Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and HP-UX

HP-UX comes with VxFS (the Veritas File System) and the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Only the on-disk filesystem layout comes from Veritas; HP’s volume management is all their own. There’s nothing wrong with HP’s LVM – I tend to prefer it, but then that’s what I know.

Veritas (now Symantec) offers another, competing product called Veritas Volume Manger (refered to as VxVM). The tools are different, the layout is different, and the capabilities are different. Knowing LVM won’t help you much, though the most basic concepts are the same: collect a series of disks together and then parcel them out as a single large group, with user-defined subdivisions.

Veritas Volume Manager is now a part of the Veritas Storage Foundation.

An nice set of links to documents can be found at Aziz’s Blog. In particular, the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide has been indispensable. Just about everything you can imagine you might need to do is located here.

Cuddletech offers the VxVM Quickstart with some older, but worthwhile documents that describe VxVM and its concepts. Likewise, Unixway offers a wide variety of documents on VxVM over several versions, as well as tutorials and more.

The AdminsChoice also has a good set of tutorials; there is Veritas Volume Manager part 1 and part 2 (focusing on vxassist).

There is a mailing list, but in recent months the activity has been rather sparse.

If you want to take your knowledge all the way, you can become Symantec Certified for the Veritas Storage Foundation (which mainly includes VxFS and VxVM).

Veritas VxVM works very well on HP-UX, and it is possible to create a root disk that utilizes VxVM and VxFS. When using VxVM, LVM is not used (unless a particular disk uses LVM instead of VxVM). The commands are the same across different platforms, and the on-disk layout is the same – so it should be possible to take a set of disks from a Solaris system and put them onto an HP-UX system and still read the data (but watch out for differing byte ordering!).

In the future I hope to discuss more on VxVM; we’ll see.

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Wheel Group on HP-UX 11i

On HP-UX 11i, it appears that setting up the wheel group has been made easier than ever through the use of PAM and the pam_hpsec module.

To enable the wheel group, make sure that the wheel group does, in fact, exist – you’ll probably have to add it. After adding the wheel group, make yourself a member of it (no sense in getting locked out, right?).

Edit the file /etc/default/security and look for the entry:

# SU_ROOT_GROUP=wheel

Uncomment this line (by removing the first two characters) and save:

SU_ROOT_GROUP=wheel

You’re done! Easy, wasn’t it?

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SheevaPlug: a Tiny Computer for $99

This computer introduced by Marvell is very tiny, and very interesting.  Despite the fact that Marvell’s wireless chipset has been closed to open source developers, it appears that the Sheeva Plug computer is being released as an open product: running Linux on an ARM processor, it is now available for $99 as a pre-release developer’s edition. There is already a place for developers to congregate and for documentation and so forth.

LinuxDevices had a delightful article on the technical aspects of the SheevaPlug, and it is very enlightening.

What would I use such a computer for?  I would quite possibly make it into a NAS solution with OpenFiler or FreeNAS; make it serve IP addresses via DHCP; make it into a web cache like squid; or make it serve music with subsonic.

This is one beautiful box.  One drawback I see is that with the way it is configured, there is no way to get it off the wall and out of the way.  Too many boxes plug right into the wall, which means there is no place for another box to plug in.

Another deficiency, which is silently ignored in a lot of applications shown: there is only one network connection. For the system to be a router of any type, it needs to have multiple network connections. If a SheevaPlug is to be a wireless router – or a cellular router – or other similar configurations, it needs to have more than one network connection. With the USB connection available, this is possible – but only if the USB isn’t taken with something else.

One nuisance to note, like others of its ilk: it requires added peripherals, so the “tiny” box could expand to include an external hard drive, and external USB hub with its own AC plug, a bluetooth USB plug, a USB cellular modem, a USB network port, and two network cables. This is the curse of tiny electronics today: one day, all of these extras will be included in a box the same size, and the cabling will be history.

One disadvantage that no one seems to have mentioned yet: the box is not grounded.  That’s right: only two prongs – no grounding plug.  This is totally baffling to me: no ground?

Still, these are really minor disadvantages: I want one – or even two!

It would be interesting to consider the use of these in the enterprise (although they are specifically designed for the home). The biggest places I could see these used in the enterprise would be for testing purposes, and for disaster recovery. If you had one of these ready as a DHCP server and DNS server, one as a NIS server – perhaps a medium-sized enterprise could run off of these until the real servers are built and ready to go.

They could also be used to support people in the field: preconfigured, ready to run: demonstration systems, VPN end points, presentation systems, security test launching points… What else can you think of?

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Webware 100

CNet has released their 2009 list of the 100 Best Web applications in 10 categories, plus the editor’s choice for the best Web applications that weren’t otherwise included.

There are quite a few, including just about every major browser on the planet. There are a few that are not in the lists, but should be. Here are some of my favorites that are and aren’t included:

Zoho

Zoho (a winner in the Productivity section) is unlike any other documentation suite online: they have everything – and the most interesting stuff is free. I keep wanting to use them, and would if my work was web-only. One of the most important reasons I like Thinkfree Office is the seamless integration between the desktop and the web; Evernote (another entry) does this too.

Evernote

Evernote was one of the Editor’s Picks. Evernote is essentially an electronic collection of notes that gets synchronized with their servers and made available to you online. Thus, you can work at your desk with desktop speeds, and let it update to the web so you can look at your notes on the go.

Pidgin

Pidgin (a winner in the Communications category) is the former GAIM instant messaging client, and supports a variety of services, as well as plug-ins. What makes Pidgin so nice is that it runs on everything – it really does. There’s versions for Windows and Linux, a version called Adium for Macintosh, and a text console version called Finch. What’s not to like?

Wikipedia

Wikipedia (one of the winners in Search and Reference) is an online encyclopedia that you can edit. If you find a mistake, don’t just complain: fix it! I edit regularly – any time I find bad English, I correct it – doing my part to make Wikipedia an excellent resource.

Not only that, but there is also the French Wikipedia or the Russian Wikipedia – or numerous others that could also use your help – even an Esperanto Wikipedia!

Thinkfree Office

How did they miss Thinkfree Office? This is one of my favorite applications, and I use it daily. I bought the Macintosh version ages ago (before web synchronization was as nice as it is now).

Not giving Thinkfree Office a place in the awards is a real mistake.

Data.gov

This is brand new – perhaps just too new for the awards – but the United States government put all the public data they had available onto Data.gov and made it easily available to all. Certainly, it is of most interest to United States citizens – but a lot of the data should be interesting to others as well.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, to me, is a social networking web site for adults. Professionalism is paramount, and connections can truly be useful and helpful. You can get back in touch with old colleagues and catch up on what they are doing, and more. Not including LinkedIn was a real surprise for me also.

SpiderOak

SpiderOak provides excellent backup service with multi-platform support: Windows, Linux – its supported. Old versions of files – and deleted files – can be retrieved from the user interface on whatever platform you are using. Very simple, and very easy.

Toodledo

Toodledo is a To Do List manager: simple, clean, and easy to use. It integrates with iGoogle, with Firefox, and others, along with numerous export and import capabilities. If you are willing to keep your To Do list online (sadly, I wasn’t), this is a must – especially for GTD adherents.

ReadItLater

The Read It Later application is no less than brilliant – every time you see a web site you want to read – don’t read it (wasting otherwise productive time): save it and read it later. This is a wonderful idea, and I use it all the time. Now if only I could remember to actually read them….

Wolfram Alpha

WolframAlpha, the new offering from Wolfram is absolute genius. It is like a fact-based search engine – like a cross between Wikipedia, Google, and the CIA World Factbook – but even that doesn’t cover it all. If it has to do with facts or computation, WolframAlpha can handle it.

And that doesn’t even cover Wolfram’s other offerings, like: WolframTones, free computer-generated tones for your mobile phone; Wolfram Demonstrations, explaining and demonstrating mathematical concepts at all skill levels; Wolfram Mathworld, a one-stop resource on mathematics; and even more!

At one time I seriously considered a carreer in mathematics; this site is a mathemetician’s dream come true…

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Working from Home

As a system administrator, you almost certainly will find yourself working from home. Are you productive at home and concentrating on your work? Or is the home life intruding on your work time?

Lifehacker points out a delightful post from Lynn Truong over at Jonathan Fields awake@thewheel blog. In this post, Lynn describes how to separate your work from your home time – even while working from home, and while still making time for the little ones in your life.

Some of the suggestions will be familiar if you’ve considered this at length; in any case, it is a nicely written piece that covers a lot. Go read it!

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Linux Mint 7 Released!

Linux Mint 7 was released yesterday; it is available on CDROM. I’ve installed it onto an hp nc4010 laptop with no problems whatsoever.

So far, Linux Mint is absolutely beautiful. This is a nice contrast to Ubuntu, on which Linux Mint is based – the color scheme of Ubuntu (which seems to be firmly and stubbornly entrenched) is a dark, oppressive, and dirty brown; whereas Linux Mint uses a vibrant and uplifting green. It is a small thing, but a very common (American?) complaint against Ubuntu – and colors do affect mood.

Linux Mint also focused strongly on ease of use – including making sure that everything works out of the box. Listen to anything – view anything – it all works, and straight out of the box.

Ubuntu tries to make it easy to upgrade to view and listen to what you like: Linux Mint makes it unnecessary to upgrade or install anything.

Like Debian and Ubuntu, on which Linux Mint is based, the number of available applications is insane – no other distribution has as many packages available. In particular, Debian has the best support for Lisp I’ve ever seen.

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CommunityOne West: June 1-3 2009

Sun is holding its CommunityOne West conference at the Moscone Center June 1-3 in San Francisco, California.

Sounds like there will be a wide range of Solaris and Open Source topics, including virtualization, system management, cloud development, mobile development, web development, and much more.

The OpenSolaris community will be there in force, so don’t miss it!

This is one of the first conferences since Oracle announced their acquisition of Sun; it would be interesting to be plugged into the rumour mill on the floor.

Did anyone go to CommunityOne East in New York City?

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Using SNMP with Intersystems Caché

Intersystems Caché can be monitored using SNMP, but it must be started. The details of using SNMP in Caché are detailed in the Caché Monitoring Guide in Appendix B.

Firstly, to make life easier, the SNMP MIB for Caché is included in the installation of a Caché instance. Go to the top level directory (which contains the CPF file) and then change to the directory SNMP. This directory contains the SNMP MIB (named ISC-CACHE.mib).

Put this file with the other MIBs that your client uses. This will provide names and details for your SNMP client. If using net-snmp under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, put the MIB file in /usr/share/snmp/mibs/.

To start using SNMP in Caché (assuming your SNMP server supports AgentX and is already running), use this command (in the %SYS namespace):

%SYS> d start^SNMP(705,20)

The first parameter is the standard port for AgentX (705), and the second is a timeout value (default of 20). When you look at the jobs running in %SYS (using THIS^%SS) you will see a job named SNMP.

To stop SNMP, just enter (again, in the %SYS namespace):

%SYS> d stop^SNMP()

(Don’t forget the parenthesis; it won’t work otherwise.) Logs are written to the mgr/SNMP.log file.

Once SNMP is started, you can check Caché data:

snmpwalk -m ALL -v 2c -c public server .1.3.6.1.4.1.16563.1.1

This command is a net-snmp command, and assumes a server running SNMP v2 with a “public” community and Caché SNMP running. If SNMP is fully set up, you will get a variety of details about your Caché instance. The MIB file is well-documented as to what each element is and means.

AgentX and SNMP on HP-UX

A recent (in a relative fashion) protocol for support SNMP agents is called AgentX. This protocol is an attempt to standardize the protocol between a “master” SNMP agent (or server daemon) and the client agents. This style of SNMP configuration then makes the SNMP support extensible, providing for the ability to add and remove whole SNMP subtrees as desired. Intersystems Caché is one product that provides an agent that uses that AgentX protocol.

Unfortunately, HP-UX does not support AgentX, but rather a commercial protocol called EMANATE.

To be able to use subagents that support AgentX, the native SNMP server must be disabled, and one that supports AgentX installed to take its place. Thankfully, this is not difficult.

First, disabling SNMP requires modifying a number of files in /etc/rc.config.d:

• SnmpHpunix
• SnmpMaster
• SnmpMib2
• SnmpNaa
• SnmpTrpDst
• cmsnmpagt
• emsagtconf

Change the entry that enables the affiliated agent or server: typically, this is by setting an entry such as SNMP_MASTER_START to 0.

This completely disables all agents as well as the master SNMP daemon. Don’t forget to stop all of these using their init scripts to stop them:

cd /sbin/init.d
./SnmpHpunix stop
./SnmpIpv6 stop
./SnmpMib2 stop
./SnmpTrpDst stop
./SnmpNaa stop
./SnmpMaster stop
./cmsnmpagt stop
./emsa stop

After this, get HP’s Internet Express and install Net-SNMP, which supports AgentX. Strangely enough, the Net-SNMP documentation states that Tru64 and OpenVMS servers come with AgentX support built-in.

Once installed, use the utility snmpconf to configure the agent – it creates the appropriate configuration file in the directory you are in. You’ll want to set these configuration parameters, either through the use of snmpconf or directly:

master yes
agentuser root
agentgroup sys
agentaddress 161
agentXSocket tcp:localhost:705

Better yet, create a special user and group for SNMP – installation of Net-SNMP does not set this up for you.

Once the snmpd.conf is configured, then run snmpd. Make sure you are running the right snmpd; reread the path if you need to:

# type snmpd
snmpd is /opt/iexpress/net-snmpd/sbin/snmpd
# snmpd -Lsdaemon -c /opt/iexpress/net-snmp/etc/snmpd.conf

You’ll have to create an initialization script in /sbin/init.d; we’ve discussed how to do this before.

You should not expect the rich set of HP-UX-specific entries that are provided with the standard installation, but in trade you get extensibility – which allows you to run subagents such as that provided with Intersystems Caché.

Boost Your Career: Certifications

Certifications are a valuable item in this economy, and are useful to bolster and reinforce a background in supporting your chosen environment.

There are a number of certifications, both in type and in provider:

• HP Certifications (including HP-UX)
• Red Hat Certifications (including RHCT, RHCE, RHCA, and others)
• Solaris Certifications (including SCSA and others)

Of course, there are many others. One very good source for quite a few certifications in a broad range of areas is Brainbench. The Brainbench certifications are excellent, but I wouldn’t let that stop you from going for the software developer’s certifications either – get both.

Once you have earned your certifications, you can put them on your wall or in your résumé – or both. The certifications will help, though they are only one of the items that interviewers will look for: most important is hands-on day-to-day experience. However, certifications help give you an advantage over the competition. Go for it!