I am migrating the load balancer pools from one F5 load balancer to another. Along with that move is a change to the monitor used to control automated load balancer status – when the app is stopped we have a sequence in the stop function which drains and then offlines the application in the load…
Continue Readingadding HP jetdirect printer to windows XP
About every three to six months IT moves printers, upgrades printer and otherwise makes printer changes necessary. Most of our printers are HP with jetdirect cards (port 9100). There is a printer server. In UNIX this means translating windows shared printers, naming conventions and security features, through a rather cryptic graphic interface. Doable once in…
Continue Readingwindows printers and print jobs refuse to delete
Occasionally I’ll run into a situation where I have to adjust the printers on a laptop. Delete one, add a new and changed one, basically bring the printer configuration up to date with what is currently present on the network. Today I brought in my netbook, and I needed to print a few pages of…
Continue Readingmapping the memory within a java process
At the system level, you can look at not just how much memory a process is using, but where it is using the memory, in detail. Use pmap… First find the process id: [root@jbtest ~]# ps -ef | grep java bbod 11987 11929 0 Feb29 ? 00:04:03 /opt/jdk/bin/java -Dprogram.name=run.sh -server -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dcom.test.cookiedomain=test.com -Dtangosol.mode=prod…
Continue Readingrecreating a xen VM that has died
This is the process I use to re-create a VM that has hung or otherwise become unresponsive. 1. Find which xen server the VM (e.g., test) is on: in the svn checkout for puppet configurations (you have puppetized all of your servers, including xen. right?), go to the location for the configuration of your xen…
Continue ReadingMapping applications to VMs
I use XEN in RedHat linux (CentOS) for our QA environment. Within each XEN server I might have 20 – 30 servers. There are three XEN servers per QA environment, three QA environments. A constant problem is tracking where applications are installed within the VMs. I use puppet throughout the environments, including deployments of applications…
Continue Readingone year ago…
I love you and I miss you Ashley Lyn. Born 2 July 1986, passed away 3 Jan 2011. I think no matter how much time passes I will not believe you are not right there, just out of sight, still part of my world. –doug
Continue Readingresolving yaml error in puppet
The error was: 246 – 9:08 info: Loading fact tmpfact err: Could not retrieve catalog: Could not parse YAML data for node app.net: syntax error on line 64, col 0: `time: 2011-07-31 01:52:21.901522 -04:00′ warning: Not using cache on failed catalog during a puppet run. To resolve, remove the .yaml files in /var/puppet/yaml/node and /var/puppet/yaml/facts…
Continue Readingcombining pdf files into one
I scanned a book I wanted to read on the go (and that was not available as an electronic version). I used vuescan and an Epson V750 Pro scanner. It was tedious. Especially tedious because about halfway through the (windows) system crapped out and vuescan crashed and I lost the pdf creation, thus having to…
Continue Readingfinding the largest files within a directory
I was shown this maybe my second day on my first job with the title “System Admin”. It worked on Solaris 2.4, and has continued to be useful through AIX, HPUNIX, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Crunchbang, other variants of Solaris, BSD, etc. One of the best parts of being a UNIX sysadmin instead of…
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