Whoa, two NetWare posts in one day. I must be making an effort to counteract what I was complaining about in my previous post about Novell news disappearing.

Adrem makes a remote console for NetWare formerly called Freecon, which was free. I just noticed via iDogg’s blog that it’s no longer free, and has been renamed Litecon. You can’t download the Freecon installer anymore. They’ve decided to start charging $500 for a product that they formerly gave away for free. Nice.

iDogg also makes a great point how a little third-party utility for managing a part of an OS that costs more than the whole OS it manages makes no sense.

I read a tonne of tech news via RSS in Google Reader. I subscribe to various IT-related feeds and planet feeds. I used to often see Novell-related news in my feeds. In the last year or so these have dwindled to the occasional IDM story or something to do with SLES in data centres, which doesn’t really interest us too much. We were strong NetWare / OES customers, Border Manager users, GroupWise and Zenworks and everything red. We’re still tight with GroupWise, but the rest of the stuff is losing it’s lustre for us.

This has occurred coincidentally with Novell stopping marketing to us directly, and disappearing from our market space. They’ve stopped addressing our market requirements in their shift to data center Linux. We still use their products, but we don’t feel like they are connected with our market anymore. We actually get cold sales calls on stuff we don’t care about from them every once in a while now, while we haven’t heard from our actual sales rep in a year. The only direct contact we get from them where they act like they know who we are anymore is for auditing and billing.

It was a good run while it lasted, anyways.

I’m off tonight to the U of A Swimming Alumni Fundraiser silent auction. It’s at Hudson’s Tap House on 104 Ave in Edmonton. I mentioned it previously. Jenn, along with Sara, Mark, Mike and Dave put a lot of effort into organizing it, and they’ve managed to round up lots of great donations. Hopefully we can kick off the scholarship endowment with a good chunk of money.

I usually use the basic web interface from WordPress to edit my blog. I’ve read about other bloggers using other blogging clients, and some of them are pretty nice, with flickr integration and stuff like that, so I thought I would try one. I’m posting this from Ecto. It’s a Mac blogging client that seems pretty cool. I’ll have a go at it for a few entries. The only downside is that I often blog from work, where I only have Linux or Windows, and not a Mac. Hence the lowest common denominator of the WordPress web interface.

Anyways, consider this a test.

I did a live upgrade on our Sun x4500 today from build 64 to build 89. I wanted to use the native CIFS (windows) server capability for zfs in the newer Solaris build.

The live upgrade was essentially a mirror of the process I undertook to get to b64 in the first place, where I created a boot environment in the alternate disk, copied my existing boot environment to it, and used a Solaris build 89 dvd image to upgrade it. Details on that can be found in this old post.

I had one problem, where the local filesystem service failed to start after the reboot into the new version of Solaris. It was complaining that some of the directories that my zfs filesystem uses for mount points were not empty. The directories it complained about were root filesystems I had created for some Solaris zones inside the zfs. I exported the zpool, which unmounted everything, and indeed, the zone subdirectory still existed in the zfs directory hierarchy. I moved those directories out of the way, and rebooted with init 6. The system came up as expected, and everything booted up normally.

It appears that what happened was that when I ran lucreate to create the duplicate of my b64 environment prior to upgrading it to b89, it erroneously copied my zone roots into it from the zfs filesystem. Then when I upgraded the system and rebooted, those files were in the way of my zfs pool, preventing if from mounting cleanly.

Other than that, the upgrade went swimmingly. I will have to check to see if the zone in question also managed to get upgraded, since I moved the files created by lucreate after the upgrade to get back to the files stored in the zfs pool.

Update - the zone I mentioned is still on build 64. I’ll have to figure out how to upgrade that.

I have a lot of disk-based snapshots of NetWare and OES Linux servers on a big Sun x4500. We get the data onto there using rsync. We let our admins get data back from Solaris by using a web interface based on Apache. However, this doesn’t work very well for getting data from Solaris to NetWare in bulk in a hurry. Neither does rsync, because with datasets in the several hundred gigabyte range, rsync is dog slow.

Here’s a quick way: Install the nfs part of the NetWare Native File Access Pack on your NetWare box, export the volume via nfs from NetWare, mount it on your Solaris box, and just copy. I’m getting about 45 GB per hour over a gigabit connection, which is fast enough for right now, because I just want to get the data over the weekend. I could probably tune it up to about 100 GB per hour with a little effort.

How to do it:

First get the NFAP from Novell for NetWare. Uncompress it somewhere on the NetWare server or put it on a CD. Use the installer on the NetWare gui to install it.

Next, edit sys:\etc\exports, and add a line like the following:

/volume/folder -rw -root solarisbox.mydomain.com

This shares the folder “folder” on the NetWare volume “volume” via nfs, and gives the Solaris machine solarisbox.mydomain.com full access to the share. If you want to share the whole volume, just omit the “/folder” part.

Next, add a line in the sys:\etc\hosts file for the IP address of the Solaris machine. If you don’t do this then the Solaris machine will be unable to mount the nfs share.

192.168.1.10 solarisbox.mydomain.com solarisbox

The last step on NetWare is to stop and restart nfs.

nfsstop
nfsstart

Next, on the Solaris machine, mount the NetWare nfs share, and go to town. As root on Solaris, do this:

mkdir /mnt/mountpoint
mount netwarebox.mydomain.com:/volume/folder /mnt/mountpoint

This will make the NetWare folder available on the Solaris box at /mnt/mountpoint.

Now you can use cp, or even rsync natively on the Solaris machine to get data stored on your Solaris volumes onto the NetWare volume.

I have noticed as I get older, a propensity for growing bristly, unruly, long greying eyebrow hairs. While normally this isn’t particularly noticeable (by me at least,) today I had an experience that made my crazy brows all too apparent to me.

I was swimming at lunch time at NAIT, and I kept seeing a hair or thread flapping in front of the left eye of my goggles while I swam. After cleaning the goggles every time I stopped for half an hour and being unable to get rid of whatever it was, I came to a startling and sad realization… that the thread was a mad scientist eyebrow hair, and it was quite attached.

I’ve plucked it.

I went to the University of Alberta Swimming Alumni AGM this week and volunteered for the board of directors. There is an increasing amount of interest in it, and more younger people are coming to the functions, so that’s great. We need to try to track down and include some older alumni in our ranks.

We’re running a fundraiser function in a couple of weeks on Thursday June 19th called the Reagan Williams Pub Night and Silent Auction. There is a Facebook page describing the event. Here is the official flyer. Tickets can be obtained by contacting the email addresses in the flyer, or at the door, but it would help us to know the approximate number of people coming in advance, so I would encourage interested parties to contact the email addresses.

The purpose of the fundraiser is to collect funds to help establish a University of Alberta Swimming scholarship endowment in the name of Reagan Williams, so that the swimming organization at the university can use the scholarship money to attract some talented swimmers and strengthen the program. The money raised will be added to the funds collected at the memorial service for Reagan. The alumni are pretty excited to be a part of it. It should also be a good social opportunity, which I’m all in favor of. If you are a former U of A swimmer, a friend or colleague of Reagan’s, or just part of the swimming community around Edmonton, come out and rub elbows with some old friends.

This weekend we went to the first summer swim meet for our region in Westlock. Mack and Emily both put in their usual head-turning performances. Both kids moved up in age group this year, Mack to 9 & 10, and Emily to 11 & 12. Since Mack is now in 9 & 10, he got to do his first ever 100 m free race, which he won by about 20 m. He also did best times in 25 fly and 50 free and won all his events. Emily stood up and put down a 100 free of 1:08.92, which would have been second in 11 &12 at provincials last year. It’s the third fastest 11 year old time recorded in Alberta in 2007/2008 among year-round swimmers. That should get her competition shaking in their speedos.

Westlock put on a good meet and it ran smoothly and quickly. It was a good start to the season.

Jenn got us a Wii Fit a couple of days ago at Wal-Mart. I set it up last night and gave it a go. I tried all the strength training exercises that were available, the balance games, and some of the yoga ones, and then ran out of time. I will give the aerobic ones a go tonight.

One thing I discovered is that you need a big room to use it. A lot of the fitness exercises require some serious room. Particularly the things that put one foot on the balance board and one off, like lunges, or the Warrior pose in the yoga activities, and the v-sit exercises take up a lot of room. I found myself moving the couch out of the way, and even then I kept having to slide the balance board to different places on the floor to have enough room for each activity.

I noticed that there is a lot of clicking and futzing with the wiimote, pressing A all the time to continue. That’s a hassle, because during most of the exercises, you don’t want to have the wiimote in your hand, and because the exercises take so much room, you won’t be exercising close to a standing-height thing to quickly put the wiimote down on and pick it up again. I don’t want to lay it on the floor next to the balance board, because I don’t want my spastic balance to cause me to step on it. Being over six feet, with a BMI of (very high) if I stepped on the wiimote it would be dead. I may have to hack up some kind of small floor-friendly button that I can step on to simulate a press of the A button. Our DDR dance pad might work for that. Either that or I will have to rig up a thing to hang the wiimote from the ceiling and pull it down when I need it and have it auto-retract, like the microphone in the centre of a boxing ring.

Anyways, I did work up a sweat, and combined with the hour of swimming I did (real swimming) I burned a few calories all told.