thinking sysadmin

Running a lot of Red Hat VMs in your virtual infrastructure, on shared storage? CentOS, Scientific Linux, both versions 4 and 5, they count for these purposes; Fedora should likely be included too. Do you have the slocate (version 4.x and earlier) or mlocate (version 5.x) RPMs installed? If you’re uncertain, check using the following:

> rpm -q slocate
slocate-2.7-13.el4.8.i386

or

> rpm -q mlocate
mlocate-0.15-1.el5.2.x86_64

If so, multiple RHEL VMs plus mlocate or slocate may be adding up to an array-crushing 4:02am shared storage load and latency spike for you. Before being addressed, this spike was bad enough at my place of employment (when combined with a NetApp Sunday-morning disk scrub) to cause a Windows VM to crash with I/O errors. Ouch.
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Since Sun and Amazon removed the limit on the number of OpenSolaris 2008.05 instances able to run on EC2, I’ve been curious – and a little bothered – by the fact that the 2008.05 AMI is 32-bit only. Curious because OpenSolaris shouldn’t have any issues running on a 64-bit EC2 instance (there are other 64-bit OpenSolaris AMIs available on EC2, after all), and a little bothered because there have been long-standing reports of trouble running Solaris on 32-bit architectures, which makes me hesitant to invest much effort in a 32-bit OpenSolaris EC2 environment.

Well, perhaps a 64-bit AMI is forthcoming – I think this is still a beta program – and perhaps Sun’s just trying to save us a buck or two, since the cheapest 64-bit EC2 instance is four times as expensive per hour as the cheapest 32-bit instance.

According to a blog post on blogs.sun.com, the capacity limit for OpenSolaris 2008.05 on EC2 has been removed.

The blog entry makes it sound like you no longer need to register with Sun to use OpenSolaris on EC2, but that doesn’t appear to be the case – I only see the AMI in my private instances, and the details on the image seem to confirm this.
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For grins, I tried a quick-and-dirty BFU of a SXCE 79 instance running on EC2 to the latest nightly build this morning. I roughly followed Ben Rockwood’s BFU instructions and didn’t do anything to resolve conflicts beyond running acr. On reboot, it looks like the system panicked – I presume the reason is probably somewhere in here. Console dump after the jump for the curious.
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I finally got around to installing Ubuntu (Hardy) on my Eee PC this weekend. My only regret: That I waited so long to do it.
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• Ubuntu Netbook Remix – “A ‘remix’ of the standard Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 release to enable it to work better on devices with small screens, such as Netbooks (sub-notebooks).” I’ve been meaning to replace Xandros on my Eee with Ubuntu – it’ll be nice to have this on top of Hardy Heron. (Seen at Ars Technica, whose post has more info and some nice screenshots.)
• Internet Traffic Growth Doesn’t Matter – A look at Internet bandwidth consumption that sounds quite level-headed to me. A few great quotes, some of them excerpted from a presentation by Andrew Odlyzko: “Internet traffic growth rates are slowing. Hype is accelerating.” “Telecom is the only industry that worries about it’s [sic] customers using too much product.” “Volume is not value. SMS messages consume almost no bandwidth but bill out at $1000/Mb.” “Traffic growth simply doesn’t matter. Period. What matters is revenue.” And best of all: “Most people think they are special but in realty [sic] just want to watch ‘American Idol’.” (Seen at Data Center Knowledge.)

I missed this: Apparently the OpenSolaris 2008.05 AMI on EC2 has reached a capacity limit. So, while I got Sun’s approval this morning for their OpenSolaris/SXCE.79 on EC2 beta, I don’t get to use OpenSolaris until they add more capacity; SXCE.79 is a nice consolation prize, though.

Generally, I’m a fan of Sun Microsystems. For the most part, I like their hardware and their software – and their best products show real innovation and willingness to take risks. I’m also a fan of Amazon’s EC2 product, so the announcement that Sun would be officially bundling OpenSolaris for EC2 was great news. Unfortunately, it seems that after all the hullabaloo, Sun doesn’t really want to make it that easy for you to actually use OpenSolaris on EC2, by managing access to it like a control freak would.
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In the past, I’ve used our local mirror of the CentOS yum repository to kickstart machines booted using PXE; apparently, this no longer works with CentOS 5.1, although it did with 5.0. If you attempt to do so, after the initial PXE boot, you get the following message:


The CentOS installation tree in that directory does not seem to match your boot media.

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So, you recognize that FreeBSD isn’t officially supported on VMware ESX, but you want to give it a try anyway? Here’s what I did to get it installed, with VMware Tools and using e1000 Ethernet drivers:

Installation was for the most part straightforward – I chose “Other” for the operating system type, and allocated resources like I would for pretty much any other operating system. The install from an NFS-mounted ISO image worked fine; I’ve only run into two issues so far: Installing VMware Tools and changing the Ethernet drivers from the default Lance drivers.
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