Following the CentOS team's announcement of their repackaging of Red Hat's Cluster Suite and Global File System (GFS) applications, I decided to give them a run. Results so far have been less than encouraging.It took a fair while to download the required source RPMs and build them (working in my emulated environment, of course). After installing them, … Continue reading GFS on CentOS – maybe
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Here is a link to the best blonde joke ever! Not that I'd usually post links to jokes, but this one is worth it. Happy New Year!
I'm thinking of putting my server on a bit of a software diet. Each time I get a clever idea about something else to run, half-a-dozen or so new packages get thrown at it. The latest was the idea of running Sync4j, which needed Tomcat, which in turn (obviously) required a swag of Java guff. This I'm not … Continue reading Server bloat
I'm obviously expecting too much. I thought that after years of having to wander the wastelands of proprietary protocols, Linux mobile phone users might at last have some relief. SyncML is an open standard for device synchronisation that is supported by many new phones; this, I thought, was what we have been waiting for. Unfortunately I was wrong...What … Continue reading Device Synchronisation — why is it still so hard?
As the title suggests, Vic's photo Gallery is back up after the disk blow-up the other week. Follow the link at the left of Crossed Wires to view. There's still been no new photos for a while, but at least you can go back to looking at the old ones! 😉
I had a rather brutal lesson in LVM recovery last week. I had four SATA disks in an LVM VG, one of which failed. Despite the failed disk *not* being the first drive in the VG, all the LVs in the VG were toast. Why? Because when I created the LVs, I striped them over the two disks that … Continue reading Recovering a striped LVM volume group… or not
A hard disk failure last week caused a big issue for the Crossed Wires admins. The drive was a WD, and they're not necessarily off the purchasing list because the drive failed: disk drives are mechanical devices, and especially the consumer-level ones are not indestructible. The reason they're off the purchasing list is that I had to … Continue reading Western Digital off the purchasing list
In chasing my VNC problem I came across this reference on the kernel Bugzilla about a general problem with segfaulting on SMP AMD64 systems.  Some pretty ugly stuff (the comment list is huge!).  Anyway, guys are chasing suspected bugs all over the place, with a couple of theories but not really any firm leads... Then, Linus (Torvalds, … Continue reading Linus, you da man
I like Gentoo Linux, but sometimes I find it's not really applicable for some of what I'm using it for. Like my main server. This machine is one of the two machines at my place that just HAVE to work (the firewall/phone server is the other), and there's been a few instances recently where Gentoo has let … Continue reading Gentoo Linux wastes a bit more of my life
My first (and at this stage only) podcast has commenced. I've created zCast, a podcast on the IBM zSeries and System z9 mainframe systems. Point your podcast-subscription weapon-of-choice at the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/zCast) and give in to the magic (or at least sit back and enjoy).Who knows: this could be the start of something big. I could become the … Continue reading My podcasting career commences!
Crossed Wires 