Sometimes it is necessary to break down the patch status of the Linux landscape. Especially if the administrator's work is subjected to security standards a constant documentation of maintenance tasks is often necessary. Using Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager available patches are described as errata. Those …

Read More

Recently I finished my first ArchLinux installation since 2010. Many things have change since I used the distro the last time and I felt a little bit helpless first. The former ArchLinux installer isn't used anymore - the experienced Linux user has to prepare the hard drives for the installation on his own. The …

Read More

When a upload/download of a particular virtual machine on a VMware vSphere ESXi host is not working a common issue is that required network ports are not opened (yeah, it's "always" a firewall issue!). It makes no difference whether you start the process directly on the ESXi host or on a VMware vCenter …

Read More

Recently I had a issue when trying to use the OSA dispatcher integrated in Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite and SUSE Manager. The software was unable to push actions to registered client systems - it seems that there was a problem with the appropriate service: 1# service jabberd status 2router dead but subsys locked 3sm …

Read More

Recently I stumped upon the following error while creating GPG keys for signing self-created RPM packages : 1can't connect to `/home/su-rpmdev/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent': No such file or directory 2gpg-agent[14392]: command get_passphrase failed: Operation cancelled 3gpg: cancelled by user 4gpg: Key generation …

Read More

After a recent upgrade from VMware vCenter Server 4.1 to VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 and from ESXi 4.1 to 5.5 I was molested by the following message: 1Uplink redundancy lost on DVPorts: "xxxx/xx ..." Physical NIC vmnic1 is down Analysing the switches showed that there was no link flapping. This fault …

Read More

Virtualized Linux guests running on VMware vSphere can only offer the best performance if the helper software VMware Tools in the most recent version. If you have ever used VMware products you know that constant updates guarantee the support of new operating systems and hardware. But this has also the disadvantage that …

Read More

I was dazzled when I recently saw the following warning message ahile using the vSphere Client: 1Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed Okay - let's do this. I started the requrested consolidation by opening the context menu of the affected virtual machine and clicking "Snapshot" and …

Read More

When a logical storage device unit (LUN) of a SAN storage system shall be connected to a Linux server multiple access paths are often used to increase the availability of the storage - especially in case of failures. To implement this technique the multipath daemon (multipathd) is often used under Linux. This software …

Read More

Some system updates (e.g. kernel updates) require the affected Linux system to be rebooted. If the system is managed using Spacewalk, Red Hat Satellite or SUSE Manager this reboot can be scheduled after patching the host very comfortably. However it is possible that after the reboot (watch the output of the uptime …

Read More