Chris Weldon’s Blog

Last Friday and this morning I had been trying to deploy the latest changes to my WCF application. As I started doing this the manual way (e.g. copying all DLLs, configs, and service endpoints into a directory to zip and send up to my web server), I took a step back and realized I needed a NAnt build target because I’m going to be doing this over-and-over again. However, after creating the build target and deploying the resulting Zip to my web server, I received a strange error message when trying to invoke my services.
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Software Development, Systems Administration automation, c#, nant

As I was looking for ways to better interact with our NetApp FAS2050, I came across an article detailing the Virtual Storage Console. Being intrigued, I decided to install it on our vCenter Server. The install went fine and the application registered fine per documentation. However, the problem came when entering the credentials under the NetApp tab. I was stuck in an infinite loop that stated SSL is not configured.. No matter what I did (whether that was use the root user, the vcenter user I created, checking or unchecking Use SSL, I got the same error message - SSL is not configured.

This was despite installing the software per the Installing NetApp VSC According to Best Practices. SSHv2 and SSL were enabled when executing secureadmin status. Furthermore, httpd.admin.enable was on using legacy access.

I went Googling for the solution to the problem, and came across an old Nabble list scrape that said to put the IP addresses of all of my ESX hosts in /etc/hosts.equiv and turn on httpd.admin.hostsequiv.enable. Sadly, that didn’t work. Yet, further Googling revealed something painfully obvious. If you’ve ever tried accessing your filer via HTTPS (e.g. https://filer/na_admin/) and you were not listed in the trusted.hosts, then you’re flat out denied access. That’s exactly what was going on here. The VSC requires access to the APIs provided through the same console, and thus requires you to manually list all the IP addresses of the ESX servers in the trusted.hosts file.

In Summary

Make sure all of your ESX hosts (and vCenter server) are listed in the options trusted.hosts.

Systems Administration configure, esx, netapp, ssl, vcenter, vsphere

I am setting up monitoring for my PostgreSQL database server, and ran across a cool way to get around specifying the username/password via the command-line every time the checks are run: pg_service.conf. Unfortunately, there is very little documentation on the config file. As best as I can figure out, if you are connecting to a remote host, your definitions should look as follows:

[service.name.here]
dbname=db.name.here
user=user.name.here
host=host.name.here
password=password.here

On a Gentoo Linux server with PostgreSQL 8.4 installed, this file will need to be placed at /etc/postgresql-8.4/pg_service.conf. Then, to reference it, simply export the PGSERVICE environment variable with the value of the name of the service in brackets.

*nix, Systems Administration postgresql, Systems Administration

If you were a luck systems administrator who followed the instructions for a Tomcat container installation using the EAR-WAR install when setting up Atlassian JIRA, then you may have been privileged to see the following error message in your log files:

2009-12-06 22:56:25,762 main WARN     [core.entity.transaction.JNDIFactory] [ConnectionFactory.getConnection]
Failed to find DataSource named java:comp/env/jdbc/JiraDS in JNDI server with name default.
Trying normal database. javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name jdbc is not bound in this Context

If you’d like the solution on how to get rid of this error, please read on.
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*nix atlassian, jira, Systems Administration, tomcat

I recently upgraded my student worker workstations up to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X.6) to take advantage of the better integration with Active Directory and Exchange. The primary reason: getting network home drives working correctly. We have a set schedule for them, but they may come in early or late depending on their school schedule. This introduces problems if someone is on a workstation that another typically uses. If all of their data were on a network server, there would be no cause for concern because they could use any workstation and still have access to all of their data. This blog represents my trials and failures with getting mobility synchronization to work properly.
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Systems Administration apple, mac os, Networking, snow leopard, synchronization, Systems Administration

After several updates of various systems software packages on my Gentoo Linux servers, I began to notice a problem where I was being denied sudo access. The solution was amazingly simple, once I actually Googled to figure out what was going on.
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*nix gentoo, linux, Systems Administration

I seem to be surrounded by problems these days. Zend has announced that Zend Studio 7 is now in Beta, so I figured I’d go give it a try since I was having so many problems with Eclipse being sluggish and overall a piece of junk. Yes, I know Zend Studio 7 is based on Eclipse, but I can’t help but think that the slowness is a part of the PDT plugin I use for PHP development.

I’m running Gentoo Linux AMD64 on a dual-screen monitor utilizing Xinerama. I ran into a problem when trying to start the installer for Zend Studio.
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*nix gentoo, linux, Systems Administration

I typically only install Mozilla Firefox plugins that I find really useful and help improve my browsing experience. Because I’m a hardcore Linux geek, I also love applications such as vim, which is a text-based, high-performance editor. When I head about Vimperator, I immediately grabbed it and started using it. The plugin was amazing in that it really helped me move away from that dreaded mouse and back to my keyboard, improving my overall efficiency.

Well, Vimperator recently released an upgrade to 2.0. This upgrade really overhauled the performance and indicates that the developers are serious about making sure this plugin is useful for its audience. It did, however, break compatability with one of my other plugins, Tab Mix Plus.

Tab Mixx Plus is a great tool in that it can help manage your tab bar and do cool things such as make all tabs a fixed width and spill tabs over to other rows (so that if you have 40+ tabs open like me, you can still stay somewhat organized). Additionally, if you open new tabs from a link inside an existing tab, the color of the tabs will change so you can see which are related. However, upon reading about Vimperator 2.0 and Tab Mixx Plus, I found that the Vimperator team doesn’t prefer Tab Mixx Plus because of the way it interfaces with Firefox.

Their alternative is Tab Kit. In addition to being more standards compliant in terms of how it interfaces with the tabs in Firefox, it also has more features than Tab Mixx Plus and also is more efficient. This is another plugin that I’ve found helps improve Firefox performance, since I was hell bent on reducing the amount of memory Firefox consumed on my 4GB system.

Hope this helps.

Systems Administration firefox, memory, Systems Administration

When Mozilla Firefox was still in Beta stages (e.g. pre-1.0), I fell in love with it. The browser was light-weight, standards-compliant, and much more secure than Internet Explorer. Ultimately, the thing that won me over was the fact that the browser had multiple tabs to allow me to browse multiple web sites without having to open a dozen different windows, yet still consumed very little memory.

Flash forward to today and we find that Firefox 3 is a bloated monster, especially on anyone’s computer that has more than 2GB of RAM. Why? Well, everything points to the caching that Firefox does behind the scene’s to make it have accellerated performance. However, after a certain point, this performance drops not just the browser, but the entire system. The caching algorithms by default use a percentage of total memory. Thus, the more memory you have, the greater initial percentage taken up by the caching system. So, on a system with 4GB of RAM (such as mine), I easily see Firefox consuming > 1GB of RAM - even with only 12 or so tabs open and things like Flash blocked.

I believe I have found a Firefox plugin that has managed to bring that memory bloating under control. The plugin is called RAMBack. So far on my Linux system, Firefox has gone from consuming ~25% of memory (~1GB) to just 4-6% (roughly between 175MB and 225MB). I’m going to try this plugin out on different platforms and see how it compares, and I encourage anyone else to do the same if they want to see immediate performance.

Systems Administration firefox, gentoo, memory, Systems Administration

So, one of the things I’ve been working on is getting a nice Virtual Mail system setup for Cerberus’ Enterprise Hosting Solution. One of the things I’ve come to be really annoyed with is the lack of being able to apply procmail filtering to my mailbox (getting ~100+ e-mails from systems logs every day really makes my phone’s battery drain trying to download them all). After scrounging around, I managed to find a nice solution for my virtual mail hosting.
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*nix gentoo, linux, mail, maildrop, postfix, Systems Administration