Emil Krueper

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Fsck, today I recognized we missed to celebrate something – we have several servers with two years+ of interruption-free uptime now. Sorry. May you continue to crunch numbers until the end of days! Yours sincerely!

Last evening I started relocation of all services from my old dedicated server to a vserver at another location. So I have to say bye bye old fellow, I am not going to miss you so much. But thanks anyways for (usually) being so reliable.

These days I can have better performance for less money. And I can spent the money in things like pizza, beer and so on in our family money socks. Yeah!

I have successfully built some CentOS 5.5 AMI with EBS and with instance storage. First I had to create an openvz CentOS instance and then I started building the AMI in the openvz environment. Cool.

Lately I have been very much traveling around and visiting different conferences related to cloud computing. I have been discussing a lot the assets and drawbacks for us at work to put some stuff into the cloud. Well, very soon I had to dig into the AWS. I had a look at all the available EC2 AMIs and I asked myself why there is no recent gentoo based x86_64 AMI for Amazons EC2. And in truth I needed a proper gentoo EC2 AMI asap to start testing.

So what’s wrong? Is it too much weird command line kung fu to create such an machine image? Or is there no demand for Gentoo x86_64 images? People don’t use Gentoo anymore since the Gentoo hype was over long before there was AWS? Gentoo people are unaware there is 64bit available and still stick to 32bit? AWS people don’t want Gentoo people to use Gentoo images since the Fedora machine images are much better for everyone? Yeah.

I deceided to roll out my own AMI. I did some research and read lots of articles about the different ways to create those machine images. Twenty minutes later I felt enlightened:

1. You can convert an existing xen image or
2. create your AMI with VMware and convert this or
3. you can use an existing AMI and base your AMI on it and so forth.

Sounds like crap. I like building things by my own and have more control on the inside of the result.
It took some time to figure out how to proceed and how to solve small emerging hurdles.

Working on a good build host it takes maybe twenty to thirty minutes from zero to have a basic AMI ready to go. Basically you need to create the AMI file, format it with some filesystem, mount the file as a loop device, extract an stage3 archive, install some requirements and modify some config files. The most time is wasted waiting for ec2-upload-bundle to complete. It’s enough time to get another cup of coffee, sit on the sofa and read some pages in the newspapers.

I think the result is pretty good already. I have completed different automations and have begun working on the details to create almost autonomous clusters, this is again funny stuff with crons, bash, sed, awk and perl.

EC2 is definitly very interesting. If you need some help with gentoo AMIs you can just sent me an email or put a line in the comments.

All the best, Emil

In case you are running Debian Lenny on one or another Dell PowerEdge server or a bunch of servers from the R series (like the R410), there might occur a problem with the firmware of the Broadcom NetXtreme II network interface cards when your are updating the kernel from the official repositories. The warning message is like:

“W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/bnx2-09-4.0.5.fw for module bnx2”

In that case you can easily fix the problem with adding the non-free repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb https://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib

and then run

aptitude update && aptitude install firmware-bnx2

This will install the required firmware and rebuild your kernel initrd and include the firmware at boot time.

Well, I was just deleting all the spam messages caught by akismet in the couple last days and noticed this site got no update since late 2009. Looks like it’s not just others being busy with other things to do.  Happy 2010 for everyone with all the best – Emil

P.S.: If you wonder what I look like since we have last met in person – I have reworked my favourite self-portrait:

I was having my break and I found this picture:

And as a response I got from my colleague another picture:

While these pictures are funny they also express common past, present and future deficits of many beings – the lack of sincerity and solidarity.

A few minutes ago – while I was dumpster diving the internet visiting that shiny Munin site we have once setup for some eye candy a more complete picture – I discovered the servers have today reached their first year uptime. In general that is nothing special, but well, this is our project. This thrills me and now it’s time for another 365+ days with keeping the engines running…cheers!

After I returned home from a vacation much too short I am now alone at home for another week – the family is spending some more time in vacation. Soooo. I have to feed myself.
This is what I have created in less than 40 minutes without any recipe – a pizza. And no, it is not convenience food.

Take some flour, cheese, tomato sludge, water, yeast, salt, olive oil, olives, onions, garlic, more vegetables and scramble it until you have a homogeneous pulp and smear it onto the baking sheet.