wildness

As I've recently tried the patching of a sun cluster with Zones/ZFS/global filesystem and everything running, I've noticed that not so much people have tried this, so I might share the experience here ;)

So read the complete article to see how it behaves ;)

I've grabbed some times ago two Mobotix cameras.. I must say first that I was impressed by they quality (nice look, high resolutions, good framerate and nevertheless, GNU/Linux based).

As I put them to monitor some outdoor part of my house, I've wanted to record everything that would happen, but hey, first question, how to record ?

Indeed, they don't support MPEG4 streaming. In fact, they are using some half-proprietary MxPEG format, that seems to be on its way to become a good choice when it comes to camera streaming. I've searched out the internet to find the SDK of the camera that provide also the little mxgconv binary, allowing you to convert MxPEG to JPEG frames. Well.

Here is then the little script I used to record in MPEG4 everything coming from the cameras on hourly-basis.

I remember some times ago, I had seen a great tool that permitted to clone an interface through the network. By saying that, I mean that you can run a little client on a box where you want to sniff an interface and where all the traffic will run through network to the host where you will effectively sniff it.

This could be usefull for example when the box you want to sniff is an embedded device with only a little space available.

As I was today in need of this tool but can't finally find it back, I decided to code my own and then to share it... Read the whole article to know more!

After the reboot of a sun server, I found a diskgroup being unusable because of a wrong disk private region that was not consistent with the information stored in Veritas..

After having tried the classics vxconfigd -k -x cleattempdir, I have found that Veritas is in fact doing some backup of the configuration of every diskgroup. This configuration could be easily restored online. Even more, this could be tested without any impact. Even better, if it doesn't work: just rollback!

 # vxdisk -o alldgs list
 DEVICE       TYPE            DISK         GROUP        STATUS
 EMC0_1       auto:sliced     zonedg-dg01   (zonedg)     online

This diskgroup wasn't importable as the private region was not consistent. It consists of only one disk.

 # /etc/vx/bin/vxconfigrestore -d zonedg

When this command is issued, you can then try to see if all you volumes are there and consistent (even fsck them). The cool thing is: nothing has been commited to the disk yet. If everything is clean and runs well, just commit the restore the the disk:

 # /etc/vx/bin/vxconfigrestore -c

And voila!

Hello folks,

This post is to keep you updated about the future of articles posted here... We've just bought a new house and moved into it so now I'm preparing the network and doing some testing on virtual machines and so on.. so a few articles may come.

Meanwhile, I'm currently thinking of some articles to make in the coming weeks that could be usefull:

• jQuery framework: How to make AJAX without knowing Javascript.
• Cisco interoperability: Zyxel Gbit switches
• Linux: Using VLAN to get a better network.
• Linux: LACP
• Virtualbox: Scripts to make my life easier
• KVM: Quick Howto for Network appliance virtualization (m0n0wall, pfsense, ...)

Don't hesitate to leave a comment to give me feedback about articles you found interesting, or to request some of the articles here to be written in priority :)

Thanks for reading.