Cloud Computing

So recently, I decided to give cloud computing a chance to see if I can move at least some of our services to the clouds. I have to admit that I was not really into this cloud computing at the beginning. With our current setup, we really don't need to move our database and web applications to clouds. But then I thought about the benefits of have other services that do not depend on the internal database. Services that can be ran on a small database and aren't too critical for our business. Services like informational web sites and file sharing(for demo or presentations).

To be continuted....

VMware converter p2v from IDE to SCSI

My attempt to convert and old physical machine to an ESX environment was involving more work than I thought. Here is how I got it to boot after a number of kernel panics:

Old physical machine: IDE (hda1, hda2, hda3)

VM (converted): SCSI (sda1, sda2, sda3)

1 - I had to boot into rescue mode and edit /etc/modules.conf and add:  alias  scsi_hostadapter BusLogic

2 - Re-create initrd with: mkinitrd -v -f initrd-xxxx.img  xxxx (you should now what xxx stands for)

3 - Of course, re-install grub with grub-install

4 - Make sure grub.conf match the current hdd config (sda)

5 - Make sure my /etc/fstab converted to sda instead of sda stuff

6 - Modify ESX virtual hard disk to use BusLogic. VMware does not like this but it's the only way that I know the VM will boot.

Enable sendxmpp to alert load average

I thought this might be useful to have in addition to your monitoring system.


sendxmpp: You'll have to learn how to install this yourself :) I only tell you when you got it running. Here are some errors I had when I started:
ERROR: Authorization failed: error - not-authorized
Fix:  

Modifying the Protocol.pm of Net::XMPP (line ~1800). Mine is located at ./site_perl/5.8.8/Net/XMPP/Protocol.pm

Comment these lines out.

if($self->{STREAM}->GetStreamFeature($self->GetStreamID(),"xmpp-sasl"))
{
return $self->AuthSASL(%args);
}

Then use: echo "load is high"|sendxmpp -j 10.10.10.222:5222 -u foobar -p ###### -r home  recipient@domain

Puppet on Centos 5

Didn't think it would be so complicated that I have to blog it to remind myself  :)

Setting up puppet master:

1> wget http://puppetlabs.com/downloads/facter/facter-latest.tgz

2> wget http://puppetlabs.com/downloads/puppet/puppet-2.6.0.tar.gz

tar xzvf facter-latest.tgz  (then: ruby install.rb)

tar xzvf puppet-2.6.0.tar.gz (then: ruby install.rb)

Some spelling errors on code:

Run:  puppetmasterd --genconfig|grep factpath

Should look like this:  factpath = /var/lib/puppet/lib/facter:/var/lib/puppet/facts

Should not look: factpath = /var/lib/puppet/lib/facter/${File::PATH_SEPARATOR}$/var/lib/puppet/facts

If bad factpath, edit default.rb in lib/puppet directory and reinstall. Grep for PATH_SEPARATOR and replace the line with:

:factpath => {:default => "$vardir/lib/facter:$vardir/facts",

Go to the conf dir and copy the server.init to /etc/init.d

Make sure /etc/hosts on both client and server know how to ping each other.

Mount your vmware vmdk file(s).

Why do people make it harder than it should be in their howtos?

Here is how to mount your vmware vmdk files.


1. List your partitions:  
vmware-mount.pl -p Servername.vmdk

2. Mount the partition number you want(2):  
vmware-mount Servername.vmdk 2  /mount/point