Unix, Linux, Database, Monitoring and other I.T. Issues
Had to edit my zimbra config to allow relaying for my local network only. Funny enough, this wasnt needed until now, but its time has come, so it was setup. The documentation is internal to my site, and not sharable publicly, but it does work and its not much effort. All you have to do is run the “zmprov modifyServer” command with the “zimbraMtaMyNetworks ” option.
I should have posted this a while ago, because it comes up over and over for me. In setting up a few vista machines lately, and having trouble connecting to one of my samba shares, on my Fedora8 server - and here is the fix.
Had a problem with my aging AthlonXP workstation tonite. It locked up, then the fan started screaming, so I shut it down. Its been “complaining” for some time. That was why I originally move the HP a712n next to it, to copy all the data off it, but now I’ve gotten used to using two workstations. So the death of the AXP box presented a problem. So I moved the idle HP dc7600 convertible tower into place tonite. Its a P4 3.2Ghz with hyperThreading, 3Gb RAM, and has vista 64bit on it, and runs really well. So its hooked up with a 1600×1200 resolution and will let me do all that I need. So I’ll add AXP’s drive as a second drive and start using the data from it that way. May even try to do some sort vmware workstation on it, so that I can access the apps from AXP too - but that will take some time.
Had a momentary power flicker tonite but it was enough to bounce a few servers. Took this opportunity to bump my FreeNAS box from 512Mb RAM to 768Mb. The ZFS filesystem I’m using continually complains about there not being enough memory since the ZFS wants 512 Mb by itself. Hopefully this will stop the daily (or more) bounces of the box which I never really got to look into in order to find the root cause. Suspicion was the RAM, so we’ll see.
This is another one of those posts that probably wont help anyone else out, but is more for my own records. Tonite I shutdown the RoundCube server that I had running. I had been using the QmailToaster appliance as my mail server (front and back end, as well as antivirus and spam blocker), but there were parts of the front end interface I thought felt “dated”. Though it was awesome as far as stability and reliability, the look and feel was just a bit “old”. So I had found a product called RoundCube that had a very slick ajax interface, allowing web based dragging of emails, dropping into folders, etc. It was nice, very slick. A little heavy on the infra-requirements, but nice none the less. Well, in recent time, I’ve migrated over to Zimbra, and absolutely love it. Its so much richer, works fantastic, has calendaring, instant message, and so many other features - PLUS it blocks all the spam that was getting through my QmailToaster. So with this Zimbra instance up almost 2 months now, I can see there is no going back. As a result, I no longer need RoundCube at all, hence the power down. QmailToaster is next, now that I have proper relaying working on Zimbra.
Not much value for anyone reading this, more for my own records. But moved the T23 out of the server room today and put an R40 in its place. The R40 is a much faster laptop and will be my workstation for the server room.
Ok, so I’m currently working on a personal test project that requires me to have four different user sessions in a browser based application. The problem is that I cant use the same browser for more than one session, because each new tab just resumes the account already logged on. So I was using Firefox and Flock for two of the browsers, and Chrome and Safari for the other two. But since doing this, the memory on my machine has been taking a beating. The biggest culprits were Chrome and Safari. So I needed more Firefox type browsers and found two more. One is called CometBird, and the other is the OrcaBrowser. Both are good. CometBird is more like Firefox, whereas Orca takes a different spin on design and options menu’s. But all in all, this is working out much better.
Finally figured out what was stopping my Zimbra host from relaying mail for my other servers. I have a half dozen other hosts on my network that need to get mail out - whether for monitoring purposes, as part of an application’s communications, or otherwise. Until now, I’ve needed to keep my Qmail server up and relaying until I could figure it all out. And today I finally did. So my documentation on the Zimbra setup has been updated with a new section on how to relay through Zimbra, for my network only.
While trying to make my new mail server client “portable device friendly”, I was in search of a cheap iPhone or iTouch that I could use to test the mobile device browsing. But while searching for that, I found something even better. Its an iPhone simulator application, as reported here too.
Found something very cool today. I’ve purchased about a half dozen of the Logitech V220 mice over the last year, because I love the size, and the features. It is very smooth (much smoother than the HP one I have), is 3/4 size, and is so comfortable. Well, of the ones I bought, one of them wasn’t working … which is what you get when you eBay buy - luck of the draw. Anyway - this one mouse wasn’t working, like the receiver was for a different mouse. I tried the reset and other things but no good. So I threw it in the draw, for reasons I cant explain, I didnt just trash it. Well, today while working other tasks, and wishing I had this mouse working, I decided to look into it. Logitech has a utility to re-pair a mouse with a receiver even if they were mismatched. So I was able to get it working with that utility, and two different sites (1 and 2) and make me happy for my 6 dollar purchase after all !
Oh yeah, and learned something else tonite. While trying to upgrade my network gear in the datacenter, I learned you cant chain the Linksys SR224 switches together. I have one rack with a Cisco 2924XL, one rack with a Linksys SR224, and the third rack had a Linksys SD208 in it. Well, I have now grown passed the 8 ports of that third rack’s device and wanted to add another port, so I used another Linksys SR224. After I connected the new SR224, to the second rack’s SR224, I noticed NOTHING in the third rack was working. Eventually, after much frustration, I just ran a cable from the first rack’s Cisco 2924XL to the third rack’s SR224 in the same way I did the second rack’s SR224, and voila - all was good again. So this is to make a note that you cant chain the SR224’s … which is why they are cheap, and is what you get when you go with unmanaged switches. Oh well, live and learn.
Almost 3 years to the day, I’m looking to now bring down the Qmail Toaster appliance I’ve been using and liking. Its been very good for a long time, but no matter how I try to tune the spam filters, more and more stuff is getting through, and now for the first time, I’m losing good emails. So thats problem number one. Problem number two is that its functionally great, but feeling very dated. So thats what led me to the new collaboration style Zimbra. I’ve used it successfully elsewhere, so I made the switch tonite. Now all new email comes and flows through Zimbra instead of Qmail. I also successfully converted all the old mailbox data over. Also converted the address book too. Documentation for the Zimbra setup is now on the wiki, and shows how the box was built, data copied, address book copied, and everything in between.
Today my replacement DL380G3 arrived. My existing one that runs VMWare on it, has been very unstable. The condition is something that nobody seems to have an answer for other than “try a motherboard”. So when I started searching for prices for replacement motherboards, it was more than replacing the server. So for under a hundred bucks, I got an entire replacement server on eBay, and swapped my drives, power supplies and fans over to the new one. I’ll salvage whatever is still good from the old one, and then its just a junker. Anyway - doing that got my 5 or 6 instances back up again - email, dns, wiki, and a few others.
Also got my former LaCie 1 Tb Big EtherDisk copied over to my new FreeNAS installation (documentation) which is now a mirrored 1.5 Tb share. So I have fault tolerance, and 50% more headroom for growth. So thats good and takes care of that issue - that way I dont lose my software depot, music collection, TiVo shows, or anything else. This process involved changing all my drive share mappings on the desktop/laptops, mapping the new share to my two audiotron’s, mapping the new share to the SuSE server that does my nightly audiotron table of contents creation script, mapping it on Sockso and regenerating the library, as well as mapping it to my webserver where I keep some links that refer to that NAS.
Lastly - my 10 footer KVM cables arrived today so I was finally able to get my servers to be supportable all at the same time. Up until now, I’ve had to manually switch my “extension cable” set around from box to box, which can be a real headache. So that’s also good. Very productive day.
While trying to hook up an HP Dv9000 series laptop with Vista, to a printer that is shared off an XP pc, I ran into some issues. The printer was an HP 3015 all in one laser jet scanner/printer/copier/fax machine. It worked fine with XP on the desktop and an IBM R40 XP laptop, but as soon as I tried from Vista - I ran into issues. This stems from no real drivers being available for the HP 3015 on Vista, and even worse is being shared over the network and not directly attached.
However, after a few days, I found a solution for this problem. Short version is this - get the latest XP driver, download and extract on vista. Set the executable to run in XP compatibility mode on the Vista laptop and run. Directly attach the laptop to the printer via USB and print a test page. This part worked, although it shouldnt involve so much trickery. Then purchase a Linksys WPSM54g usb/network print server, and follow the instructions for setting that up. Now when you put the printer’s usb cable into the Linksys, its basically a network printer. You can then print to it from XP or Vista, by adding it as a standard TCP/IP printer. Since both Vista laptop and XP pc (and old xp laptop) have locally installed drivers, the add printer wizard uses them, unlike the way Vista works when sharing from over the network for the XP shared pc (which is to say it WONT use the locally installed drivers for reasons that are beyond me).
Update : documentation posted. No screenshots though … maybe in the future.
Had a power failure in the house this morning due to storm. I was pretty psyched that everything would be ok, but as it turns out, one of the racks needs a new UPS - its not large enough to handle all that I have on it. But everything came back up with a little hand holding after that.
Well, my external usb hard drives arrived today. I got 2 of the Seagate 1.5TB drives from an online retailer for $106 each - a deal indeed. They are the ones Im going to connect to FreeNAS in a mirrored 1.5TB share. That should fix my problems hopefully.
Quite a few updates recently. Instead of upping the DL585G1 to 6Gb, went with 5Gb instead, so the newest of the DL380G3’s can come online with 4Gb installed. That lets me migrate some vm’s over from the DL383 to the newest DL380 - specifically the heavy running one. So it can have dedicated CPU’s and memory.
A couple days before, probably about the 5th if I had to guess, also brought a new Zimbra email collaboration server online. I want to try this over my current Qmail Toaster appliance that has served me well for the past 2 years or so. But the Zimbra just offers so much more, its worth a look. So far I’m lovin it.
And yesterday, I finally gave up on OpenFiler and switched to the FreeNAS product. My “public” fileshare was quickly running out of space, as is my current 1Tb Lacie NAS. My backup 1Tb Lacie NAS seems to have “lost” its second drive, and I no longer trust it. All signs point to needing a solution to fix both of these situations. So I picked up 2 of the Seagate 1.5Tb USB drives, and plan to use the AMD 2200+ whitebox that was formerly my VMWare dev box - as my new FreeNAS server. The FreeNAS product works better for me, possibly due to the hardware support issue - who knows. But without much effort, I was able to share out the internal 120Gb IDE drive, configured via ZFS as both a Samba and NFS share. I’m going to load it up with a few files - mp3’s and movies as well as little files - and see how it stacks up. As long as there is no performance issue playing the mp3’s or movies, this will be the new direction.
Added RAM to each of my DL380G3’s today so they are now up to a meager 5Gb each. That will allow me to add 2Gb to my DL585G1 now as well, so I get get a meager 6Gb on that one. It aint much, but every little bit helps … especially when it comes to fitting another virtual machine in.
Modified my dns configuration again. All timeouts now removed. I had an extra hop where I was diverting some lookups, but I have now removed that. Im also trying out the new 4psa dns server as well - to see if its solid/reliable.
Also modified my big brother entries to reflect all the recent vmware migrations - where instances/appliances went from one server to another. Also updated all big brother notes files so that the text descriptions of the hosts match what’s where.
May have finally resolved some pesky DNS issues in my world. Using properly formatted DNS Forwarders, I was able to get some of my annoying timeouts to stop. Sites like wikipedia would always time out the first attempt, and take 2 or 3 tries. By adding my ISP’s latest name server IP’s to my ISPConfig’s named.conf.options files in the forwarding section - this seems to have stopped now. Few more days of testing will confirm if its a permanent fix.
Also - have been working with the 4psa dns manager and its really slick. The web interface has a *very* professional feel to it. The ease of use is really great. Its trouble free, very intuitive, has great help and looks so nice. So its now my “test” or “backup” dns server but is not yet in use for anything other than testing. If it had a non expiring license, I’d be using it now, but at this point, its test only.
And the big news is that for those remaining machines to convert - the ones with IDE configured drives, simply using the P2V converter (part of standalone converter, just choose physical machine) did the magic. I converted an older Ubuntu 5.04 machine that I use for a few tasks, and it converted in no time. Just had to tweak the /etc/network/interfaces after it was up, and set eth0 to auto. After that, all good. It was so painless it was crazy !
Finally two more instances migrated from old aging hardware to the new hardware. Today was my Vubuntus server and my ISPConfig instance. Now all I have left are the remaining three vm’s which are all IDE based and are slightly more difficult migrations.