Wiesław Herr's questions

The company I work for is currently investigating the deployment of an centralized automation system (like Salt or Puppet) for our servers (all Ubuntu/FreeBSD). We will probably go along with Salt, but I think it is irrelevant to my question.

My quesiton: Is there a good way for monitoring machines for local changes not included in the automation system?

For example: for a quick fix, someone started a service or modified a configuration file on a given machine. Is there a way to check for such things using Salt/Puppet/whatever? Or do I need to use external programs like AIDE for that?

Is there a way to simulate a malfunctioning device or a faulty cable in a FC SAN network?

edit: I know shutting down a port on a switch is an option, I'd like to simulate high error rates though.

In an ethernet network it would be a simple case of adding a transparent bridge that discards a given percent of the packets, but I have absolutely no idea how to tackle that in an Fibre Channel environment...

I am having problems with stonith SBD in a openais-based cluster.

Some background: The active/passive cluster has two nodes, node1 and node2. They are configured to provide an NFS service to users. To avoid problems with split-brain, they are both configured to use SBD. SBD is using two 1MB disks available to the hosts via an multipath fibre-channel network.

The problems start if something happens with the SAN network. For example, today one of the brocade switches got rebooted and both nodes lost 2 out of 4 paths to each disks, which resulted in both nodes committing suicide and rebooting. This, of course, was highly undesirable because a) there were paths left b) even if the switch would be out for 10-20 seconds a reboot cycle of both nodes would take 5-10 minutes and all NFS-locks would be lost.

I tried increasing the SBD timeout values (to 10sec+ values, dump attached at the end), however a "WARN: Latency: No liveness for 4 s exceeds threshold of 3 s" hints that something isn't working as I would it expect to.

Here is what I would like to know: a) Is SBD working as it should killing nodes when 2 paths are available? b) If not, is the multipath.conf file attached correct? The storage controller we use is an IBM SVC (IBM 2145), should there be any specific configuration for it? (as in multipath.conf.defaults) c) How should I go about increasing the timeouts in SBD

attachements: Multipath.conf and sbd dump (http://hpaste.org/69537)

My problem isn't one you encounter on a daily basis, yet I find interesting enough to share and ask for help. From the beginning: the academic scientific group I am a member of (we are focused on networking-related stuff) got today an ooold SPARC server, which we intend to use as our www/shell account machine (currently we use a pretty poor virtualized solution).

Here's a photo of it: http://i.imgur.com/s8iE9.jpg

The big question is: how do I find out if it's functional and install an OS on it? The thing hasn't got a VGA port which would make things way easier.

We've got a cable that looks like a DB-25 -> COM cable, but it's been reported not to work on a windows laptop with hyper terminal. I've been thinking about monitoring the network ports for any kind of traffic to confirm it's functional and then fiddling with network boot to install any OS on it - is it any good of an idea?

Thanks in advance for any help :)

Time for update #1:

I'd like to thank everyone for their advice! It was all very helpful, however I've run into some problems today. The first problem: http://i.imgur.com/tFgv5.jpg

As you can see, the thing on top was not a Sun Netra, but a StorEdge S1 disk array. The other thing is that I don't have a key, and the manual @lain says that you have to turn it on in the diagnostic mode to get a serial console. My google skills seem to be bad, @voretaq7, because I can't seem to find any information regarding turning on the diagnostic mode :-( Could a locksmith make a key that would fit provided I found a blueprint of the original key?

Here is the other photo: http://i.imgur.com/eFsEf.jpg

That's a big amount of ports there :-o How should I attach the StorEdge to the 4500? I browsed through it's manual and it seems like plugging one end of the SCSI cable to SE's out port and the other to the ,,1'' marked port on the 4500 is a good idea.

As for the DB25->COM cable - it turns out it was custom made, and probably isn't a null-modem one. Where could I find a diagram so I can make one?

Final update:

I'd like to thank everyone for their input :) You helped me a lot to get the machine running and I don't think I would be able to do it without you. http://i.imgur.com/A9obl.jpg - currently running OpenBSD, but I'll tree Free later on :) Cheers!