Archive
Posts from 2011
Installing gluster on a CentOS machine via rpmbuild
I talked previously about my experience getting gluster up and running on Fedora and CentOS Linux servers. The installation process as it currently stands is different between Fedora and CentOS servers. The Fedora package maintainers have build RPMs for gluster, so you can use yum to install everything needed to run gluster: Gluster packages aren't currently available for CentOS 6 (at least they aren't in extras or centosplus as of this morning), so you are required to build from source if you want to use CentOS as your base operating system. The build process is pretty straight forward, and I'll share my notes and gotchas with you…
$ read more →Wiping disk drive data with Darek's boot and nuke
Over the years I have accumulated dozens of disk drives. As I upgrade drives and donate my older hardware to friends and charities, I like to make sure the data on those drives is wiped. I've been using Darik's boot and nuke (DBAN) to wipe my drives for the past year or two, and the entire process couldn't be easier. DBAN is a bootable Linux CDROM image that wipes a hard drive using one of several strong data destruction algorithms (Gutmann wipe, DoD short, Dod long, etc.)…
$ read more →Working around problems with a CentOS 6 kickstart upgrade
Each time I go to deploy a new release of Centos or Fedora I encounter a new "feature" or "change" that breaks configurations that previously worked. I recently encountered several problems upgrading several hosts to FEDORA 16, and this afternooon I encountered another issue while attempting to upgrade several Centos 5 servers to Centos 6. The issue with the CentOS upgrade revolves around changes to the software installation groups. Groups that worked perfectly fine with CentOS 5 no longer work with CentOS 6…
$ read more →Adding a new CentOS or Fedora CD or DVD image to a kickstart server
I've talked in the past about Yum repositories, and how you can create them. If you are using kickstart and want to import the contents of a CD for use by the installer, there are numerous ways you can tackle this issue. One of the easiest methods is to loopback mount the CDs or DVDs and copy them to your kickstart directory hierarchy: You will need to make sure to copy the Packages, repodata and images directories. After the copy completes you can point your kickstart.cfg file at the top level directory of the release you want to install: Posting here so I have this procedure for future reference.
$ read more →Upgrading from vSphere 4.0 to vSphere 4.1 update 2
This weekend I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my vSphere 4.0 servers to vSphere 4.1 update 2. The upgrades went amazingly well, and I was amazed at just how easy it is to upgrade a cluster with VMWare update manager. The upgrade process took about 30-minutes per host, and I used the following two resources to guide me through the upgrade: VMGuru's vSphere 4.0 upgrade procedure. VMWare KB article 1022140 which includes a video of the upgrade…
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