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October 20, 2015Pete Lombardo

Xenserver Heterogeneous CPUs in Pool

I have been working to get some Xenservers setup in the same pool that have different CPU versions. With different features, I get the error message that the CPUs are not homogeneous. To help rectify this, I created the following script and then followed the instructions below. /root/get-cpu-features On server 1 The output will look something like this: Usage: ./get-cpu-features [features-key1] [features-key2] On server 2, run the script again, but this time specify the key from server 1 as an argument to the script. Now the output will look like this: The compatible feature key for all nodes is the one labeled merged, in this case, 0000e3bd-bfebfbff-00000001-20100800. On each of the two nodes, we now need to set the feature key. We can do this by running this command on each node: Now reboot the nodes and then join them to the same pool. Note: If you have more than two nodes, then you will need to add a second argument when running the script on nodes...

July 18, 2014Pete Lombardo

A Poor Man’s Solution for Automatic ISP Failover

This file should be installed on your router. In my case, I was testing with a VyOS router so I was able to easily extend it with this script. Just paste this into a new file and chmod +x to make it executable. Update the IP information below – most importantly, your LAN information. Then add it to a cron job and have it run once per minute. That’s it!

July 10, 2014Pete Lombardo

Why the public cloud is the fast food of the IT industry.

The challenge for any IT manager is how to meet business requirements with technology. More often than not, those requirements dictate rapid deployment. The cloud excels at this, since the infrastructure is already available and waiting to be used. Rapid deployment, just as fast-food, does not guarantee quality, however. In fact, the performance and reliability of public cloud services is currently variable and largely unpredictable. Despite the high availability of fast food restaurants, people do not eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner. They know that the quality of the food is sub-par, and it is intuitive to recognize that its usefulness runs out if speed and short-term cost are not the two foremost drivers. The same holds true with the public cloud services. They excel at speed-to-deploy and cost-of-entry for a solution. And – just as with fast food, public cloud services are almost irresistibly appealing on the surface. But after considering quality and long-term...

June 11, 2014Pete Lombardo

Cloudsourcing – What is this “IT revolution” all about?

First there were servers. Each server had a single purpose. In some cases, 90% of the time, they ran idle — a big waste of resources (processor, disk, memory, etc.) Then there were server farms, which were groups of servers distributing loads for single applications. Distributing loads to multiple servers allowed for higher loads to be serviced, which allowed for tremendous scalability. Then there was SAN storage, the aggregation of disks to provide performance, redundancy, and large storage volumes. A company could invest in a single large-capacity, highly-available, high-performance storage device that multiple servers could connect to and leverage. No more wasted disk space. Then there was virtualization, the concept of running more than one server on the same piece of hardware. No more wasted memory. No more wasted processors. No more wasted disk space. But the management of isolated virtual servers became difficult. Then there was infrastructure management. The idea...

June 8, 2014Pete Lombardo

What constitutes a great leader?

A leader is a driver, meaning that leaders must be good decision makers and must be capable of choosing a destination. When judged in hindsight, the destination must be meaningful and productive. Just like a driver of a car, a great driver will act upon the passenger-spoken words, “We need to take the next exit.” A bad driver will disregard all advice. As drivers, we may know where we want to go, but it is our passengers who have the best view of the road. It is our passengers who are in the best position to navigate. Good drivers take us to our destination. Great drivers rely on great navigators to help them get us to our destination in the best possible way. Heeding the advice of “passengers” is vitally important to the effectiveness of a great leader. Let’s consider the fail-forward (trust) and fail-stop (mistrust) approach to governance. The term “fail” refers to the failure of a tactical decision/action to comply with a strategic goal. The term “forward” means that the...

May 29, 2014Pete Lombardo

The Veterans Affairs Scandal

Everyone is furious about the way that our war veterans have been treated in the past, and present. The long waiting lists for medical procedures and the mistreatment of our veterans has caused quite an outrage – and rightfully so. Now there are stories in the news about heads rolling – officials in charge being dismissed from their posts. The problem that I have with this sort of thing is that I believe that it’s purely a public relations move. It is unreasonable to believe that the head of the VA in a state or town was making policy decisions for the whole country. More than likely, it was budget cuts that were passed in Washington D.C. that put the VA officials between a rock and a hard place. Of course, it’s entirely possible that these guys had the budget and just decided to mistreat veterans. But how many people would do that? What would their motivation be? It is far more reasonable to believe that they got a bad deck of cards and they were trying to make do with it. Now the...

May 27, 2014Pete Lombardo

Abstract Technology Concepts – Devops

When we think about technology, we often think of it as abstract concepts. For example, we think of a “telephone”, not a network of transducers wired through hubs and switches that create temporary channels that bridge calls together. It is natural for us to add layers of abstraction that help us to understand the purpose or use of something. In programming languages, we saw the rise of object oriented programming – the ability to define an object and then manipulate its attributes. The Windows operating system is a layer of abstraction that you interact with. These days, you can accomplish, with scripts (PowerShell), most of what you can do with a mouse. That brings me to the latest layer of abstraction – devops. It’s a concept that says that developers and operations join forces and share methodologies for the betterment of the company that they represent. For example: With a traditional sysadmin mindset, a systems administrator might click a button every day to...

April 14, 2014Pete Lombardo

Improve Zenoss Performance – Infrastructure Load Time

Q: Does the infrastructure page take a really long time to load for you? A: Take a look at your open event log entries. Every open event gets indexed when the page loads. If you want the page to load faster, simply close as many events as is prudent for your historical needs. If that fails to help, follow this guide to tune the caching and multi-threading options: http://wiki.zenoss.org/Zenoss\_tuning

March 31, 2014Pete Lombardo

Malaysian Flight 370 Search

Why are we not using drones/UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to scour the ocean for Flight 370? With all of the news about how UAVs can stay aloft for lengthy periods of time, why have we heard nothing about them being deployed and used for the search of flight 370?

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