Living the dream in the Mile High City
Sunday, January 15th, 2012
While I hate to do it, I had to turn on account registration in order to allow comments. The spam I was receiving was out of the park and just taking way to much of my time trying to hunt through all of it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
| Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, January 15th, 2012
I’ve been working with XCP 1.1 for some time now and have been happy with it. Recently I was fighting with a problem that was beating me up pretty good. Today was a break through and I was able to get it working.
XCP doesn’t ship a “transfer” VM with it’s install. I started to figure this out by hunting through the /var/log/xensource.log file and seeing the following errors every time I tried to import an OVF from VMWare into XCP via XenCenter:
Server_helpers.exec exception_handler:
Got exception XENAPI_MISSING_PLUGIN: [ transfer ]
Some digging around in the XENAPI docs for the above error and hunting google lead me to looking at the installed plugins for XCP. On my XCP host(s) I executed the following:
cd /etc/xapi.d/plugins ls | grep transfer
The above grep yields zero results. I was onto the problem now why my OVF import would fail. XCP doesn’t have the required transfer VM as part of it’s installer. Some more (and more and more) digging around started to point me in the direction that XenServer 5.6 fp1 had the transfer vm in it’s installer. I logged into Citrix and pulled down the XenServer ISO. Mounting the ISO and looking around I found a directory called “packages.transfer-vm.” The contents of this directory yield a RPM named xenserver-transfer-vm-5.6.100-39215p.noarch.rpm. COOL! This may be the ticket. So I send the disk up to my XCP ISO SR and install the package via:
rpm -ivh xenserver-transfer-vm-5.6.100-39215p.noarch.rpmPreparing... ########################################### [100%]1:xenserver-transfer-vm ########################################### [100%]Importing XenServer Transfer VM... done.rpm -ivh xenserver-transfer-vm-5.6.100-39215p.noarch.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:xenserver-transfer-vm ########################################### [100%]
Importing XenServer Transfer VM... done.
After installing the transfer-vm RPM I got back into XenCenter and fired up an OVF import and it worked!
cd /etc/xapi.d/plugins ls | grep transfer
The above installs the RPM and now yields “transfer” as the results to grep!
I always like to give credit where credit is due. The following two posts helped get to the final steps of getting imports to work.
http://old-list-archives.xen.org/archives/html/xen-users/2011-11/msg00141.html
http://blogs.citrix.com/2010/12/09/diagnosing-xenserver-appliance-wizard-failures/
Below is the image from XenCenter showing the import and the transfer VM
| Posted in Tech, Virtualization | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
Been toying around with Xen, XCP, and XenServer lately. The current version of XCP is really just XenServer 5.6 so we decided to roll with XCP in our datacenter. I was quite impressed to find out how easy it was to transfer our Xen (OSS) img files to XCP with very little effort and just a little patience.
Here’s what I did
xe vdi-list params=all
xe vdi-import filename="<your_image.img>" uuid="<uuid from step 4>"
I was really impressed that this even worked moving a Windows 2008 VM from an Intel based Xen Hypervisor to an AMD based XCP Hypervisor. I never would have expected it to work with Windows! A pleasant surprise. I love when stuff just works!
| Posted in Tech, Virtualization | No Comments »
Thursday, January 13th, 2011
My wife has decided to fully detail the story of our Dandy Walker experience from start to finish. Typically we keep our personal lives private but in this instance we felt that it was important to get information out there to other mothers and fathers who need a positive experience after learning their unborn has Dandy Walker. I’d invite you to read her blog and our store at http://shayna.chichirico.com
| Posted in Dandy Walker, Personal | No Comments »
Friday, September 24th, 2010
Today I decided to create a new project to show a colleague some simple UI Binder stuff. For the sake of brevity I added a div to my core page that was the same name as the application I created. My application was called MyUiBinderExample and inside my HTML I added this:
<body>
<h1>Test Page</h1>
<div id="myuibinderexample"></div>
</body>
The problem with the above is the div id is the same as my application. According to this post:
"This occurs because the IFRAME which hosts the module has an id which matches the module's name."
Great find. The simple thing is to just change the id of the div and never name it the same as what you name your app!
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=4003
| Posted in Java, Tech | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
Sept 2, 2010 – The Diagnosis
Today was our appointment with the Maternal Specialist. As we headed to the Dr. we were optimistic that she’d do an ultrasound and tell us that the initial findings that we believed was hydrocephalus was or wasn’t true. Worst case scenario, we expected to hear our baby would have to have a shunt surgically placed in her brain and all would be well. After all, according to some blog posts and Doctors, putting in a shunt is a trivial procedure.
The tech came in and took upwards of 70 or 80 ultrasound pics. She told us she was going over her “checklist.” Again, we saw all fingers, legs, toes, and even a healthy beating heart. Baby looked toward us and we got a good glimpse of her face. Everything looked good.
After the tech left we sat and waited for a while. Our Dr. entered the room after looking over the ultrasound images. I knew right away the news was bad. Her face was somber and she quietly sat down to explain what I believe is one of the worst things I’ve heard in my life. Our Dr. told us that the she saw the Dandy Walker complex. I’m guessing if you’re reading our blog you’re familiar with Dandy Walker so I won’t go into the details of the complex. We were obviously shocked and devastated at the same time. Our heads were spinning as we’ve never heard the term Dandy Walker before. Doc continued to explain the full spectrum of issues and the severity of the complex. She also suggested we see some neuro specialists at Children’s Hospital.
In a nutshell, we were told the baby :
Wow, what a lot of info to take in as parents. We left the office with a huge weight on our shoulders and a lot of questions w/o any answers.
Tags: dandy walker, hydrocephalus | Posted in Dandy Walker, Personal | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Introduction
This is the first of a series of blog posts related to a diagnosis our family has been faced with. Not until recently did we realize the severity of the diagnosis and now I’m moving back in time to track and blog about events that we’ve encountered. As time progresses this blog will change from past tense to current as I’ll be blogging in next to real time about the new findings we come across.
The Initial Finding
It was Aug 27, 2010. Just like any parents we were excited to go have our 20 week ultrasound done for Baby III. We already have 2 children and we wanted to be “surprised” on the sex this time. We found out the sex early on our first two children and wanted to wait until the birth date for this one.
Although, at this point in time we didn’t know the sex I’ll refer to baby as “she/her” for now, “she/her” reads and sounds better then “it”. Today was like any normal ultrasound. We got to see baby move her feet and hands. The ultrasound tech showed us her heart and we got to listen to the rapid beat. Everything checked out and looked healthy and well. We took our oldest to go see her new sibling growing in mommy’s belly. After the ultrasound I left and went back to work while my wife & daughter stayed to talk to the Dr.
That night my wife came home and told me the OB Dr. saw some fluid in one of the baby’s brain ventricles and suggested we see a maternal specialist as soon as possible for a second opinion. We immediately Googled the diagnosis and came across hydrocephalus. Based on our reading our thoughts were that worst case baby would need to have a shunt put in after birth to help remove some fluid and that was all.
But we were very wrong….
Tags: baby, dandy walker, fetus, hydrocephalus, ultrasounds | Posted in Dandy Walker, Personal | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
I’m used to doing some things the old fashioned way. Using /etc/init.d/mysql restart. Doing so in Ubuntu gave me this:
Rather than invoking init scripts through /etc/init.d, use the service(8)utility, e.g. service mysql restart
Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to anUpstart job, you may also use the restart(8) utility, e.g. restart mysql
Now, I tried this new way of doing things and it just hung, no response, nothing in the error logs, nothing. A little google search brought me to a forum post (and solution) by Thomas Gutzmann that was very useful and worked beautifully. Below are the steps provided and the associated forum link for reference. Thanks Thomas.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1475798
After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, MySQL wouldn’t start up again. Several solutions had been discussed in this forum, but none of them would fit in my situation. I finally found a way which I want to outline here.
Symptom: “start mysql” or “service mysql start” (as root) hangs.
Reason: In /etc/init/mysql.conf, there is an infinite loop in the post-start script due to an incomplete migration of MySQL.
Fix: Create an additional user in the schema “mysql”.
Steps:
1. Look at /etc/mysql/debian.cnf. Extract the cryptic, bun unencrypted password for user “debian-sys-maint”.
2. Start mysql using “/usr/sbin/mysqld” (as root).
3. Log in as mysql (or “su – mysql”).
4. Connect to mysql as root: “mysql -u root –password=XXXX”.
5. Create the user “debian-sys-maint”, using the password retrieved in step 1: “create user ‘debian-sys-maint’ identified by ‘btIgH81mUXcfZdCQ’;”.
6. Get the pid of mysqld: “ps ax | grep -i mysqld”. Example: “3024 ? Ssl 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysqld”
7. Kill this process: “kill -5 3024″.
8. Start mysql (as root): “start mysql”. Eventually you see an error message that mysql is already running; this can happen if you tried the command before and cancelled it with control-c. In this case, enter “stop mysql” and “start mysql”.
9. Reboot to see if MySQL starts up automatically.
10. If the automatic startup still fails, you may follow the advice from a different thread: change the start condition in /etc/init/mysql.conf to “start on (net-device-up IFACE=ethX)”, where “X” is the interface you have mysql bound to, e.g. ETH1.
11. In my case, I had another very specific problem: I’m running Ubuntu in a VM with several virtual disks which were not mounted yet when the network was up. Quite tricky to figure out. So I modified the start condition to “start on (net-device-up IFACE=eth1 and stopped mountall)”, and now everything is fine.
| Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »