May 4
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
Drupal, Drush, CentOS
| 16 Comments
I am updating the RPM for CentOS 5.6 to the latest stable build as of this writing which is Drush 7.x-4.4 .
Jan 5
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
Drupal, Linux, CentOS
| 8 Comments
While looking at how to install drush for CentOS 5.5, I was amazed that there were no RPMs available. Luckily, someone did all the hard work and created a script to build the rpm here: http://www.workhabit.com/labs/drush-rpm-form
Using their script: http://www.workhabit.com/sites/default/files/rpm_build-drush.txt, which I am reproducing here:
You will need perl and rpmbuild if you wish to build the packages:
Once you've got the right tools, you can build the latest ones from http://drupal.org/project/drush
Now we copy it to the current folder and install it
I built out the latest as of this writing 4.0 rpm, which is attached:
drush-6.x_4.0_rc9-1.noarch.rpm
Jun 23
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
XenServer
| 25 Comments
First we follow instructions on the Dell Wiki to install the OpenManage repository and install the OpenManage Server Administrator.
Optionally we install OpenManage Server Administrator. In order to install it, we need some packages not currently installed. Because of that, we will need to temporarily enable the CentOS base repository.
Now we start up the server administrator:
As you can see, we're missing lockfile. Lets install it. First lets find out what package provides it.
It's in the package procmail. Lets install it.
Now lets start the services again:
Now we follow the Dell IT Assistant User's Guide to set up the SNMP alerts. For this guide, I will assume that you already have a working Dell ITA installation. Following the instructions on page 252 of the PDF:
You should see the following file:
First we follow step one and add a community name. Community name is like a password. Lets use a random password generator to create one:
Change the line that says:
to something like this
At the end of the file add
Now we enable the SNMPd service and start it
Replace 192.168.1.88 with the IP address of your Dell ITA Server and 6bs2m9j-ZwUvdq?x@HyFq2Fapt!CUQX@ with the community string you set up earlier.
Now we will are going to follow Citrix KB Article CTX122337 to add the proper firewall rules.
You should see something like the following:
Add the following right after "-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 5353 -d 224.0.0.251 -j ACCEPT". Unlike the XenServer document, dell ITA requires port 162 to be open in addition to 161. It also needs port 1311 open if you are have install System Administrator.
The whole file should now look like:
Now we refresh the firewall rules:
Now log into Dell ITA server and test the connectivity. Go to Tools->Troubleshooting tool and put in the IP Address (or Host Name) of your Xen Server and click "Get Text Configuration". Now select SNMP Connectivity and click "Configure". Put in "6bs2m9j-ZwUvdq?x@HyFq2Fapt!CUQX@" for the Get Community and keep the Set Community blank and click "OK". Now click "Run Selected Test(s)". You should see something like the following:
Now lets add the IP of this server to the ranges (if it's not already covered by an existing range). Click on "Discovery and Monitoring->Ranges". If the range is not already covered, right click on "Include Ranges" and then select "New Include Range". Put in the IP address of your Xen server and "255.255.255.255" for the subnet mask, if you just want to add just the specific IP of this server. Click "Next", and then again click "Next" and put in "6bs2m9j-ZwUvdq?x@HyFq2Fapt!CUQX@" or the community string you set up earlier under "Get Community". Click "Next" a bunch of times until you get to step 7 and then change the option to "Perform both Discovery and Inventory". Click "Next" and "Finish".
Now right click on the IP that we've just added under the "Include Ranges" and click "Perform Discovery and Inventory Now". Pick the "View Progress" from the dialog box that pops up. Once you see that the current task is 100% complete, click on "View->View Devices" and the server should show up under "Servers".
Jun 10
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
XenServer
| 45 Comments
Since XenServer 5.6 has some sort of bug which won't let it boot when you have linux raid partition, and I haven't found a way around it, I'm going to make this short and sweet. We will just delete the existing LVM SR and recreate it as ext3. This will allow us to do sparse provisioning.
First we will need to delete the current Local Storage, which involves quite a few steps.
As you can see it's the second one on the list (the one that start with /dev/disk/by-id). Now we unplug it and destroy it.
Now lets destroy the storage repository attached to it. First we get a list of the repositories.
We will delete the one called local storage.
At this point it will be forgotten and disappear from XenCenter.
Now, lets delete it from LVM.
Now lets remove it.
Now we remove the physical volume.
Now we change the partition type to Linux.
Now we reboot to make sure that the kernel picks up our changes.
Now we reboot and everything should come up fine.
May 11
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
ColdFusion, CFBuilder
| 35 Comments
When opening an html file with CFBuilder, it was generating a temp file in my workspace - that wasn't going away when you closed the file. Digging into the issue, it turns out that Aptana - which is CFBuilder's HTML editor, does this. To get rid of this behavior, uncheck the following option:
Apr 7
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
Urchin
| 30 Comments
After installing Urchin, I got the following error when trying to update _domaindb.
Now the DNS was configured properly and download.urchin.com was pinging normally.
Turns out that urchin needs the nscd service enabled.
After doing this, the update should work fine.
Mar 29
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
XenServer
| 44 Comments
After I wrote my earlier post about setting up local NFS and enabling sparse provisioning, I was having some performance issues with NFS. It turns out that you can still have sparse provisioning with local storage when it's set up as ext, instead of lvm.
XenServer will create sparse disks for your VMs only on NFS based volumes or locally formatted ext volumes. If you are using ISCSI or lvm based local storage, it will fully allocate each disk. This is less of a problem when you have a thinly provisioned ISCSI volume which is also compressed (such as those provided by Nexenta/OpenSolaris), but when you have a limited amount of local storage, it's unfortunate that XenServer doesn't give you the option to create sparse disks out of the box.
Luckily, we can convert the storage to ext3 and enable thin provisioning.
First we will need to delete the current Local Storage, which involves quite a few steps.
As we can see, it's the last one. Now we unplug it and destroy it.
Now lets destroy the storage repository attached to it. First we get a list of the repositories.
At this point it will be forgotten and disappear from XenCenter.
Now, lets delete it from LVM.
Now lets remove it.
The instructions that follow use a different system, and a different hard disk.
I am using a 2TB disk and will create 2 888GB partitions for local storage and one 200GB for ISOs.
Since XenServer will only allow a single SR on a drive, we'll need to create a fake raid array on the second data partition. To this end we need to change the type of the partition to "Linux raid autodetect", so that it's automounted on boot.
First lets set up our ISO repository.
Now lets set up a folder for it and make sure it gets mounted at boot time.
We need to add our directory to automatically mount at boot time. Lets add this entry
This is how my file looked like at the end.
Now lets try mounting it.
If you get no output, that means it probably worked.
Lets check that it mounted successfully.
Now lets create our directory that we will export.
Lets edit the exports file.
Save the file, and now lets start the nfs and portmap services.
Lets make sure that the portmap and nfs services start at boot.
Lets verify that our directory is being exported.
Lets add an ISO SR as well. Right click on the server in XenCenter, and click "New Storage Repository". Select "NFS ISO" as the type, and enter the following parameters.
Now we will create the actual Storage Repositories to keep our VMs. I have decided to split mine in two as a way to short stroke the disk - I will try to use mostly the first SR, and maybe put in VMs that are not used often into the second SR, as the first SR should have slightly faster speed and better average seek time. You may choose to only have a single SR, so you'll need to modify your fdisk config earlier.
First we create our ext3 filesystems.
Update (6/8/2010): Turns out it's not necessary to make the ext3 partitions yourself, as XenServer does it for you.
Now we will create the storage repositories on these ext partitions. As I mentioned earlier, we need to create a fake raid on top of the second partition, otherwise XenServer won't us use it.
Update (6/10/2010): Looks like XenServer 5.6 has some sort of bug which prevents it from booting with any partitions set to type "fd". If you are using 5.6 - DO NOT CREATE an md device. Instead just partition it so that there is only a single data device.
Now lets set up our Storage Repositories. This will take several minutes (about 15 minutes for me for a 1TB repo), so don't panic if you don't see any progress for a while.
Now we set up a Storage Repository on top of the fake array.
Now we reboot and if everything comes back up, we are done. Now when we create VMs, the Virtual Hard Disks will be allocated sparsely, and VMs created from templates, will all use the same base VHD and only store the changes in their own disk.
Dec 3
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
Windows x64, Windows 2003, ColdFusion, Railo
| 52 Comments
Now that we've got Tomcat, Railo and Apache httpd up and running, lets connect Tomcat and Apache.
For this we will need a mod_jk connector. The binary can be found here.
There is no x64 connector as there is no x64 official release of Apache httpd, so we will be using the x32 connector. In my case I downloaded mod_jk-1.2.28-httpd-2.2.3.so from the win32 folder. Download this file and put it in C:\Apache2\modules. Now rename it to mod_jk.so
Create a file in c:\Apache2\conf\extra called workers.properties and put this into the file
Now lets download Railo and lets set it up. We want to get the custom one, the jars, in my case "railo-3.1.2.001-jars.zip (34 MB)". Create a Railo folder in the Tomcat folder, in my case "C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0".
Now open up the railo zip file and put the jar files from the railo-3.1.2.001-jars into the railo folder we just created.
Now edit the catalina.properties file that was in Tomcat conf folder, in my case "C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0\conf". Find the line that says "common.loader=${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar" and edit it to say "common.loader=${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/railo/*.jar"
Now open tomcat-users.xml and change the encoding to utf-8. At the top where it says "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='cp1252'?>" and change it to "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>" This is needed due to some weird Tomcat bug on windows.
Now lets open web.xml in the Tomcat's conf directory. Just before the "Built In Servlet Mappings" add the following:
Now at the end of the servlet mapping section, add the following
Now open up server.xml and at the end of the file inside the Engine tag, we'll add a new host definition.
Now lets go back to our httpd-vhosts.conf Apache file. We need to add the following (I do this outside of any virtualhost definitions.
We also need to add the following to the VirtualHost definition
The full virtualhost definition should look like
Now if we restart Tomcat and Apache we should be able to hit http://railotest in our browser and see the debugging info. We will also see a WEB-INF folder created inside c:\websites\railotest.
Now lets put in an alias for the railo-context so that we can get to the admin. Inside the virtual host add
Now restart Apache and we should be able to get to the Web Administrator for this host by going to http://railotest/railo-context/admin.cfm
Dec 2
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
Windows x64, Windows 2003, ColdFusion, Tomcat, Railo
| 32 Comments
In the previous two parts we installed Tomcat. Now lets set up Apache httpd server.
I suggest downloading Apache from Apache Lounge. The nice thing about Apache Lounge's builds is that they include mod_rewrite and mod_ssl.
The latest version at the time of this writing is 2.2.14. Download httpd-2.2.14-win32-x86-ssl.zip and open it in your favorite archiver (mine is WinRar).
I recommend taking the Apache2 folder inside the zip file and placing it on c:\. After you've done this you should have a c:\Apache2 folder with many files and subfolders in it.
Open c:\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf file in your favorite text editor. I recommend Textpad.
I usually change a few things from the defaults. Your configuration may differ.
Change
Uncomment the following modules:
Find the line that says
After closing directory tag lets add one allowing access to our web root. I usually set up a folder or a new drive for it. Lets say we set up a webroot of "c:\websites". Create a folder websites on c: and then inside it create another folder called railotest. We will use this to set up our test site.
After the closing tag, add a new one allowing access to our web root.
This will allow Apache to serve from anywhere inside c:\websites. Alternatively, you can set up a new directory entry for every site that you create, but I find that this makes things easier without significantly impacting security.
Find the line that says
and add index.cfm to that list
Uncomment the line that says
Now open up httpd-vhosts.conf file that is located in "C:\Apache2\conf\extra".
There are two sample virtual hosts defined. Lets comment them both out. Alternatively you can just delete them.
Now lets add a new entry for our test server
Now save the files and lets try running apache and see if it worked. Open up command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd.exe)
Now we will need to define a host called railotest using windows hosts file. Open up "C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" file in your favorite text editor.
After a bunch of comments, you should see
Lets add an entry for railotest
Now this computer knows that railotest points to 127.0.0.1.
Lets put a test cfm file in the webroot for railotest. Create a new file called index.cfm and put it in c:\websites\railotest.
Inside the file lets put some basic cf code
If you still have apache running and put in http://railotest in your browser you should see the code being output. It is not being interpreted yet because we have not hooked up Apache httpd to Railo. We will do this in Part IV.
For now lets set up apache to run as a service.
First stop the httpd that you ran earlier by entering ctrl-c and do the following.
The Apache service is now installed. I recommend also adding the "Apache Monitor" app to your startup folder.
Click Start->All Programs and right click on Startup. Now click "Explore All Users". In another explorer window open up C:\Apache2\Bin and right drag ApacheMonitor.exe to the Startup folder. Let go of the right mouse button and select "Create shortcut here".
Double click on the shortcut and the monitor App should appear in your taskbar next to the clock and next to Tomcat's icon.
Double click it to open it and click start. Now you have a working Apache installation that will start as a service.
If you enter http://railotest in your browser, you should see the code we wrote earlier. This will persist across reboots.
In the next part, we'll hook it up to Railo and be able to actually execute this code.
Dec 2
posted by Ruslan Sivak in
Windows x64, ColdFusion, Railo
| 37 Comments
I tried following Sean Corfield's excellent post on how to get Railo running on Tomcat, but ran into a few snags on my x64 windows system.
First download Tomcat 6 from the Apache Foundation. I picked the "Windows Service Installer" of the Core.
Start up the installer and hit next a few times until you get to the "Choose Components" section. Select Full install and then uncheck the Examples item as we won't be needing it.
Pick the installation folder, and the default port, and set a password for the administrator. At the next step it will ask for a path to a J2SE 5.0 JRE installation. Finding this on Sun's site is a bit of a pain, so here is a link to the J2SE 5.0 Update 22, which is the latest as of this writing.
Download it, install it and make a note of what folder it installs in. In my case it was "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_22". This is the path I provided to Tomcat installer.
Finish the tomcat installation and you will see that the service is installed, but will not start. This is because we need the 64bit service wrapper
The only file that should be in there is tomcat6.exe. Download it and replace the one in your tomcat's installation bin folder. In my case that folder is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0\bin".
Now if you go to "http://localhost:8080/", you should see The Tomcat default start page.
In part II, we will cover getting setting up Apache.