this lately and I finally got annoyed enough to look it up, turns out the fix is very simple.
First off figure out which interface you are using, if you are using more then 1 then I will assume you know which one you want the hostname pushed from, easily enough you can run 'ipconfig' or 'ip addr show' and note the interface name. In most cases this will be eth0 for copper and something like wlan0 for a wireless connection. Once you have the interface name substitute it into the following command:
Then restart networking:
In the above example I am using '$HOSTNAME' which is the system hostname variable but you could set this to a static name if you desired.
First off figure out which interface you are using, if you are using more then 1 then I will assume you know which one you want the hostname pushed from, easily enough you can run 'ipconfig' or 'ip addr show' and note the interface name. In most cases this will be eth0 for copper and something like wlan0 for a wireless connection. Once you have the interface name substitute it into the following command:
echo "DHCP_HOSTNAME=$HOSTNAME" >> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-
Then restart networking:
sudo service network restart
In the above example I am using '$HOSTNAME' which is the system hostname variable but you could set this to a static name if you desired.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Is Hyper Threading enabled?
Needed a quick way to check if Hyper Threading was enabled on some RHEL boxes, ended up writing a quick "script" that can be copied onto the command line.
I'll go through it line by line just for fun:
First we grab all lines matching "core id" from /proc/cpuinfo, sort them (in case the id's where not listed in numeric order), list the unique values and count them
And the whole thing...
I'll go through it line by line just for fun:
First we grab all lines matching "core id" from /proc/cpuinfo, sort them (in case the id's where not listed in numeric order), list the unique values and count them
cores=`grep "core id" /proc/cpuinfo|sort|uniq|wc -l`Using grep I count the number of lines matching "processor" from /proc/cpuinfo
procs=`grep -c "processor" /proc/cpuinfo`If we fine less cores the processors then Hyper Threading must be on
if [[ "$cores" -lt "$procs" ]]; then
echo -e "\n$HOSTNAME: cores=$cores, processors=$procs\n HyperThreading: Enabled"
If we find the same number of processors and cores the Hyper Threading is off
elif [[ "$cores" -eq "$procs" ]]; then
echo -e "\n$HOSTNAME: cores=$cores, processors=$procs\n HyperThreading: Disabled"
If neither case matches then we have run into a failure, or our math doesn't work on this particular box
else
echo "epic failure"
fi
And the whole thing...
cores=`grep "core id" /proc/cpuinfo|sort|uniq|wc -l`
procs=`grep -c "processor" /proc/cpuinfo`
if [[ "$cores" -lt "$procs" ]]; then
echo -e "\n$HOSTNAME: cores=$cores, processors=$procs\n HyperThreading: Enabled"
elif [[ "$cores" -eq "$procs" ]]; then
echo -e "\n$HOSTNAME: cores=$cores, processors=$procs\n HyperThreading: Disabled"
else
echo "epic failure"
fi
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb istat
I was recently tasked with organizing 137k+ small .jpg files into a folder structure based on year and quarter, why? users opening this directory with a ftp client complained that it took a "long time" to get a directory listing... apparently 15 - 20 minutes each time they opened the directory, honestly if a program didn't return anything in 15 minutes I would probably kill it and blame the server!
I really didn't think too much of the problem, in my head I though "i'll just use 'find' and 'stat'", which would have worked perfectly EXCEPT that I had to do this on a AIX 4.3 server and mounting the filesystem remotely was not an option.
A few problems with AIX 4.3 - no 'stat' command, in AIX 5.x you can install the coreutils rpm from the AIX toolbox to overcome this problem but you are up the creek without a paddle in 4.3! Also 'find' doesn't have all of the options you would usually have available on a newer version of linux - this was an issue in my case since I had to put the files into subdirectories (example: /basedirectory/2008/Q3) which meant that when searching for files to process in the basedirectory I did not want to descend into the yearly and quarterly subdirectories, easy with the -maxdepth option - which is not available in 4.3.
I ended up getting around the lack of -maxdepth in the find command by using the -prune option to remove subdirectories from processing, because the basedirectoy did not contain any directories except 200{8,9}/Q{1..4} this task was simplified even further by providing a common directory 'Q*'.
The lack of the 'stat' command had me banging my head against 'ls' for a day or so... The problem I have with 'ls' is in trying to get the year from 'ls -l', it works great for files older then 180 days but files less then 180 days are listed with the file modification timestamp in place of the year. I toyed with awk'ing the year/modifaction time column and checking if the value was an integer, which does work but you run into issues if your script is running within 180 days of the end of the year and examining files from the previous year, all the files will have timestamps which would cause you to examine the value of the current month vs. the month of the file being examined to determine the correct year - logic that I was uninterested in writing out.
Enter in my new most loved command in AIX: 'istat'
I was lucky enough to find a post mentioning 'istat' which "displays the i-node information for a particular file". 'istat' is simliar to the linux 'stat' command although it does not allow you modify the output using command line switches - nothing a little grep and awk won't fix! What 'istat' does do is handily format data about file creation, modification and access in an unambiguous matter - dates are always shown in the same format, unlike 'ls -l'. Without this tool I was writing a longer and longer script to deal with corner cases dealing with files modified 180 days ago and files modified around the last 3 months of the year - with 'istat' I was able to make my script much simpler and rely on the computer to hand me information in an consistent format.
I would be surprised if anyone has to solve this same problem but I will post the script anyways, as a warning this script is slow - 'istat' is not a tool for performance! Also working 'xargs' into the mix would make a more elegant solution in-place of 'find' and 'cat'.
In the following script I have disabled the actual move command - this will only print what would happen! uncomment the line beginning with 'mv' and it will move files.
I really didn't think too much of the problem, in my head I though "i'll just use 'find' and 'stat'", which would have worked perfectly EXCEPT that I had to do this on a AIX 4.3 server and mounting the filesystem remotely was not an option.
A few problems with AIX 4.3 - no 'stat' command, in AIX 5.x you can install the coreutils rpm from the AIX toolbox to overcome this problem but you are up the creek without a paddle in 4.3! Also 'find' doesn't have all of the options you would usually have available on a newer version of linux - this was an issue in my case since I had to put the files into subdirectories (example: /basedirectory/2008/Q3) which meant that when searching for files to process in the basedirectory I did not want to descend into the yearly and quarterly subdirectories, easy with the -maxdepth option - which is not available in 4.3.
I ended up getting around the lack of -maxdepth in the find command by using the -prune option to remove subdirectories from processing, because the basedirectoy did not contain any directories except 200{8,9}/Q{1..4} this task was simplified even further by providing a common directory 'Q*'.
The lack of the 'stat' command had me banging my head against 'ls' for a day or so... The problem I have with 'ls' is in trying to get the year from 'ls -l', it works great for files older then 180 days but files less then 180 days are listed with the file modification timestamp in place of the year. I toyed with awk'ing the year/modifaction time column and checking if the value was an integer, which does work but you run into issues if your script is running within 180 days of the end of the year and examining files from the previous year, all the files will have timestamps which would cause you to examine the value of the current month vs. the month of the file being examined to determine the correct year - logic that I was uninterested in writing out.
Enter in my new most loved command in AIX: 'istat'
I was lucky enough to find a post mentioning 'istat' which "displays the i-node information for a particular file". 'istat' is simliar to the linux 'stat' command although it does not allow you modify the output using command line switches - nothing a little grep and awk won't fix! What 'istat' does do is handily format data about file creation, modification and access in an unambiguous matter - dates are always shown in the same format, unlike 'ls -l'. Without this tool I was writing a longer and longer script to deal with corner cases dealing with files modified 180 days ago and files modified around the last 3 months of the year - with 'istat' I was able to make my script much simpler and rely on the computer to hand me information in an consistent format.
I would be surprised if anyone has to solve this same problem but I will post the script anyways, as a warning this script is slow - 'istat' is not a tool for performance! Also working 'xargs' into the mix would make a more elegant solution in-place of 'find' and 'cat'.
In the following script I have disabled the actual move command - this will only print what would happen! uncomment the line beginning with 'mv' and it will move files.
#!/usr/bin/ksh
#
# organize files ending in $fileextension in $basedir
# by moving them into subdirectories $basedir/$year/$quarter
#
# backdate variable controls how many days old a file must be before
# it is considered for processing, 92 days is approx 3 months
# if you don't believe me ask google "3 months in days"
backdate=92
fileext=YOUR_FILE_EXTENTION
outfile=/tmp/jpg_organizer.out
basedir=YOUR_BASE_DIRECTORY
errors=0
# function to calulate which quarter a month lives in
calculate_quarter() {
case $month in
Jan|Feb|Mar)
quarter="Q1"
;;
Apr|May|Jun)
quarter="Q2"
;;
Jul|Aug|Sep)
quarter="Q3"
;;
Oct|Nov|Dec)
quarter="Q4"
;;
esac
}
# rudimentary error checking
error_check() {
let errors="$errors + $?"
if [[ $errors -gt 0 ]]; then
echo "encountered an error, exiting"
exit $?
fi
}
# find files older then $backdate and move them into $basedir/$year/$quarter directories
find $basedir -name Q\* -prune -o -name \*$fileext -mtime +$backdate -type f -print > $outfile
error_check
for i in `cat $outfile` ; do
filename=$i
fileattrib=`istat $i | grep "Last modified:"`
month=`echo $fileattrib | awk '{print $4}'`
year=`echo $fileattrib | awk '{print $7}'`
calculate_quarter
if [[ ! -d $basedir/$year/$quarter ]]; then
mkdir -p $basedir/$year/$quarter
error_check
fi
echo "moving:$filename to $basedir/$year/$quarter/"
#mv $filename $basedir/$year/$quarter/
error_check
done
rm $outfile
exit 0
Monday, October 26, 2009
AIX syslogd and splunk (and more)
AIX is what I would call a 'batteries not-included' OS; the vanilla DVD install leaves you with a functioning system that has telnet (with root access) enabled, no OpenSSL/OpenSSH, korn shell without autocomplete (must be enables 'set -o vi'), no logging, etc...
Since I work around a lot of RedHat boxes I tend to modify the AIX servers to have a simlar setup to RHEL, here are some of the steps I take:
Install the following rpm's from the aix toolbox:
bash (add /usr/bin/bash to /etc/security/login.cfg)
curl
coreutils
less
lsof
python
rsync
sudo
unzip
wget
Install OpenSSL and OpenSSH
Change root home directory to /root and change shell to bash:
Since I work around a lot of RedHat boxes I tend to modify the AIX servers to have a simlar setup to RHEL, here are some of the steps I take:
Install the following rpm's from the aix toolbox:
bash (add /usr/bin/bash to /etc/security/login.cfg)
curl
coreutils
less
lsof
python
rsync
sudo
unzip
wget
Install OpenSSL and OpenSSH
Change root home directory to /root and change shell to bash:
mkdir /root && chuser home=/root shell=/usr/bin/bash root
Modify prompt for all users:
aixpert -l high
# Set bash prompt to be much more linux likeChange logging setup:
if [[ "$TERM" == "xterm" ]];then
if [[ "$SHELL" == "/usr/bin/bash" || "$SHELL" == "/bin/bash" ]];then
if [[ "$UID" -eq 0 ]];then
PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\][\[\033[31;1m\]\u\[\033[0m\]@\h \W]# "
else
PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\][\u@\h \W]\$ "
fi
fi
fi
# Linux-ify the AIX logging setup and enable automagic rotationRemove "Message forwarded from hostname:" from remote logging output:
# Everything but mail and auth to messages
*.info;mail.none;auth.none /var/log/messages rotate size 10m files 10 compress
# Auth to secure
auth.debug /var/log/secure rotate size 10m files 10 compress
# Mail to maillog
mail.debug /var/log/maillog rotate size 10m files 10 compress
# Emergency messages to all users
*.emerg *
*.info;mail.none @NETWORK_LOG_SERVER
chssys -s syslogd -a "-n" ; stopsrc -s syslogd ; startsrc -s syslogdRun aixpert to enable a much higher level of security:
aixpert -l high
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Lotus Notes 8.5 on Fedora 10 x86_64
32-bit packages required for notes 8.5 to work on Fedora 10 x86_64. Notes will install fine without these but will not run.
libxkbfile-1.0.4-5.fc9.i386
libgnomecanvas-2.20.1.1-4.fc10.i386
libgnomeprint22-2.18.5-1.fc10.i386
libgnomeprintui22-2.18.3-1.fc10.i386
gnome-vfs2-2.24.0-3.fc10.i386
libgnome-2.24.1-9.fc10.i386
libgnomeui-2.24.0-2.fc10.i386
libXScrnSaver-1.1.3-1.fc10.i386
libcanberra-gtk2-0.10-3.fc10.i386
gtk-nodoka-engine-0.7.2-1.fc10.i386
Of course installing these also carries a lot of dependency baggage.
And a handy one liner:
sudo yum -y install libxkbfile-1.0.4-5.fc9.i386 libgnomecanvas-2.20.1.1-4.fc10.i386 libgnomeprint22-2.18.5-1.fc10.i386 libgnomeprintui22-2.18.3-1.fc10.i386 gnome-vfs2-2.24.0-3.fc10.i386 libgnome-2.24.1-9.fc10.i386 libgnomeui-2.24.0-2.fc10.i386 libXScrnSaver-1.1.3-1.fc10.i386 libcanberra-gtk2-0.10-3.fc10.i386
libxkbfile-1.0.4-5.fc9.i386
libgnomecanvas-2.20.1.1-4.fc10.i386
libgnomeprint22-2.18.5-1.fc10.i386
libgnomeprintui22-2.18.3-1.fc10.i386
gnome-vfs2-2.24.0-3.fc10.i386
libgnome-2.24.1-9.fc10.i386
libgnomeui-2.24.0-2.fc10.i386
libXScrnSaver-1.1.3-1.fc10.i386
libcanberra-gtk2-0.10-3.fc10.i386
gtk-nodoka-engine-0.7.2-1.fc10.i386
Of course installing these also carries a lot of dependency baggage.
And a handy one liner:
sudo yum -y install libxkbfile-1.0.4-5.fc9.i386 libgnomecanvas-2.20.1.1-4.fc10.i386 libgnomeprint22-2.18.5-1.fc10.i386 libgnomeprintui22-2.18.3-1.fc10.i386 gnome-vfs2-2.24.0-3.fc10.i386 libgnome-2.24.1-9.fc10.i386 libgnomeui-2.24.0-2.fc10.i386 libXScrnSaver-1.1.3-1.fc10.i386 libcanberra-gtk2-0.10-3.fc10.i386
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