Well I gave unity the old college try in ubuntu 11.04. But last night I just couldn’t take it any more. There were some small rendering issues occasionally plus some tray programs like workrave had no place to go, at least that I could find anyway and I really need workrave to remind me to change from sitting to standing positions every so often.

At any rate I decided to try gnome3 and gnome-shell. Its pretty easy to install

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

Then I dont know what process needed killed but just restarting X didnt seem to work for me, I rebooted and selected “Gnome” from the session selection bar.

My first impressions so far … much better. I think its a cleaner look. I use synapse a gnome-do like launcher any time i want to launch a program so for me an application dock is mostly a waste of time. Its clear that unity and gnome-shell have many ideas in common, I just think gnome-shell looks better and stays out of my way more out of the box.

And if you want to remove gnome-shell try the following

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

check_snmp_extend is a python script that I found orphaned on some Nagios forum. It facilitates using snmpd as an agent for executing Nagios plugin scripts. I adopted it made a few changes and tossed it on github a while back. I’m happy to merge initial snmp v3 support from Lee Whalen

Just happened to notice that centos 6 looks like it will be dropping soon. In QA and syncing to internal servers today, sync to public mirrors on Monday.

http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa

April 1st. I had a fairly eventful day, first I found that the phone system at $work has been mis-configured since it was installed. Second I got a call from someone I had worked with a few years back about a system that did not have backups that had a raid hiccup tanking the system a few days ago needing help with a restore.

The phone system

Several months back a new phone system was installed at my office. It has been a small nightmare ever since. Little issues seem to constantly pop up with it. I’ve had reports of people being unable to make long distance calls, but the error I recently found out is the default phone system error “Not enough lines”. So its unhelpful and misleading to say the least. We finally noticed that the errors were specific to long distance numbers with the same area code. So there seemed to be some issue with intralata calling.

I contacted the voice support team, provided them some testing phone numbers and got a ticket opened with the carrier. We all finally got on a conference call to troubleshoot the issue. The carrier said they weren’t getting the +1 and asked if 272 was in the local calling table to which voice support answered “Yes”. Everyone pretty much glazed over that statement because I had to point out that that is a long distanccd tme number. Thats when voice support said, “Yeah it looks like there are over 600 numbers in the local calling table.” Well, here in Lawrence KS there is no way that there are 600 nxx local numbers (nxx is the second set of digits, new info to me). So voice support removed the 272 number from the local calling table and now my test number started working.

Naturally I asked the carrier to provide us a list of local nxx numbers so that we can fix our local calling table. I was surprised that between all the people on the phone from the carrier, none could provide the list. In fact they all seemed to think it would be extraordinarily difficult to get that list. Finally they provided me a link to a form on their website that should spit this info out for me. But of course this form was broken, and every number I tried said that no information was available in the database. Upon relaying that information the carrier proceeded to give me another website to use http://www.localcallingguide.com. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how authoritative the data provided by Raymond Chow from Ontario Canada is. Luckily he does provide an xml query interface so I was able to figure out how to get the list I needed, and told the carrier I would use that for now, but they needed to provide an authoritative list by EOD Monday, its Tuesday and voice support says they still haven’t received the list. If the carrier cant tell you what numbers are local, then they have no business billing you for any long distance!

What? No Backups?

My second April Fools day fun was the old “I have no backups, can you save me?” routine.

The company I used to work for was sold and I helped them migrate to the new companies equipment. They had Xen installed on one dell server, and it ran several virtual machines to run the e-commerce website. Well that dell server has a PERC 6i controller, and 4 drives in a raid 5 (no spare). I know your probably thinking they dropped two drives, but no. They just dropped a single drive. I am pretty sure I have heard of rare data loss on those controllers with just a degraded set. Well thats what appears to have happened to them. The box went into a reboot loop, each time coming up it would kernel panic and reboot again. Did I mention there were NO backups?

We were able to bring up a recovery environment on a bootable USB key and we were able to salvage each virtual disk. Just had to go back through and re-assemble the virtual machines and do a few fix-ups to get everything working again. Unfortunately this consumed the majority of my weekend doing various imports and exports to and from the recovery environment and then the rebuilt production server. Hopefully the close call and several days of downtime even before I got involved will be enough to convince them its time to have backups and verify they work.

I should point out one important thing. Backups are no good unless they are verified. During the recovery I exported three re-assembled virtual machines, all three exported without error but two of the three failed to import. I’m glad I tested them because if I had not no one would know the backups were faulty until they went to restore.

I know I have been pretty silent for a while, what can I say it has been busy. I did want to drop this little tip though. I use vim and gnome-terminal a LOT, so I hit ESC quite frequently. Being so close to the F1 key can be hazardous as I tend to mash the ESC key several times. I have no idea where I picked up the habbit of hitting ESC multiple times but its something I have done for a long time and I don’t see me retraining myself any time soon.

At any rate, if I miss the mark and mash F1 I get a slew of gnome-help windows, which is quite annoying to go around closing. Gnome-terminal has the ability to set (or disable) keyboard shortcuts just for gnome-terminal by navigating to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts. You can find the help shortcut pretty easily and clicking on it allows you to remap the keyboard shortcut but what is not so obvious at least to me was how to disable the shortcut. Well a bit of searching finally turned up the solution. Use backspace to remap the key to “Disabled”.

Happy Holiday, hopefully ill be more present in the near future.