Archive for July 2009
At work we now have a very nice SAN with two machines running VMware vSphere. I did try to add fibre storage to the VMware machines and that didn't work. I did get a lot of errors and unknown problems. Even Google never heard of them. One of those was ~~~~~~~~~~ Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to get disk partition information ~~~~~~~~~~
Googling for this and more generic terms pointed me to a hint to partition the disk on the VMware server itself and then create a VMFS filesystem onto it. Well, that should be easy enough.
Running partedUtil on the device gave me: ~~~~~~~~~~ /dev/disks # partedUtil get naa.60050cc00061071d00000000000000d9 Warning: Device /dev/disks/naa.60050cc00061071d00000000000000d9 has a logical sector size of 4096. Not all parts of GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL.
Segmentation fault ~~~~~~~~~~
That seems realy broke!
I suddenly realized that I set the blocksize at the SAN level to be 4k. I did this because VMware uses very large files, so 4k should be more efficient. But it seems that VMware doesn't support it. Why not?
Removing the logical disk on the SAN side and recreating is with a blocksize of 512 bytes completely solved the problem.
I always love it when an error message points you into the right direction.
Oke, that's it. Ubuntu Jaunty up and running.
After hardly two hours of installing and configuring
it's done. I have Ubuntu up and running. With zsh, Firefox 3.5,
OpenOffice 3.1 (although I never use it), all the VPN connections
I need, TeX Live, Mutt, ext4, XFCE 4.6, Wifi, webcam and all
the things I forgot.
I didn't need Google, hack it or whatever. Just configure it the way
I want. Out of the box, no problems.
Ubuntu rocks!!
Some time ago I blogged about installing OpenSolaris and how impressed
I was with it. Well, as things progress and ideas change, I now completely
have had it with OpenSolaris. A lot of packages installed from the
repositories do not work and it is slooooooowww (hence the nickname
Slowlaris). I still think ZFS rocks, but OpenSolaris isn't there yet.
As a UNIX/Linux consultant I do not mind a little puzzle now and then,
but for my laptop it just has to work. I cannot afford to spend a couple
of hours to find out how to compile a simple package as Mutt, which I
cannot live without. If this was the only thing it would be livable,
but it's for about everything I need. And after a couple of week I still
didn't have my PPTP VPN and OpenVPN up and running. Missing libraries,
not enough development tools, broken dependencies, no proxytunnel, no virtual
tunnel device etc.
Well, I'm fed up. I'm listening to Pavlov's Dog and installing Ubuntu.
