Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Clusters and Virtualization

So I’ve been working a bit on clustering on and virtualization in general at work.  My self imposed project is to virtualize all of our servers.  Reducing the datacenter foot print from 3 racks full of servers to a single rack of virtual hosts.  A more accurate plan is to have 2 half racks of virtual hosts.

To accomplish this I am splitting my efforts between VMWare and OpenStack.  I have yet to successfully build an OpenStack cluster.  This I feel is completely my own fault.  It seems I can get through a tutorial with out being interrupted. This I’m sure is leading to a misconfiguration somewhere in my cluster build.  OpenStack takes a very long time to build the first time around and I have to admit that I do not fully understand each element of the cluster.

VMWare on the other had has been built and in production for sometime now.  I just have to test VSAN and figure out the licensing we will need to build a fully redundant cluster of VMWare hosts to house all of my now physical servers in a virtual environment.  

Currently my VMWare servers all use internal storage and the only shared storage is via nfs.  This is except for a single 3 node cluster that uses iSCSI SAN via FreeNAS.  So implementing a VSAN solution for my existing VMWare servers is a simple matter of building the VSAN servers and attaching each of the VMWare hosts to the storage. 

I’m sure you can tell where my plans lie.  I love the idea of OpenStack and hope to complete a cluster install, but the ease of administration of VMWare is probably the way I will be going.

-Oldwulf

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Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux

I re-found today the installation instructions for Ubuntu to run native on Windows 10 via WSL.  Just click the link below and follow the extremely simple instructions.  I haven’t run this since the developer version of Windows 10 that introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux.  In the current iteration you can install any flavor of Linux that is posted to the Windows Store.

Check out the instructions here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

-Oldwulf

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Back at it again…again.

OK so I’m going to attempt to keep something on this site that is active.  I will attempt to post information as I find it for systems administration.  Information may be misguided, but it will be posted.  I might even take a moment and correct mistakes as I find them.

-oldwulf.

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Getting back to the basics

It has been far too long since I have taken a step back and tried to identify all the things that I have dropped this past year due to time constraints.  To that end I think I will do some updated build docs for the basic OSes that I run.  I will also do some first step configurations for these OSes.

I’ve been meaning to document the basics and just haven’t taken the time needed.  Life has just been too busy.

-Oldwulf

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My FreeBSD Customizations

At work I’m starting to switch from using Ubuntu for all systems to adding in both OpenBSD and FreeBSD into the mix.  With the changes Linux is making moving to systemd and Ubuntu’s choice to drop PHP56 in 16.04, I’ve decided to take the step toward BSD.

Because of this I’ve been fighting to make my BSD experience as comfortable as my linux experience.  By far OpenBSD is my favorite BSD thus far.  I have to run both distributions of BSD in my DSN Cache project.  This is forcing me to figure out how to customize the FreeBSD CLI.

After a clean install of FreeBSD these are the first changes I make:

C Shell Color Prompt:

Set global /etc/csh.cshrc file with the following content and then remove the local user.cshrc file.

csh.cshrc
 
  1. # $FreeBSD: releng/10.3/etc/csh.cshrc 50472 1999-08-27 23:37:10Z peter $
  2. #
  3. # System-wide .cshrc file for csh(1).
  4. alias h history 25
  5. alias j jobs -l
  6. alias la ls -aF
  7. alias lf ls -FA
  8. alias ll ls -lAF
  9. alias vi vim
  10. # A righteous umask
  11. umask 22
  12. set path = (/sbin /bin /usr/sbin /usr/bin /usr/games /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/bin $HOME/bin)
  13. setenv EDITOR vim
  14. setenv PAGER more
  15. setenv BLOCKSIZE K
  16. if ($?prompt) then
  17. # An interactive shell -- set some stuff up
  18. # set prompt = "%N@%m:%~ %# "
  19. if (`id -u` == 0) then
  20. # root variation:
  21. set prompt="%{\e[31;1m%}%n%{\e[37m%}@%{\e[33m%}%m%{\e[37m%}:%{\e[36m%}%/%{\e[37m%}#%{\e[0m%} "
  22. else
  23. set prompt="%{\e[32;1m%}%n%{\e[37m%}@%{\e[33m%}%m%{\e[37m%}:%{\e[36m%}%~%{\e[37m%}"\$"%{\e[0m%} "
  24. endif
  25. set promptchars = "%#"
  26. set filec
  27. set history = 1000
  28. set savehist = (1000 merge)
  29. set autolist = ambiguous
  30. # Use history to aid expansion
  31. set autoexpand
  32. set autorehash
  33. set mail = (/var/mail/$USER)
  34. if ( $?tcsh ) then
  35. bindkey "^W" backward-delete-word
  36. bindkey -k up history-search-backward
  37. bindkey -k down history-search-forward
  38. endif
  39. endif

 

Install VIM:

 
 
  1. pkg install vim

edit /usr/local/share/vim/vimrc and add this content

 
 
  1. " Colors
  2. colorscheme elflord " awesome colorscheme
  3. syntax enable " enable syntax processing
  4. " Spaces & Tabs
  5. set tabstop=4 " number of visual spaces per TAB
  6. set softtabstop=4 " number of spaces in tab when editing
  7. set expandtab " tabs are spaces
  8. " UI Config
  9. set showcmd " show command in bottom bar
  10. "set cursorline " highlight current line
  11. set showmatch " highlight matching [{()}]
  12. " Searching
  13. set incsearch " search as characters are entered
  14. set hlsearch " highlight matches
  15. " Movement
  16. " move vertically by visual line
  17. nnoremap j gj
  18. nnoremap k gk
  19. " move to beginning/end of line
  20. nnoremap B ^
  21. nnoremap E $
  22. " $/^ doesn't do anything
  23. nnoremap $ <nop>
  24. nnoremap ^ <nop>
  25. " highlight last inserted text
  26. nnoremap gV `[v`]
  27. " Remote Compatibility
  28. set nocp
Uncategorized

Update on site plans

I’ve decided to not move any of my old content to this site.  I will be dedicating this site to systems administration, writing, acting and general discussion.  Most likely all that will be on this site are white papers for the various OSes that I run and the applications hosted there in.

-Oldwulf

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That New Site Smell

Well I’ve gone and done it again.  I’ve moved one more time.  Previously all of my information and blog was located on https://bitternacht.com/oldwulf, but this site has pretty much died so I’m moving back to oldwulf.com for my personal blog.

Bitternacht.com will not be going away so much as just being revamped entirely.  During an upgrade of the server the database was broken.  Unfortunately I do not have much time to fix the database so it is much easier just to move my blog to this site.  I will attempt to export and import the posts and pages, but I may end up just recreating all of my posts here as static pages.

Once I have all of my information moved I will turn bitternacht.com in to an archive site and start fresh with wordpress.  I had it setup as a “network” install of wordpress which is why I’m having issues fixing the database.  Even if I do happen to fix the database I figure having my personal blog on it’s own domain is a much better idea as most of my posts have nothing to do with Bitternacht or what is was created for.

I hope to have both sites fully operational before the rebels decide to blow up my creation.

-Oldwulf