Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

We've been having a variety of problems with our LVM system partitioning and anaconda. Mind you, once it is configured and installed, the system runs fine. But during rollout, LVM has been a head breaker... Main issue is: dirty disks. Since we are booting from SAN, we have no control over the LUNs we get. Although we specify zerombr and clearpart --all in anaconda, LVM complains if there is anything on the disk. Especially if there are non-Linux partitions left on the disks. Altiris does it's boot "magic" using a DOS partition to create a known environment from which it launches stuff. This gave the anaconda installer headaches. Our work-around: don't do partitioning from anaconda, but use the pre-install phase (%pre). We force a clear of the local disk (sda) and our boot LUN (sdb) and clear partitions explicitly as well as remove any traces of LVM signatures. We remove all Logical Volumes (LV), Volume Groups (VG) and Physical Volumes (PV). While this is a lo...

During the (scripted) updates of ESX using Altiris, we discovered a ton of timeouts on the ESX hosts. The problem was the NFS server was getting very slow and Altiris scripts were failing due to connection losses and timeouts. Although we updated /etc/init.d/nfs and increased the number of threads/servers from 8 to 16 (default is 8 per core, the VM has 2 cores), this didn't change the behavior we observed on the ESX hosts. Still timeouts... So I dug a little deeper and found NFS for clusters , an excellent tuning/testing document for NFS servers. I tested the server settings using the suggested nfsstat -s and observed next to nothing. All was fine. However, the /proc/net/rpc/nfsd file (using watch -d cat /proc/net/rpc/nfsd ) still showed at least 6 out of 8 processes (aka threads/servers) with 20+ seconds of 100% busy. Clearly something was wrong, but it wasn't the NFS server. More testing showed that manual actions (of what was going on in the scripts) pushed upto 100MB/s t...

I tried to image our Linux servers, taking a "golden image" from one of our bare metal servers. I wanted to have a quick restore available in case I seriously cripple a serever during testing. In earlier runs, the restore worked but the Linux image had become unusable. GRUB wouldn't produce anything beyond its first 4 letters, so I created another server and imaged that. Same thing... Turns out I am using a Dell Poweredge 2950 with a local disk in RAID1 (mirror). I only use the local disk as swap area, creating a big LVM Volume Group (VG) on it called VGinternal. The actual boot disk is a LUN on the SAN. It also uses LVM and I have a VG in the LUN called VGsystem. VGsystem holds the actual system partitions /, /var and /tmp. When Altiris images this, it uses raw mode to capture the LVM partitions. Upon deploying the image containing LVM disk info, you must tell the DS to use the Linux environment . Not the WinPE or DOS modes... Testing it later...

The docs on Red Hat Network Installations can also be applied to Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL)... Easily. Just make sure that you may have to edit the file TRANS.TBL in Enterprise/RPMS . You can also use Altiris to setup a Linux ftp deployment server. Just boot the OEL cd with the prompt: linux askmethod Then, the OEL CD image will ask you if you'd like to use the CD-ROM or opt for an NFS, ftp or http install source. Before you hit the OK key, make sure that the local CD image disk 1 is unmounted . If you don't, the network install will fail and you'll see the file product.img appearing in your logs. Try again, this unmount the boot CD image from which you started and then hit OK to start the network install. This fixed all my problems (after several hours).

I am having a tough time with up2date on Oracle Linux. The backward package manager has survived the Red Hat "fork" or spin-off, if you will. Sad, very sad. I have always hated the cumbersome up2date thingy. It's vague and opaque about how it does things. yum is better, but sadly yum won't work (yet, Juli 2007) with Oracle's update network ULN . So you can't use it. I am trying to find a way to strip a lot of packages off of an installed system in order to clean it up for an upcoming 'golden image' creation with Altiris. Altiris will be used to quickly provision new bare metal machines with a 'golden image' of OEL, containing all packages and configs. The only thing I can find, is system-config-packages in the Red Hat documentation on Removing Packages . Sadly, whenever I try to remove packages, it always whines and complains about missing libs, prompts to insert CDs or whatever. I can never simply wipe a system and remove unwanted packages o...