Archive for March, 2010

I recently had a need to push out a few settings to a group of iLOMs on new Sun servers. I really despise using a web interface for everything so I took the ssh route. The first thing I tried to do after determining the commands I needed was to shove the commands in with ssh directly.  I quickly became apparent that route just wasn’t going to work.

When you log into the iLOM “daemons” need to initialize. Based on the errors that I got while trying to shove the commands in with ssh I assume these “daemons” have something to do with access controls. It became apparent that I needed to use expect if I wanted to automate over the ssh connection. I used the pexpect module in python and wrote a simple script to push a batch of commands to a list of hosts.

It was written from the point of view that most of these settings need to happen when you receive a new box so it defaults to the iLOM default username and password (root/changeme). I’m not sure how often I will use this tool but I will be sure to keep my command snippets in version control as its highly likely I will be using the same settings over and over again or with slight permutations.

iLOM-commander can be found in my github (patches accepted)

In the last week my wife and I have both experienced excellent customer service. All too often you only hear about a company when they do something bad (see all my fail posts). I just want to be sure to give kudos to both of these companies.

1) BornFree: My wife ordered some BornFree Spouts as we start transitioning our son to sippy cups. She said about 5 minutes after she hit the order button she realized she should have ordered more. So she called the company to change her order. The person she spoke with said it had already been packaged up (wow that was fast). But instead of her having to place a new order and pay shipping two times they said they would just toss in an extra set of spouts for FREE. How bout that? They certainly didn’t have to do that we were more than willing to pay for them. But hey thats good customer service and my wife will likely recommend them for a long time.

2) I have an old ReadyNas with 4 drive bays. Some where along the line I lost the brackets for one of the drives. Its been running for a long time with one loose drive but today I decided to see where I could hunt a set down. Its an old discontinued unit so my hopes were not high. I contacted a guy (chirpa) on their forums asking if he knew where I could purchase a set. He said to just send him some pictures and my address. Its not a part they carry but he said he could find some in the lab and just send them to me for FREE. Thats also great customer service. Even though that unit is no longer in production and employee took the time to respond to my mail on a saturday and will hunt some esoteric rails down for me on monday and ship them out.

So don’t forget to point out good customer experiences you have. Its easy to rant about a bad experience, but take that same extra time to shine a light and give credit when its deserved.

Citrix has released the beta for the next version of XenServer code named “Midnight Ride”.

I’m looking forward to the enhanced snapshots (memory+disk), and memory over commit for lab environments.

Get access to the beta program here

I know I’ve mentioned how much I love the sysstat package before. I use sar regularly to help with performance diagnostics (Analyzing Linux System Performance And Finding Bottle Necks, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux, Baseline Analysis Is Important, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux Revisited). I wrote this little Nagios plugin to collect the performance metrics that sar collects.

I use this plugin with Zenoss and I set any performance thresholds there, more important to me was collecting the information for historical graphing. I searched around and didn’t really find any existing solutions thats why anyone wanting to do similar perhaps with cacti is stuck with my craptastic code (or please point me to a better implementation).  Anyway if you want to grab the plugin and check it out its on github.

check_sar_perf

If you hadn’t already guessed I am a big fan of the Xen hypervisor. Lately I have been using the Citrix XenServer release because it makes it quite palatable for my co-workers. One annoyance that I do have about XenServer is the requirement that you license it (with a free license) every year. If you fail to license it the GUI stops working. Now I hate relying on GUIs but the fact of the matter is others in my team expect to have a working GUI when they need to do something. And I dont know about you but I don’t really log onto the management console very often. Really I only log on to it if I need to provision a new server so its entirely plausible that a license would expire and I wouldn’t know about it until I really needed to do something.

I ended up writing a little Nagios plugin that checks the license expiration date using XenAPI. I don’t know that it’s 100% compliant with the plugin specification but it does work for me. I actually don’t prefer to use the warn and critical states with the Nagios (I use the performance data with Zenoss and apply thresholds there. I find that to be a bit more flexible.) but I did implement them. The plugin can be executed on the XenServer (you may want to reference how to install nrpe on XenServer) or on from your monitoring host as long as the host performing the check has the python XenAPI installed.

The plugin check_citrix_xenserver_license can be found on github.

I hope someone can find it useful.