Video clips of Darwyn

January 26th, 2010 michaelf No comments

Since the purchase of a new digital camera, which happens to take lovely HD video clips, my wife and I have recorded Darwyn doing various things. Below is a selection of those things that happens everyday, and might not otherwise be recorded.

Below was recorded when we took him to a beach for the first time;

Followed by a clip showing him using his blow up tube in the spa for the first time, and then showing him eating a biscuit.

Categories: Blog Tags: ,

RHEL 5.3 excessive file handles

January 19th, 2010 michaelf No comments

As per my previous post here. I’d like to share some conclusions and how they came about.

A scheduled reboot was performed and the nagios agent and scripts got corrected. However this wasn’t the issue, which was sort of determined prior to the reboot, as I had them stopped for about 2 cycles of sar reports (20mins).

After the reboot, the problem of course happened again. sar -v output would show the file-sz increase over time. Somewhat like 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. So you get a slow increase, although as seen in previous post 500 or so handles consumed at a time.

I suspected some with oracle, so pointed out some processes that seemed to be respawning every 7 mins, but it turns out this was due to database scripts accessing the database, however one of the dba’s investigated further and determined they believed the emagent process seemed to be acting a bit odd. Upon further investigation a stop of the agent, and checking the current cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr output showed the file-sz value drop by over 10000. Thus it looks like we found the issue, so of course they had to defer it to oracle support. At least we now have a way to bring the value down by a restart on emagent (which is Oracle Grid Control related I am told).

To aid others, if anyone is seeing something similar. I’d recommend making sure that the system wide file-max-nr value is greater then that of the limits.conf hard limit for the user you suspect that might be causing it. In the case of our system, the file-max-nr was set to 65536, however so was the oracle hard limit for nofiles. Thus when oracle user used up all the handles, then the system also had issues, aka unable to ssh in. So increase the system wide setting, can be performed without reboot. Then for any user’s you suspect that might be causing the issue, set them up with limits via the limits.conf file and then monitor. If a process running as one of those users is consuming all the file handlers, then only the software ran by this user will suffer the issue, and the system wide setting of a greater value will allow you to still ssh in and do various other things.

Hope this helps anyone else out in the wide world web, as it was certainly a good problem to investigate.

Categories: Blog Tags: , , ,

RHEL 5.3 sar -v output continues to show an file-sz increase

January 15th, 2010 michaelf No comments

Anyone out in the wide world web seen this before;

sar -v

16:50:01    dentunusd   file-sz  inode-sz  super-sz %super-sz  dquot-sz %dquot-sz  rtsig-sz %rtsig-sz
17:00:01        22144      5100     18581         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
17:10:01        22274      5610     18591         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
17:20:01        22631      5610     18832         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
17:30:01        22744      5610     18822         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
17:40:01        23233      6120     19172         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
17:50:01        23563      6120     19381         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
18:00:01        23702      5610     19395         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
18:10:01        24023      6120     19583         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
18:20:01        24093      6630     19522         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00
18:30:01        24441      6630     19738         0      0.00         0      0.00         0      0.00

What I am referring too, is the file-sz value increasing, in fact on the system in question it continues to increase until it hits the system limit and then processes start to fail. Which is not what I want.

Any tips of trying to pin point the application that might be causing it and any associated commands. Platform is RHEL 5.3 x64, system is used to run three Oracle Database instances.

I have a suspicion against a possible application, and intend of having it shutdown at some point and then monitoring the output from the sar -v for several samples to determine if I see the same pattern as per the output above.

EDIT: I believe I think I found the cause, but won’t know until I can get approval to make the change and reboot the host. I had a feeling it might be something to do with nagios and some scripts that check various things. Still believe this to be the case, as I have found an issue with nrpe itself on the host. Will get the approval to make the changes and reboot. Then will post back outcome.

Categories: Blog Tags: ,

Canon Ixus camera dies

January 12th, 2010 michaelf No comments

After what has seemed to be about 7 years, our Canon Ixus camera suddenly died. It started to produce lines in the pictures, which is common with the CCD failure.

We replaced it with a Pentax E80, as found here. It’s a sweet little camera, and the 720p HD recording feature is nice.

Categories: Blog Tags: , , , ,

More Traxxas Rustler VXL video clips

January 3rd, 2010 michaelf No comments

Have another few video clips to share from the other day, unfortunately I couldn’t post them sooner as I didn’t have the internet bandwidth available to me to uploaded them. So it had to wait until I got home.

Hope people enjoy, I know I certainly enjoy using the car. Although managed to break a drive shaft in the last few days, so the Rustler VXL is out of action. Going to order a set of steel drive shafts, as the standard plastic ones just don’t handle the power produced from the 11.1V 3S LiPo.

Categories: Blog Tags: ,

Traxxas Rustler VXL Brushless

December 28th, 2009 michaelf No comments

Finally with the assistance of my nephew I’ve managed to obtain a few video clips of the Traxxas Rustler VXL. Below is a capture from the first video footage we obtained.

Categories: Blog Tags: , , ,

Domain Registration

December 27th, 2009 michaelf No comments

While I was away visiting family, I had to get a domain registration completed.

We registered the .org.au on the 25th Dec, and to the surprise of us all it was completed in the early hours of 26th Dec. Not bad considering it was Christmas and all. Very impressed.

Configured Google Hosted to host the email for the domain in question, then configured a small Wordpress setup for the domain itself on our linode VPS server. Now to show Heidi’s mum how to use it, then let her go crazy with Wordpress.

The domain and website is for the Kings Christian Church Temora, which can be found here.

Categories: Blog Tags: ,

Solaris 10 update 8 printing on Sparc

December 23rd, 2009 michaelf No comments

Why is printing so hard to configure. Anyone able to assist?

EDIT: lprng was attempted to be compiled and installed. Although installed, had issues with the filters. So printing didn’t work. Next up someone tried to install CUPS and this too failed for certain reasons. Last attempt was then to use the native printer support in Solaris and this too seems to have failed.

Anyone got any links to any reasonable good howto’s that can be followed to have either the native stuff work, and/or get cups to work on Solaris Sparc platform. Have a few network printers that need to be printed too from the Sparc host in question and not having much luck it would appear. Grrr

Another year older.

December 12th, 2009 michaelf No comments

A few days ago was my birthday. So I am another year older. Doesn’t really feel any different I must say. But the time sure does fly by.

I got some nice gifts from my wife and family. Picked up a new Hyperion battery charger, which is the model as shown here. Along with it I also got 2 x 3S 11.1v LiPo batteries. Thus the need for the newer modern charger. A framed photo of Darwyn with Santa (his first one). Last but not least also got I Am Legend on Bluray and a Madonna audio cd. All in all a good number of gifts to celebrate the day.

Categories: Blog Tags: , ,

Traxxas E-Revo Brushless 1/10 Electric

November 19th, 2009 michaelf No comments

Below is a video clip of a Traxxas E-Revo Brushless 1/10 Electric monster truck, it was taking in the last few weeks. The remote control is my neighbors, unfortunately I don’t have any clips of my ones just yet. But soon I will. Enjoy.

Categories: Blog Tags: , ,