I’ve wasted my 82 minutes watching Half Baked today. I had a high hope on this movie, thinking it would be something like Clerks II or Pineapple Express. Yea it’s a stoner movie but crap, Jim Breuer looked like a tard the whole time. I had a laugh on a couple of scene though.. hardly remember which scene anyway. Thought of stopping halfway but I was optimist that probably there would be some funny scene in the end but I was wrong.
Hahaha Elias is so funny I love em geeks.
If only I have the ability to transfer my thoughts to my blog, the number of posts would’ve prolly been doubled. No. Tripled. Probably more. The problem with me is I waited for too long. Way too long that all my ‘bright, lively’ ideas and thoughts in my head weaken out. And when the excitement is dead, there will be no more joy in writing. I guess that’s why twitter is so popular these days. Quick update in a short period of time. But that is something that am not interested in anyway.
Some of the things that I have thought of writing yet I didn’t:
Horrible drivers.
I curse a lot when driving. It doesn’t really matter whether am driving to work, or driving back home from work, nasty drivers can really get on my wick! Everytime I start cursing, I’ll think of blogging it, and expose their license plate number. I even thought of creating a website just for me to update my daily encounters with all these cocky drivers. But looking at the rate of my posting on my own personal blog.. nah.. forget about it.
Recipes, recipes and more recipes!!!
I’ve been baking a lot lately, mostly breads and cakes. Breads are awesome, I almost finished up a can of yeast in a matter of weeks! It all started off when I embarked myself in a quest of finding the best donut, or doughnut recipe. I made donuts on 3 weekends back to back, and my third attempt was so good that I actually wanted to mail that guy to thank him for sharing his recipe. But oh well.. I haven’t done that either.
Here’s the recipe courtesy of Secret Donut Recipe:
http://www.secretdonutrecipe.com/recipe1.html
I have saved several pictures of my bread baking journey and yes I will definitely write about them. What fantastic about bread is that even if it turns out slightly off, most of the time it is still edible. Argh I’m hungry right now and I want cupcakes..
Update: At the time of posting, I’ve already baked about 50 cupcakes 
Teeth.
5 months with no updates 
. Need to say more?
Geeks who dick.
Okay I don’t know what’s that supposed to mean, but am referring to geek who is also a dickhead. Most geeks will feel insulted if they were asked whether they know how to do <insert-technical-task-here>. But some of them are seriously emotional emos that I feel like bitchslapping them left and right. Now I’m getting all emotional hmmpphhhh!!
Example:
me: Have you installed that already?
dick: I’ve installed that many times already..
You see, my question is simple, and the answer should be either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. That kind of response is another way of saying.. “So you think I know jackshit???”
Should’ve just responded back, “Just checking, you noob”.
My new keyboard.
I’ve been using my trusty Samsung keyboard for years that some of the letters are just not visible anymore. I don’t really have any problem with that since I type with my eyes focus on the monitor, and not the keyboard. Thanks for my years of experience in IRC, ICQ and YM. I decided to switch to my another keyboard, A4tech after I noticed an annoying stickyness everytime I hit the ‘A’ key. But the stupid thing with the A4tech keyboard is its layout. The pipe ‘|’ key which is normally located on the top row, below the Fn keys row, is instead placed right next to the right ‘Shift’ key, below the ‘Enter’ key. I use ‘|’ a lot so this is actually a major turn off for me.
If you’re a nix user, you’d understand how important this pipe key is. Why did I buy the keyboard in the first place, you ask? Because 5 years ago I was using Windows 
You may say it is just a keyboard, but am hell fussy with it. The feel, the sound, the surface of the keys, are all important to me. I will normally close my eyes, lean a bit close towards the keyboard, and start typing. I started to feel embarrassed after doing it so many times at every single store. I was hooked with Razer Lycosa gaming keyboard, but it was so frustratingly expensive. The keyboard alone will cost me almost 300 bucks, but it is one helluva beauty. So beautiful it haunted me every night, calling my name, begging me to run my fingers all over it. Anyway I didn’t buy the keyboard due to its price. Unless am a gamer, I don’t think it’s a wise idea to buy it and waste all of its macros and whatnot capibilities. Eventually I bought myself a Gigabyte GK-K6800 keyboard and it’s a brill, but unfortunately I can’t use any of the glorious multimedia keys since my FreeBSD failed to detect them using xev. Yet to try to configure it using the standard keyboard multimedia keycodes. It’s an awesome keyboard and the price is cheap.
My fluctuating weight at that time of the month.
I just realized few months back that about a week before my menses, I’ll feel constantly hungry. Almost everytime at that time of the month, I’ll gain myself 2 – 4 lbs. It’s not just plain hungry, it’s more like having multiple cravings that can drive me up the wall. Am like a mid-end desktop turning to mainframe, but instead of crunching numbers, I crunch food 
Economy.
Lol. Kidding.
Unrelated, why the fuck is the break tag doesn’t work properly in wordpress?
I haven’t been blogging for more than a month. I have abandoned my blog temporarily and I don’t really quite like the fact that I did it. I don’t know why, I think am just lack of mood to write anything.. or even visit my blog. Lol.
Altec Lansing AHS515.
So anyway, I was being a bit creative this morning. I have an Altec Lansing AHS515 headset which I bought few years ago, and am not really impressed with it because I only used it for less than 2 years when suddenly there was no sound coming out from the left can. Not long after that the left pad fell off, so I decided to just throw it away. But wait.. the microphone is still working fine. But the annoying part is, it’s too bulky for just a mic. Yea you might be wondering why wouldn’t I just wear it since it’s a headset? Well now I have another headphone courtesy of Devin, who gave it to me because he thinks that the headphone sucks (see how nice he is? lol), so yea I can’t be wearing layers of headphones. Bottom of the line is, it sucks that I have to hold the big mic all the time while talking to him on linphone.
So today, I managed to convert my Altec headset, to a microphone with stand! It is fugly.. but am still proud of it. Oh am on linphone right now with Devin and am using the mic at the time of writing. The joy of multi-tasking 
Me mic hehe.
Oh well, belated. Been off to bed awfully early lately.
Anyway, to all sexy system administrators out there, Happy System Administrator Day. Hope one day I’d celebrate as one
I woke up early this morning and had my occasional celebrities surfing routine when I saw a headline ‘Michael Jackson is dead’. I am a big fan of Jacko, but I was not even slightly intrigued by the headline. I didn’t even bother to click the link at all. Thought it was just another bullshit rumor and I could care less about it. It was not long after that when my sister text me a message on my cell – ‘Michael Jackson is dead’.
It’s hard to believe that he is dead. He is a music genius. No doubt he is the King of Pop of all time. When I was a small kid I used to watch his clips on the telly, and I think my favourite at the time was ‘Billie Jean’. Last year I had a MJ fever and I spent most of my time listening to his music, dancing and moonwalking and searching for his mail address (yes I thought of writing him a letter but I didn’t write any because I think the letter would’ve not gotten to him anyway). I love him so much that if MJ and Radiohead were to perform in my country on the same day, I would’ve gone to MJ’s concert. Well of course I’m a big fan of Radiohead too, but hell, Michael Jackson is definitely a true performer. He’s a legend.
RIP MJ.
Today I decided to install Sun VirtualBox on my FreeBSD 7.1/amd64. The installation from ports is straightforward as usual.
#csup -g -L2 /etc/ports-supfile
#cd /usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox
#make install clean
I got stuck when it failed to fetch this file Dev86src-0.16.17.tar.gz.
#wget ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles/Dev86src-0.16.17.tar.gz
#mv Dev86src-0.16.17.tar.gz /usr/ports/distfiles/
#make install clean
#hash -r ; ldconfig
Mount proc:
#mount -t procfs proc /proc
Load vbox driver module:
#kldload vboxdrv.ko
#kldstat | grep box
13 1 0xffffffffab46a000 3fb0e vboxdrv.ko
Launch vbox from menu or command:
#VirtualBox
Done.
This could be one of the bestest news I’ve heard in months!!
Excerpt from miwi:
“Today Virtualbox was committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. After a lot of work we had a good discussion today about how stable Virtualbox is, and after the CTF with take6 we got a lot of good feedback, so it was time to commit.”
Read it here.
Woohoo!!
One of my recent project was to configure Edge load balancer on 2 servers in high availability (HA) environment. I rarely do Edge, but the configuration is pretty straightforward. In my past projects, Edge implementation has always been in separate boxes, which is easier compared to collocated setup. In this post I’m going to share my configuration for edge dispatcher (MAC forwarding) that resides together with web server (I’m using IHS) and WebSphere. Each server will use 1 IP address for both web server and dispatcher. The configuration is almost the same, but there were few issues that I encountered and I hope this post will be of help to those who are dealing with Edge dispatcher as well.
For typical setup of Edge load balancer servers that do not reside in the same box with web servers, the general rules are:
- Primary Edge – cluster IP aliased to its NIC.
- Standby Edge – cluster IP aliased to its loopback.
- Web Servers – cluster IP aliased to loopback.
These rules hold the same in collocated environment:
- Primary Edge – cluster IP aliased to its NIC.
- Standby Edge – cluster IP aliased to its loopback.
Double collocated HA edge.
Say I have the following:
Cluster IP – 192.168.10.10
Cluster port – 8080
Primary Edge – 192.168.10.20
Backup Edge – 192.168.10.21
default.cfg for Primary Edge:
dscontrol set loglevel 5
dscontrol set logsize 50000000
dscontrol executor startdscontrol executor set nfa 192.168.10.20
dscontrol highavailability heartbeat add 192.168.10.20 192.168.10.21
dscontrol highavailability backup add primary auto 8880
dscontrol highavailability reach add 192.168.10.55
dscontrol highavailability reach add 192.168.10.56dscontrol cluster add 192.168.10.10
dscontrol port add 192.168.10.10:8080dscontrol server add 192.168.10.10:8080:192.168.10.20
dscontrol server add 192.168.10.10:8080:192.168.10.21dscontrol manager start manager.log 10004
dscontrol man reach set loglevel 5
dscontrol man reach set logsize 50000000
dscontrol advisor start Http 192.168.10.10:8080 Http_192.168.10.10_8080.log
default.cfg for Standby Edge:
dscontrol set loglevel 5
dscontrol set logsize 50000000dscontrol executor start
dscontrol executor set nfa 192.168.10.21
dscontrol highavailability heartbeat add 192.168.10.21 192.168.10.20
dscontrol highavailability backup add backup auto 8880
dscontrol highavailability reach add 192.168.10.55
dscontrol highavailability reach add 192.168.10.56dscontrol cluster add 192.168.10.10
dscontrol port add 192.168.10.10:8080dscontrol server add 192.168.10.10:8080:192.168.10.21
dscontrol server add 192.168.10.10:8080:192.168.10.20dscontrol manager start manager.log 10004
dscontrol man reach set loglevel 5
dscontrol man reach set logsize 50000000
dscontrol advisor start Http 192.168.10.10:8080 Http_192.168.10.10_8080.log
goActive script:
This script will remove the cluster IP from loopback and alias it to the NIC.
#!/bin/ksh
CLUSTER=192.168.10.10
LOOPBACK=lo0:1ifconfig $LOOPBACK 0.0.0.0
dscontrol executor configure $CLUSTER
goStandby script:
This script will remove the cluster IP from NIC and alias it to the loopback.
#!/bin/ksh
LOOPBACK=lo0:1
CLUSTER=192.168.10.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.192dscontrol executor unconfigure $CLUSTER
ifconfig $LOOPBACK $CLUSTER netmask $NETMASK up
goInOp script:
This script will remove the cluster IP from all devices (loopback and NIC).
#!/bin/ksh
CLUSTER=192.168.10.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.192dscontrol executor unconfigure $CLUSTER
ifconfig $LOOPBACK $CLUSTER netmask $NETMASK down
The normal method to test if the high availability works smoothly is by plugging out the network cable off the edge server. I would tail the root mail (/var/mail/root) at the same time, so I could see which HA script has been triggered when the network is interrupted. Another method is to bring down the server, by rebooting it or shutting it down. With reboot you’ll only have a short time span to monitor the failover in action, but of course this depends on how long your servers take to start up.
But since this is a collocated environment, if I were to opt for either the described testing methods, I wouldn’t be able to see if the dispatcher balances all requests to both web servers accordingly (in my case I’m using the round robin algorithm). So what I did is, I manually stop the executor so that failover occurs. Note that stopping the dsserver alone won’t trigger the HA scripts. Actually it is not necessary to stop the dsserver. Well to be honest even if it’s not a collocated environment, I normally test the HA failover by stopping the executor, since normally am working remotely and plugging out the cable requires me to get the help of the sys admins. So might as well test if its really working before going through all the hassle.
One of the problem that I encountered was instability. Sometimes the dispatcher will run in the right mode (active | standby), but most of the time both will run as active. It was very unstable, no certain pattern that I could track. Even worse, sometimes when I tried ro run the dispatcher as a standalone lb, all of the incoming requests will be routed directly to the web server, skipping the dispatcher completely. I was stuck with this problem for several days when I finally figured out what the culprit is.
The ibmlb module.
Everytime when the executor is stopped, the ibmlb module will be unloaded. Everytime when the executor starts, the ibmlb module will be loaded to the kernel. I’m lucky that I have dmesg on both servers, so based from dmesg, this is how it should looked like whenever you stop and start the executor:
ibmlb DLKM successfully unloaded
ibmlb DLKM successfully loaded
But what happened was, when I stopped the executor, the ibmlb was not unloaded. The status was busy, and I’ll have to unload the module explicitly.
ibmlb DLKM successfully unloaded
ibmlb DLKM successfully loaded
ibmlb version is 06.01.00.00 – 20060515-232359 [wsbld265]
WARNING: moduload : module is busy, module id = 14, name = ibmlb
WARNING: moduload : module is busy, module id = 14, name = ibmlb
WARNING: moduload : module is busy, module id = 14, name = ibmlb
WARNING: moduload : module is busy, module id = 14, name = ibmlb
WARNING: moduload : module is busy, module id = 14, name = ibmlb
I’ve not seen anything like this before (I used to configure dispatcher on AIX servers). Consider the following test cases (arp table checked from a different server that resides on the same segment):
TEST 1.
1) Primary active, Backup standby. Cluster IP belongs to Primary.
2) Primary down, Backup goes active. Module ibmlb is UNLOADED successfully on Primary. Cluster IP belongs to Backup.
3) Primary up in active mode, Backup goes standby. Cluster IP belongs to Primary.
TEST 2.
1) Primary active, Backup standby. Cluster IP belongs to Primary.
2) Primary down, Backup goes active. Module ibmlb is busy and still LOADED on Primary. Cluster IP belongs to Backup.
3) Primary up in active mode, Backup stays active. Cluster IP belongs to Primary, but all requests will skip dispatcher and go straight to the web server.
TEST 3.
1) Primary active, Backup standby. Cluster IP belongs to Primary.
2) Primary down, Backup goes active. Module ibmlb is UNLOADED successfully on Primary. Cluster IP belongs to Backup.
3) Primary up in active mode, Backup goes standby. Cluster IP belongs to Primary.
4) Backup down. Module ibmlb is UNLOADED successfully.
5) Backup up, running in standby mode.
6) Backup down. Module ibmlb is busy and still LOADED on backup.
7) Backup up, running in active mode (remember that Primary is also in active mode too). Cluster IP belongs to Backup, but all requests will skip the dispatcher and go straight to the web server.
8 ) Backup down. Module ibmlb is busy and still LOADED on backup. Explicitly unload the module using kcmodule command until it gets UNLOADED. Cluster IP belongs to Primary.
9) Backup up, running in standby mode.
Most of the time I won’t be able to unload it right away, until I let the server ‘rest’ for about 15 – 20 minutes, before trying to unload it again. Rebooting the server will always solve this problem (the module next state is unused). Am not sure if there’s a way to force a module to be unloaded though. As far as I know there’s no force flag for kcmodule.
I was fooled several times since I tested the splash page of the web servers from my Opera browser. I was on a different subnet, so I guess there must be a switch/router in between me and the edge servers. At times, even when the cluster IP is aliased to the Primary Edge, my browser will point to the Backup Edge since the ARP cache was not refreshed. It was so annoying since this will affect the cluster report. The rest of the testings were done by running a browser from a different server but belongs to the same subnet. At least I could clear up the ARP cache manually if I have to.
Okay probably this is my browser problem, but testing the splash page with Firefox sucks. It kept on hitting the splash page even after I’ve stopped both web servers, and cleared up the cache. It was alright with Opera though. What gives?
By the way I’m using Edge v6.1. If you check out the Edge Fixpack page here, you’ll notice that there is no patch for HP-UX. Not a single patch. Is IBM trying to say something? Don’t use Edge on HP-UX, perhaps? Lol. Anyway, IBM packed me a patch (6.1.0.35), but still it didn’t address the module issue. Am not sure if I could call it a patch though, it’s more like an installer since I had to reinstall everything.
Thanks to Robert Brown from IBM for assisting me on this ‘false alarm’ panic attack (initially I thought it was a network issue).
