www.djtremors.com

The 17th of September 2008 opens a new door for myself as I leave my old work place for a new one after 9 years. It's been a long time coming but I've finally found something interesting and new to change to.

I am now working for a company called Adeptra (www.adeptra.com) who specialises in automated voice calls. Very interesting technology even though alot of us sysadmins have done something like this in our life time already.

The system calls clients to inform of possibly security breach of their credit cards or even just that their payment for their bills are overdue.

I haven't heard the system yet but going from the demo on the site, the systems text to speech seems quite well put together and scripted.

I've worked on text to speech before and even speech recognition (funny episode when I told my machine to start IE and it started FireFox instead, maybe it knew better than to run IE. Kept me laughing for a while..) but the technology is a long way from perfection.

So it looks like alot of new reading material for me for some months to come and a new life to start over again but I will keep up the community mods/tweaks that I make from time to time.

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Datacenter installs

Written by DjTremors
Sunday, 19 April 2009
Went for a little visit to our datacenter at Telstra to install some more blade servers into our chassis and also put in a new 2Mb PRI for servers to make calls. damn Telstra take forever to install a new line and the outsource the wiring to some other guys. here's some shots... Hmmmm Now 15 blades in our cluster... "You said you plugged me in WHERE??"
Last Updated ( Sunday, 19 April 2009 )

Install DTC-Xen with DRBD+LVM backend

Written by DjTremors

Sunday, 24 August 2008

I wanted to build a Xen system with failover so that i can restart the systems with minimal loss of data on my webservers.

Using a SAN or NAS is great but is still a single point of failure unless you pay the big bucks for a complicated network setup, the solution is to have a network RAID 1 using DRBD.

The disk layered structure designed and built is as the following and was done with DRBD ONLY on the Xen shared data volume and not the hosts root file system.

LV(xen000)	LV(xen001)
VG(lvm1)
DRBD0
MD3
SDB	SDC

NOTE: Part of this document is taken from DTC-Xen instructions and should be taken from their site as they update it frequently and I have my copy for my own references only.

> cd /usr/src/

> apt-get install mercurial

> wget http://bits.xensource.com/oss-xen/release/3.2.1/xen-3.2.1.tar.gz
> hg clone http://xenbits.xensource.com/linux-2.6.18-xen.hg
> wget http://dtcsupport.gplhost.com/xen-patches-2008-06-01.tar.gz

> tar xvfz xen-patches-2008-06-01.tar.gz
> tar xvfz xen-3.2.1.tar.gz

> apt-get install make gcc libc6-dev zlib1g-dev python python-dev python-twisted bridge-utils iproute libcurl3 libcurl3-dev bzip2 module-init-tools transfig tgif libncurses5-dev patch libvncserver-dev libsdl-dev libjpeg62-dev bcc bin86 gawk pciutils-dev lvm2 flex tetex-bin gs-common

> cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.18-xen.hg/
> /usr/src/xen-patches/patch-xen-hg

> cd /usr/src/xen-3.2.1
> make world KERNELS="linux-2.6-xen0 linux-2.6-xenU"
# Copy .configs for both (if already preconfigured) and `make oldconfig`, ....
> scp config.build-linux-2.6.18-xen0_x86_64 \
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it :/usr/src/xen-3.2.1/build-linux-2.6.18-xen0_x86_64/.config
> scp config.build-linux-2.6.18-xenU_x86_64 \
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it :/usr/src/xen-3.2.1/build-linux-2.6.18-xenU_x86_64/.config
# otherwise use `make menuconfig` and configure it yourself.

# NOTE: Make sure "Drivers -> Connector - unified userspace <-> kernelspace linker " is enabled for drbd compilin to work.

# Now finally make the kernels.

> make dist KERNELS="linux-2.6-xen0 linux-2.6-xenU"
> make install KERNELS="linux-2.6-xen0 linux-2.6-xenU"

> vi /boot/grub/menu.lst
# Add the following lines above the "## ## End Default Options ##" line in your menu list.
title           Xen 3.0 / XenLinux 2.6
kernel          /boot/xen-3.2.1.gz dom0_mem=393216
module          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-xen0 root=/dev/md0 ro console=tty0 max_cpus=1
# (NOTE: Remove /boot if /boot has its own partition from root and change root=/dev/md0 to what ever root is on )

> update-rc.d xend defaults 20 21
> update-rc.d xendomains defaults 21 20

# Cross fingers and reboot
> reboot

> vi /etc/apt/source.list
# Add the following
deb ftp://ftp.gplhost.com/debian stable main # US main ftp
deb ftp://ftp.gplhost.sg/debian stable main # Singapore mirror (for asian users)
deb ftp://ftp.gplhost.fr/debian stable main # Paris mirror (for european users)

> apt-get update

> wget http://oss.linbit.com/drbd/8.2/drbd-8.2.6.tar.gz
> tar xvfz drbd-8.2.6.tar.gz
> cd drbd-8.2.6
> make install

# Edit /etc/drbd.conf and /etc/init.d/drbd restart
> drbdadm create-md xenlvm1
> drbdadm -- --overwrite-data-of-peer primary all
> drbdadm primary all

> vi /etc/lvm/lvm.conf
# Change the filter line to exclude any MD devices or SCSI disks but allow/read DRBD devices
filter = [ "r|/dev/cdrom|","r|/dev/sda*|", "r:/dev/md*|", "r|/dev/sdb*|", "a|/dev/drbd*|" ]

> /etc/init.d/lvm restart

> pvcreate /dev/drbd0
# Physical volume "/dev/drbd0" successfully created

> vgcreate lvm1 /dev/drbd0
# Volume group "lvm1" successfully created

> vgcreate lvm1 /dev/drbd0
# NOTE: if you get something similar as below, your filter is not correctly setup and my example above isn't enough.
# Found duplicate PV fpCn3ra1k796umKCOIynSB8eTwdBpu4J: using /dev/hda4 not /dev/drbd0
# Found duplicate PV fpCn3ra1k796umKCOIynSB8eTwdBpu4J: using /dev/drbd0 not /dev/hda4
# Found duplicate PV fpCn3ra1k796umKCOIynSB8eTwdBpu4J: using /dev/hda4 not /dev/drbd0
# Found duplicate PV fpCn3ra1k796umKCOIynSB8eTwdBpu4J: using /dev/drbd0 not /dev/hda4
# Volume group "lvm1" successfully created

> apt-get install smartmontools
> vi /etc/smartd.conf
# Remove the auto detect part
/dev/sda -d ata -H -l error -l selftest -f -m This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
/dev/sdb -d ata -H -l error -l selftest -f -m This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

# DONE. your DTC-Xen with DRBD as a network RAID1 is now complete.

If it seems I've missed a step, I probably did as some things I had to go back and fix then continue documentation but could either be out of order or missed it totally so please let me know via the contact us page.

good luck.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 24 August 2008 )

New Job, New Era

Written by DjTremors
Saturday, 23 August 2008
The 17th of September 2008 opens a new door for myself as I leave my old work place for a new one after 9 years. It's been a long time coming but I've finally found something interesting and new to change to. I am now working for a company called Adeptra (www.adeptra.com) who specialises in automated voice calls. Very interesting technology even though alot of us sysadmins have done something like this in our life time already. The system calls clients to inform of possibly security breach of their credit cards or even just that their payment for their bills are overdue. I haven't heard the system yet but going from the demo on the site, the systems text to speech seems quite well put together and scripted. I've worked on text to speech before and even speech recognition (funny episode when I told my machine to start IE and it started FireFox instead, maybe it knew better than to run IE. Kept me laughing for a while..) but the technology is a long way from perfection. So it looks like alot of new reading material for me for some months to come and a new life to start over again but I will keep up the community mods/tweaks that I make from time to time.
Last Updated ( Saturday, 23 August 2008 )

osCommerce - Category Details patch

Written by DjTremors

Saturday, 24 May 2008

Here is a patch which I needed to display more information than just the title "Categories" on the top of the screen. You can place the text on the right side or at the top of the list if you like to giving more information to the customer on where they are. You just need to make mods if you want it at the top as this patch uses the left or right boxes method.

There are 4 parts to the patch :

patching the admin/categories.php file giving the ability to add/edit the content.
adding the new file /includes/boxes/categories_details.php, this is mainly to display on the right column if you want.
patching the includes/column_right.php to included the new categories_details.php file above.
mysql patch which includes the details column needed.

You will need to first modify your MySQL osCommerce table. I used a type BLOB for the details data as this can be any size but is generally slower. Because I know some people/clients use large HTML to display information, this is a good one to use otherwise just use a VARCHAR with a big enough size.

ALTER TABLE `categories_description` ADD `categories_details` BLOB NOT NULL AFTER `categories_details`

Download the patch file to apply the patch at the root of the store. if you are using a /shop or /catalog in your URL then go into that directory and run the patch command with the correct path to the patch.

patch -p0 < osc-rc2.patch

Download : patch file and categories_details.php

have fun patching.

Last Updated ( Saturday, 24 May 2008 )

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