February 17th, 2010 by Stargazer
CentOS strikes again
If things are running smoothly, things might get really nasty. Today’s special: KVM on CentOS 5.4
My plan was giving KVM a shot for virtualizing a couple of machines. So I inserted the CentOS CD and did a network install, added KVM and Virt-Manager.
Tags: centos, linux, virtualisation
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Extending CentOS
February 12th, 2010 by Stargazer
If you are a company, Gentoo Linux might not always be the best choice for you – especially as it’s not supported by enterprise products like the kerio mailserver, various backup systems or some database engines.
So I had to find a suitable distro and found that RedHat based thing called CentOS. In general, it’s said that it’s a quite secure distribution and it should do the trick – but the packages it offers could be considered as poor.
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PHP on CentOS 5.4
February 3rd, 2010 by Stargazer
Dealing with CentOS isn’t always fun, but at least it is a distribution suitable for professional work. But all that doesn’t help if it comes to problems.
The problem today is called PHP. CentOS ships with PHP 5.1.6 which is slightly old. I don’t see that as a huge problem, but some applications like dotproject do as it uses some mbstring functions that aren’t available in 5.1.
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Doing iSCSI targets on ZFS
January 7th, 2010 by Stargazer
As ZFS did quite well here – even after messing around with disks, I decided to give it another try. This time I am out to use its features on other systems. But to do so, I need to share it. As I am running virtual machines, it would be nice to have iSCSI shares to (ab)use. So let’s do it by starting the service:
# svcadm enable iscsitgt
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Disk failure and ZFS
January 4th, 2010 by Stargazer
ZFS is a beautiful filesystem – even in case of hardware failures, as it was build to deal with them. Allow me to demonstrate a defective disk on a Raid-Z1 pool. As long as only one disk breaks down, it is still functional – even while rebuilding.
To do the recovery, we need to locate the bad disk, which happens by typing ‘zpool status -x’:
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My first glance at OpenSolaris
December 23rd, 2009 by Stargazer
Today I was having my first glance at OpenSolaris. Getting the ISO burned, booting the LiveCD and all this didn’t take long and the system was booted, welcoming me with a Gnome Desktop environment – which I personally dislike for several reasons – but at least it is something to work with. And don’t forget: Solaris is the system offering ZFS underneath, which should be worth a look. So I clicked the install icon on the desktop and waited for the process to complete.
Tags: solaris
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 10 Comments »
Certificates and the mobile phone
December 18th, 2009 by Stargazer
It has been quite a while since I started to get SSL Certificates working on my server machines – so it was time to get that stuff running on my mobile phone too. You might wonder now why the phone would need such a certificate, but in this case it’s just some root certificates to enable it to connect to my mailserver.
Tags: cacert, mobile phone, security
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