James's questions

We have a Bobje installation and use crystal reports infoview to share some of our reports with our customers over the internet. Most reports will work ok however any reports that take 'longer' seem to fail. Longer being about 3-4 mins. If we run the same reports on the local network they work fine. In fact we have some reports that take 10-15 mins that return fine locally but not over the internet.

We have been in contact with SAP about this and have not had any satisfactory solution (so far!!). Mostly getting browser and java version. We have also increased as many timeouts as we can but this has had no effect.

We are now at a loss about what to do next. One suggestion is that it may be 'network' related but I am unsure as to where to start on that one. another idea is that it may be an OS socket timeout ??

Additional Information:

• Server RH 4
• Bobje version XI 3.1 fix pack 1.5
• Oracle 10g RAC

Any help would be much appreciated.

James

We have a set of servers that are isolated from our main network, they are an island from our corporate network. At the moment we have to get relay rules added each time we want to send mails from one of these servers to the outside world. So our plan was to build a dedicated server on this Island and have all mail directed to it, which would relay onto to Corp.

A second advantage of this was to allow us to build plugins to analyse and parse the mails. All of the mails are errors and informational messages about our apps.

My first thoughts on this was to use Qmail as I built a system like this years ago (10 years) when I was in a different company. My colleague also had experience with Qmail so that seemed the obvious choice. The problem is we have both been reading about Qmail and there seems to have been no work done on this in years. This is seems quite strange.

So the questions we have are;

• Is Qmail still support and has it any sort of active community
• Leaving sendmail aside (we don't consider this a choice) is there a Qmail like MTA
• Would I better of using something else e.g. postfix.
• Where is the best place to find out what is going on in the MTA world (vague I know)

Or am I making too much of this and should go ahead and install something even tough it seems to be over 10 years old with very little change.

I hope this is not too long winded but any help would be much appreciated.

J

We have a database server running oracle rac. We were recently running out of space on the main LUN that it is attached to. I created a new 100GB LUN and concatenated this onto the existing LUN creating a new MetaLUN. After some messing I managed to get linux to recognise the new space. I then created a new partition in on the pseudo device, to use the new space. Previously when I have done this on other system the next step is to create an ASM disk on the new partition and add this disk to the oracle disk group. This however fails. I am aware of various issues with ASM and powerpath, but I don't think this is the issue here. As on while investigating the issue I discovered that one of the underlying logical device is not reflecting the size change. See below;

Powermt displays all of the underlying logical units

[root@XXXXX~]# powermt display dev=emcpowerd  
Pseudo name=emcpowerd  
CLARiiON ID=CKM00091500009 [VFRAC2]  
Logical device ID=6006016030312200787502866C65DE11 [LUN 30]  
state=alive; policy=CLAROpt; priority=0; queued-IOs=0  

Owner: default=SP A, current=SP A       Array failover mode: 1  
`==============================================================================`
---------------- Host ---------------   - Stor -   -- I/O Path -  -- Stats ---  
`###  HW Path                I/O Paths    Interf.   Mode    State  Q-IOs Errors`
`==============================================================================`
   3 qla2xxx                   sde       SP A0     active  alive      0      0  
   3 qla2xxx                   sdj       SP B0     active  alive      0      0  
   4 qla2xxx                   sdo       SP A1     active  alive      0      0  
   4 qla2xxx                   sdt       SP B1     active  alive      0      0  

**Fdisk on the pseudo device shows correct space.**

[root@XXXXX ~]# fdisk -l /dev/emcpowerd  

Disk /dev/emcpowerd: 429.4 GB, 429496729600 bytes  
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 52216 cylinders  
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes  

         Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System  
/dev/emcpowerd1               1       39162   314568733+  83  Linux  
/dev/emcpowerd2           39163       52216   104856255   83  Linux  

**fdisk on one of the logical units is wrong**

[root@XXXXX~]# fdisk -l /dev/sde  

Disk /dev/sde: 322.1 GB, 322122547200 bytes    
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 39162 cylinders  
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes  

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System  
/dev/sde1               1       39162   314568733+  83  Linux  
/dev/sde2           39163       52216   104856255   83  Linux  

**fdisk on the rest of the units is fine**

[root@XXXXX ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sdj  
Disk /dev/sdj: 429.4 GB, 429496729600 bytes  
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 52216 cylinders  
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes  
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System  
/dev/sdj1               1       39162   314568733+  83  Linux  
/dev/sdj2           39163       52216   104856255   83  Linux  

Also when I created the the partition linux did not create the any entries in the /dev directory for the second partition so I created these manually

[root@XXXXX dev]# mknod sde2 b 8 66
[root@XXXXX dev]# ls -al sd[ejot]?  
brw-r----- 1 root disk  8,  65 Dec 29 14:20 sde1  
brw-r--r-- 1 root disk  8,  66 Apr  8 20:31 sde2  
brw-r----- 1 root disk  8, 145 Dec 29 14:19 sdj1  
brw-r--r-- 1 root disk  8, 146 Apr  8 20:33 sdj2  
brw-r----- 1 root disk  8, 225 Apr  6 23:12 sdo1  
brw-r--r-- 1 root disk  8, 226 Apr  8 20:33 sdo2  
brw-r----- 1 root disk 65,  49 Dec 29 14:19 sdt1  
brw-r--r-- 1 root disk 65,  50 Apr  8 20:33 sdt2  

This is a production server that we cannot easily reboot.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

J

Is it possible to upgrade a 32bit instance of RedHat to a 64-bit instance.

J

I have two ESX 3.5 servers in a DMZ. I can access these servers on any port from my LAN via a VPN. Servers in the DMZ are unable to initiate connections back to the LAN, for obvious reasons. I have a vCenter server on my LAN and can initially connect to the ESX servers fine. However, the ESX servers then try to send a heartbeat back to the vCenter server on UDP/902 - obviously this will not get back to the vCenter server, which then marks the ESX servers as not responding and disconnects.

There are two broad solutions I can think of:

1) Try to tell vCenter to ignore not getting heartbeats. The best I can do here is delay the disconnect by 3 mins.

2) Try some clever network solution. However, again I am at loss.

Note: The vCenter server is on a LAN, and cannot be given a public IP, so firewall rules back will not work. Also, I cannot setup a VPN from the DMZ to the LAN.

**I am adding the following, explanation that I added to the comments

OK, maybe this is the bit that I not explaining well. The DMZ is on a remote site, an entirely independent network (network 1). The vCenter server is on our office LAN (network 2). Network 2 can connect to any machine on any port on network 1. But network 1 is not allowed to initiate a connection to network 2. Any traffic destined to network 2 from network 1 gets dropped by the firewall as it is traffic to a non-routable address. The only solution I can think of is setting up a VPN from network 1 to network 2, but this is not acceptable.

So any clever folk out there any ideas?

J

I have a network of 20 linux servers. My plan was to have one act like a PDC and allow single sign-on for the rest of the servers. The reason I say PDC rather than an ADS system is I want to avaid running LDAP. I will also have things like shares between the machines etc. I have done something like this before however there was a windows ADS controller on the network all ready.

Also I am currently not in front of the machines so I can't give you the full contents of my smb.conf files (only what I remember).

So the story so far.

The PDC

[Global]
    workgroup = MYDOM
    Domain master = yes
    local master = yes
    Domain logons = yes
    security = user 
    .............

The clients

[Global]
    workgroup = MYDOM
    Domain master =no
    local master = no
    security = user 

Now the first thing is thet testparam for the client tells me it is a stand alone machine. and most of the 'net' commands refuse to work as they say it is a standalone machine.

if I change security to DOMAIN (on the client) then it claims to be a domain member. If I do it on the server it starts claiming it is a BDC. and then any normal commands complain that there is no PDC... Also from the docs I have read you must have security=user for a Samba PDC and Samba Client pair...

The next part of the equation is winbind. As I stated earlier I have managed to get that working with a Real ADS controller. However if use winbind with the configuration I have discribed above if flatly refuses to accept that there is a PDC or Domain present.

So now I am very confused and fustrated.

So the short version of the question is. Can I have a Samba only network, with a Samba PDC, Samba clients, security=user and have winbind do the single sign on for the clients using the PDC. (and without using LDAP)

Hope this is not too long winded.

James