SYK Blogs

>Ubuntu Kickstart and the corrupt Packages message

Sascha — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:33:00 +0000

If you get a “Debootstrap warning http://server/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages was corrupt” error message during your PXE / Kickstart installation, just create the file manually on your install Server ( #touch path_to/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages ). The installer seems to have a problem unpacking a 0 size file for whatever reason….

>how to restart a HP iLO 2

Sascha — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:27:00 +0000

type: reset map1

enjoy a workig ilo

>It has been a loooooong time

Sascha — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:47:00 +0000

And much happened Got a new job, moved to a new place and bought a Macbook (even if I said I’ll never buy an Apple product again ).

I’ll try to update this blog from time to time with some technical posts.

>Converting VMWare Server to ESX 3.x

Sascha — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:06:00 +0000

>Yesterday, I had to relocate 4 VMWare Server machines to an ESX. A Windows Server VM, 2 Linux installations with LVM and one without LVM. Normally, you just copy the vmdk to the ESX machine, open a console and type

vmkfstools -i {vmserver.vmdk} {vmesx.vmdk}

and it will convert your VMWare Server VM to a format ESX can use. After that, just create a new VM on the ESX Server and add the converted vmdk file as a harddisk. So far so good… the problem is, it won’t work as soon as you use LVM So we have to use some magic in form of dd.

Create a new VM on the ESX Server, the Harddisk must have the same size as the one your VMWare Server VM uses.
Start the ESX VM and boot from a Linux Live-CD, I suggest you use Backtrack.
Now start the VMWare Server VM but instead of booting from the HD, use the Linux Live-CD too.
After both systems have started with their live cds, make sure Backtrack hasn’t mounted your Harddisk. Use [mount] to check this and [unmount] anything that isn’t necessary.
On your target machine (ESX), type the following command:

nc -l -p 55555 | dd of=/dev/sda

And on the source machine (VMWare Server):

dd if=/dev/sda | nc {IP_TARGET_VM_ON_ESX} 55555

Now you have to wait until the system has finished copying, which, depending on your network speed, may take a while.
As soon as dd has finished, you can restart your VM on the ESX Server and boot from HD instead of the live-cd.

If everything went right, you’ll have a old new system running

>it’s a big ad

Sascha — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 22:37:00 +0000

>great commercial for an australian(?) brewery.

>Debian 3.1 and SunFire X4100

Sascha — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 21:42:00 +0000

>There’s an excellent article about installing Debian Linux on a SunFire X4100 and X4200. Debian isn’t a supported OS on this machine thus SUN only delivers the SAS1064 RAID controller drivers for Windows, Red Hat ES, SLES and Solaris 10. The X4100 and X4200 uses Serial Attached SCSI HDDs and the drivers aren’t built in into the Kernel Debian 3.1 uses. You have to install it on a IDE HDD first and copy the whole thing over to the SAS HDD, after you compiled a new kernel which includes the drivers (you can download a 2.6.8 kernel from the website, mentioned above, which already includes the driver).
I gonna build a Kernel for the 64bit version of Debian Etch as soon as I have time

>Saturday was a good day :D

Sascha — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 19:50:00 +0000

>
And I wasn’t there

>/me does not like KDE

Sascha — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:45:00 +0000

>I use Ubuntu Linux as my Desktop OS of choice at work and haven’t tried KDE for years now. After the recent Gnome bashing from Linus Torvalds, I decided to take a look at KDE again (hey, maybe he’s right, you never know!) so I installed the latest Kubuntu version on my personal Notebook and frankly, I (still) didn’t like what I’ve seen. The icons are just too, well, toonish….
Gnome has it’s flaws, but I still think it has the cleaner interface and it does what I want it to do ^^

[Listening to: Wildfire - Sonata Arctica - Reckoning Night (4:36)]

>my new 15" Powerbook

Sascha — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:34:00 +0000

>I got my 15″ PB from Apple two weeks ago, and yes, it has the grey horizontal lines I called AppleCare and the (very friendly) support guy told me, Apple is aware of that, but they don’t classify it as a problem so they won’t replace it!
Dear Apple, I don’t pay CHF 3000.– for a Notebook which has a screen problem! And I don’t think it’s a good excuse just to tell me that it’s not that serious. It is! I don’t see them when I’m programming or do some other text intensive work, true that, but as soon as I watch a movie or just a picture they get really annoying.
Another thing I can’t get used to is the small Enter button… most of the time, I miss him when I type :-/ Oh, and why did Apple place the @ sign at the G button? On a german keyboard, you have to press Alt Gr + Q and on a Swiss German Alt Gr + 2….
Ok, enough Powerbook bashing for today

[Listening to: Dandelion - Audioslave - Out of Exile (4:38)]

>How To configure NIS on a MacOSX Server without a GUI

Sascha — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:14:00 +0000

>Here’s a short description how to get MacOSX and NIS together if you have no GUI (or the GUI doesn’t work as expected…).

1. open /etc/hostconfig
2. edit NISDOMAIN=-NO- to NISDOMAIN=yourdomain.nis
3. mkdir /etc/lookupd
4. echo LookupOrder CacheAgent NIAgent DSAgent NISAgent > global
5. killall -HUP lookupd
6. check your config with lookupd -configuration. The output should be something like:

morpheus:/Users/Shared root# lookupd -configuration
ConfigSource: file://etc/lookupd
LookupOrder: CacheAgent NIAgent DSAgent NISAgent
MaxIdleServers: 4
MaxIdleThreads: 2
MaxThreads: 64
TimeToLive: 43200
Timeout: 30
ValidateCache: YES
ValidationLatency: 15
_config_name: Global Configuration

7. test NIS with ypcat group and id username