Virtual Openfiler 2.3 with Mirrored Boot Disks (vSphere/ESX)

 

I have seen a number of installations of Openfiler on ESX, but I haven’t seen any that fully show the installation I was looking for.

In my case, I have an ESX with 2 – 1 TB disks. I don’t have a RAID controller in the machine, so the disks just show up in ESX as individual drives.

In order to provide redundancy of any data stored on these local disks, I decided to install Openfiler.

Openfiler is a Linux distribution that allows any disks attached to it (in this case virtual disks – or VMDKs) to be shared out as iSCSI or NFS. I am going to use iSCSI as it performs better in Openfiler (in my opinion). This means that even the ESX server that is hosting the Openfiler will see its’ own disks through the virtualization layer of Openfiler.

This has the side benefit of making the local disk available to all other ESX servers as shared storage. However, the main reason I wanted to do this was redundancy – I want to make the 2 individual disks look like a single RAID 1 volume and thus have the data stored in 2 different places.

The big difference in my case is that I am going to make 2 boot disks and mirror them – however, one boot disk will be on local storage and the other on existing shared storage. The reason is that if a physical drive in the ESX server was to die, and it happened to be the boot disk for the ESX server, I would have a hard time getting the Openfiler back up. This way, I just stick the other disk into another server (or reinstall ESX on another disk), re-attach the data volumes to the Openfiler and I am back in business!

On to the implementation!

You could potentially use the ESX appliance available from www.openfiler.com, but I decided to use the ISO and create a new installation. As I didn’t have 64 bit hardware, I used the 2.3 x86 version of Openfiler.

I choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (32bit) as the OS Type and gave it 512 MB of RAM.

When creating my new Openfiler VM, I gave it 5 GB of disk on different existing SHARED storage and 5 GB of disk on one of the local disks. Not sure that I would want to create both boot disks (we will end up with 2) on the local storage – if one of the physical disks died, and I lost the ESX, I want to be able to get my data back by just sticking the other physical disk into another server and re-attaching the disk to the Openfiler.  Anyway…that is your decision.

I am going to have one boot disk on separate shared storage and one on the local storage.

I begin the installation of Openfiler and skip the Media test.

After the initial steps we get to the partition manager. In our case, the hard disks are called:sda and sdb. This can be different in your case. We'll create the /boot partition first:

1. Choose Manually partition with Disk Druid.
2. Click New.
3. Select the following options:
   • File System Type: Software RAID
   • Allowable Drives: sda
   • Size (MB): 102
   • Additional Size Options: Fixed Size
   and click OK.

Now, repeat this (from step 2) for the other hard disk, sdb (selected in step 3). After that, make a RAID-1 partition from both individual partitions:

4. Click RAID.
5. Select Create a RAID device [default=/dev/md0], and click OK.
6. Select the following options:
   • Mount Point: /boot
   • File System Type: ext3
   • RAID Device: md0
   • RAID Level: RAID1
   • RAID Members: sda and sdb checked
   and click OK.

That's our first RAID-1 partition. Now, repeat all these steps for the / partition. As for the /swap partition, create them on both disks but don't create a RAID-1 partition for them (just choose File System Type: swap in step 3 and skip step 4, 5 and 6).

 

 

 

 

 

Now manually assign a static IP, let the install finish and reboot.

Login as root using the password you assigned during installation.

Now we need to update to the latest version:

conary updateall
conary update kernel
reboot

In the unfortunate case that one of the hard disks fails, we should make them both bootable. This can be done with GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader):

$ grub
device (hd0) /dev/sda
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
device (hd1) /dev/sdb
root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)
quit

Now we want to install VMware Tools

Guest->Install VMware Tools

cd /root
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-4.0.0-208167.tar.gz .
tar -xvzf VMwareTools-4.0.0-208167.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
If you run ./vmware-install.pl at this point, you will find that a number of modules are already installed and must be removed before you can proceed. So….

rm /lib/modules/2.6.29.6-0.30.smp.gcc3.4.x86.i686/kernel/fs/vmblock/vmblock.ko
rm /lib/modules/2.6.29.6-0.30.smp.gcc3.4.x86.i686/kernel/fs/vmhgfs/vmhgfs.ko
rm /lib/modules/2.6.29.6-0.30.smp.gcc3.4.x86.i686/kernel/drivers/misc/vmci/vmci.ko
rm /lib/modules/2.6.29.6-0.30.smp.gcc3.4.x86.i686/kernel/drivers/misc/vmmemctl/vmmemctl.ko
rm /lib/modules/2.6.29.6-0.30.smp.gcc3.4.x86.i686/kernel/drivers/net/vmxnet/vmxnet.ko

./vmware-install.pl

Pick the defaults for all questions except answer /usr/bin/make for the gcc compiler question.

What is the location of the "gcc" program on your machine? /usr/bin/make

reboot

Add additional disks, RAID them and present them as LUNs to ESX in the normal fashion. If I get time, I will show this part too.

MX Guarddog Review

 

Every once in a while, you come across a nice little diamond in the rough.

Check out http://www.mxguarddog.com

You put a small text based link somewhere on your site and you get free spam and virus filtering service!

Registration and setup were easy. I did this for myself and then I did it for a client.

You change your MX records to point to the ones owned by mxguarddog and then configure mxguarddog to forward your “clean” mail to your regular mail server.

For myself this was easy as I run my own virtual exchange server.

For my client, I ran into a problem as the client was being hosted on a 3rd party and they didn’t give me access to everything in the cPanel so things didn’t work right away. I had to get the MX records changed – but then things broke.

I contacted mxguarddog support – they got back to me in a matter of minutes – diagnosed the problem and told me how to fix it.  I contacted the 3rd party hosting company, got them to select the option: “Always accept mail locally even if the primary mx does not point to this server.” – or Local Exchanger (depends on your version of cPanel).

Voila! Pain free Spam and Virus filtering!

You can add multiple domains to a single account – you can whitelist, blacklist.

My only suggestion would be that they let you see statistics about the numbers of mail messages delivered, spam, virus etc.

Overall – I give this a 9.5 out of 10….fantastic!

One technical note: In order to really benefit from a service like this, you need to restrict your mail server to only allow mail from the mxguarddog.com servers – look at their instructions for the IP’s you need to allow.  Otherwise, spammers may still try to send mail directly to your server bypassing the MX Guarddog guys – and there isn’t much they can do about mail they don’t get.

free spam filter  cloud based spam filter

EA–Need For Speed Shift

 

I play XBox 360 video games.  Mostly just racing, but I will delve into some other genres too.

One title I enjoy is NFS Shift – I even pre-ordered the next iteration – Shift 2.

Even though there are tons of bugs in the game, it is still fun to play.  Fun online, fun in Career mode.

However, when playing online there are number of things that make things unfair – and one of them specifically is cheating. There is a major flaw in the online game that allows users to use a higher rating car than they should.  Now I don’t really care if everyone has the cheat, cause then it is fair again – everyone can do it and no one has a major advantage.

A better option is to FIX THE GAME!

So….I sent Electronic Arts (EA) a support ticket telling them about the game. I got no response. So I posted in a few forums and tried to get a response. Nothing.

Then I posted the cheat on a few forums and explained again to EA. How did they respond?

Did they fix the game so that this wouldn’t keep happening?  NO…they don’t care about that, they don’t give a crap about quality control or investing any more money in a game that is already history. Not that they did a very good job on quality control during the construction of the game or even the patches they released afterwards.

What did they do?  They banned ME.  Yup…try to do a good thing – report bugs – and get banned from using their product. Nice…..what stupid jerks.  They can’t spend the money to fix it, so they want to just try and hide it – make sure people don’t know about it.

Imagine you were getting shitty service from your phone company – you would tell people about it. You would also call and complain to the phone company. And then…what if they disconnected your phone line because you have been complaining to other people about it?  That is not reasonable – they would fix the phone line.  EA needs to grow up.

The other problem is, 30-40% of the people online are all using the cheat already.  So….that means that it is unfair for the rest of the players that are trying to use the system too. So hiding the fact that there is a major flaw isn’t solving anything.

EA has a policy of banning those that a) use a cheat, or b) post about how to use a cheat.  Like this solves anything.

FIX YOUR DAMN SOFTWARE!

So…just so everyone can have it….here is the post I made about NFS Shift:

Heya....I am posting this not because I want everyone to cheat, but because I want everyone to have a level playing field.

I have reported this to EA, but they don't seem to care and I am tired of seeing people beat me when I know they are cheating. There are so many bugs in this game, but EA seems to care more about pushing out the game than quality control. What pisses me off so much is that I like the game - if I didn't, I just wouldn't bother to play - it could be sooo much better - I really wish EA gave a CRAP!

I am not saying I am the fastest, but I am not bad - people don't usually beat me around Road America by 10 seconds a lap for example - I can do a 1:52 in unrestricted and a 2:03 in a 14 car.

Anyway - if everyone can have the same cheats, then it is fair again.

Major bug - Online play lets you use higher rated cars in lower levels:
For example, use a 17 level car in a game restricted to 14 level cars.
These steps have to be done everytime you restart the game, but it doesn't take long and many people are doing it.
To reproduce:
1) Purchase stock Z06 - if you already own it, sell it and rebuy it (you will not lose tuning settings)
2) Go into XBox Live
3) Create a Ranked match, Race, 14 level cars and accept it
4) Pick your Z06 from your list of cars
5) Exit the race (no need to actually race)
6) Go to the Car Garage and upgrades
7) Purchase all upgrades (except Works Convert - this bug didn't seem to work for me when I Works Converted)
8) Go back into XBox Live
9) Either create a match, or join one and when the car rating is 14, your Z06 will be chosen by default even though it is now a 17+ rated car

This also works for any level - for example, you can take the Porsche Cayman - use it as a 10 car when it is actually setup for a 14 car.

Use it while you can - I am hoping EA will fix this. I have posted this information to them and on a number of forums, so hopefully they will actually do something about it.