Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Open Manage on Debian

Ok so i'm trying to get Open Manage to run on my Dell Ubuntu box... It is based on Debian so I'm working that angle... Dell only gives Open Mange for Red Hat so I had to do a little research... It turns out you can convert Red Hat installs to Debian but there are other problems like file structure that you come across... I found a couple of websites that helped and finally found someone that had done the proper changes to the files and made .deb files (Debian install files)...

The link is: http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/domsch/openmanage-contrib/debian/?fl=d

Now I'm trying to get the package to install.. You have to have the source code for the kernel to start so thats what I'm doing now... Just apt-get install linux-source-#.#.## (Your version number here)...

On to it then...

Edit:
Ok all that stuff didn't work and was harder then it needed to be...
Check out this site:

http://linux.dell.com/debian_9g.shtml

That will get you started but the final easy thing is to edit your apt source list and add

deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

and then apt-get install dellomsa

It will install everything for you...

Check out this link for some more info (You really have to skim a bunch of stuff but it's in there... Look for OMSA and Debian together)

http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/


I still don't know much about the things it installs but it does work so far...

OMREPORT is one command so far...

Oh and to get snmp working with this (which is why I was working on this in the first place) Add this line to /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

smuxpeer .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1

Edit:
If your having problems with SNMP not working make sure that dsm_sa_snmp32d is turned on... (Thanks Cesar Avalos)
/opt/dell/srvadmin/dataeng/bin/dsm_sa_snmp32d


To get it to load automatically type this:
/opt/dell/srvadmin/dataeng/bin/dataeng enablesnmp

And also make sure that your SNMP community strings are setup correctly...

What Kernel am I using?

Linux General:

Run
uname -r

To find out what kernel you are using...

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Windows: The Network folder specified is currently mapped using a different user name and password

Windows 2000, XP, 7, 8 ; Server 2003, 2008, 2012:
Ok so if you have ever had this problem you know how really annoying it can be... You try to map a drive and you get this:

The Network folder specified is currently mapped using a different user name and password.

You check your drives and there are NO Mapped drives to that computer at ALL! I have had this problem many times and one thing I found to fix it was to try and map the drive using the IP-address instead of the computer name... Well what if that fails? Go crazy and try a million things until it works. Thats what I have always been forced to do until today! I finally found a solution (now granted this might not always be the problem, but I have a suspicion that it is the culprit more then not)...

So I was working on this very problem and thought I would try the "net use" command in the command line... And I saw something interesting... There was a resource connected... IPC$ was connected... So I deleted that resource with "net use (resource name) /delete" and that did it! That fixed the problem and I was able to map the drive no problem... I think that IPC$ is used when you browse to the computer with network neighborhood but I'm not sure... I feel so much better now that I know what has been happening all of those frustrating hours I have fought this problem!

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

VM Backup Script

ESX 2 and 3:

VMBK is a great pearl script for backing up VMs... It can do hotbackups and much more...

Check it out: http://www.vmts.net/vmbk.htm

Monday, January 22, 2007

Moving VMs and running from a secodary NAS

VMWARE ESX3.0:

Ok so I have been trying to move VMs from my main NAS to a secondary backup NAS and then trying to start them... When I imported them into my inventory list they kept coming up as unknown and wouldn't allow me to do anything... I first thought that it was a problem with me not doing something correct with ESX, but I found out that it was just a permissions problem where ESX couldn't write to the files... So now I have to work on doing a backup from my main NAS to the secondary NAS that way if the NAS goes down I can pull up the VMs on the secondary NAS and keep on going...

Help I can't write to my NFS share!

Linux in general:

Ok, so I'm not so proud that I can't admit when I do something stupid...

I had created an nfs share and could mount it, but I couldn't write anything to it! Well the first question should have been "do I have rights to write to the file system?" and there would have been my answer... Yes in the end it was just a file system rights issue...

My problem is I'm not really use to Linux and I forget that it has full multi user rights...

So...

Make sure you check the rights of what you are mounting and make sure that "other" (or if you are mounting it with a specific "user") has access... Here is a good web page that helped me understand Linux security rights ( http://www.freeos.com/articles/3127/ )...

Well back to it...

Find Things!

Linux Debian/Ubuntu:
One of the most helpful commands ever is find...

Use it to find files! Use * for a "from here on wild card" or ? for a "single character wild card"

find / (where to start) -name (I'm searching using the name) something*

so if I was looking for the file bob and I wanted to search from root on, I would:

find / -name bob
or if the file might be called bob.2 I would:
find / -name bob*

and so on...

VMWARE ESX 3.0 FireWall

ESX 3.0:

The ESX firewall is great for security but a pain when it comes to troubleshooting! It may not be best practice (None of the stuff I write probably is), but you can change the default incoming and outgoing rule from deny to allow. I use it when I just can't get something in ESX to work remember to turn it back to deny once you have figured out what in the firewall to open...

To open:
esxcfg-firewall --allowOutgoing
esxcfg-firewall --allowIncoming

To close:
esxcfg-firewall --blockIncoming
esxcfg-firewall --blockOutgoing

NFS

Debian/Ubuntu:
Ok nfs is fairly simple yet a bit of a pain... I am serving up NFS using nfs-kernel-server... First of all the NFS service control is kept in the /etc/init.d/ as normal, and it's of course called nfs-kernel-server.

Some simple things to know is that the nfs shares are configured in the /etc/exports file which also contains some access control and more specific access control is kept in the etc/hosts.allow and etc/hosts.deny can have an effect on it too...

One thing to note is that the mountd command is in /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd which is helpful because you can run "rpc.mountd -F" and get a foreground view of whats going on with the mountd service so you can see what messages you get when other boxes try to mount something from your server... Great for troubleshooting...

Simple mount command is "mount -t nfs ipaddress:/share /whereto"
Oh and the "/whereto" has to exist before hand, so create the directory first and then you can mount something to it...

My First Blog (Yeah, thats the title I thought up all by myself!)

If you have randomly stumbled on this blog, I first apologize... This is a blog that I am writing not for the masses but just to keep some record of the things I have learned in Linux. I often spend long periods of time looking for stupid little bits of how-to on Linux just to find out that all I needed was a quick command... The problem comes later when I what to do the same thing and of course I have completely forgotten everything that I learned two days ago... So... This will be random comments on things that I find out, and a notebook of sorts for commands and other things I learn as I use Linux...

Edit: I guess this thing has turned out to be more then Linux... So it's a blog on Random things in IT (Information Technology)... We'll see if it morphs again later...