Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Exclude Packages From Rug Update

Use additional rug features.

rug lock-add *kernel* prevents any kernel updates.

Monday, July 20, 2009

S.M.A.R.T resources

Smartmontools for SCSI devices

Monitoring Hard Drive Health on Linux with smartmontools (a nice blog entry)

And then there's man page

Init Script Templates

RHEL: /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysvinitfiles

SLES: /etc/init.d/skeleton

Myri10ge under SLES 10

A mysterious kernel update happened on my SLES server, maybe I was not paying enough attention when saying "yes" to "rug update". It would have gone unnoticed for a long time if I were not just reading /var/log/messages for entertainment. I'm really unhappy to have a running kernel quietly overwritten under me, even if it's somewhat my fault. The new kernel broke the 10GigE interface, which real sysadmins helped to fix when I just installed SLES 10. Here are steps to bring things back to normal:

rmmod myri10ge
lsmod | grep myr10ge
download, build and install the latest driver from Myricom
modprobe myri10ge
modinfo myri10ge
ethtool eth2


At least this time I didn't need to have /etc/sysconfig/kernel modified with MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="myri10ge" to make it load automatically on boot.