If this already happened to you, you should try Toastmasters !

Toastmasters International, founded in 1924, is a worldwide non-profit organization dedicated to help people improving their public speaking and leadership skills. I am a member of the Stuttgart International Toastmasters Club for 10 months now and I surely do not regret it. A colleague of mine during my internship at HP  invited me to a first session. I instantaneously became enthusiastic about the Toastmasters’ principles:

Mission
Toastmasters International is [...] devoted to making effective oral communication a worldwide reality.

Through its member clubs, Toastmasters International helps men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening, and thinking – vital skills that promote self-actualization, enhance leadership potential, foster human understanding, and contribute to the betterment of mankind. [...]

Vision
Toastmasters International empowers people to achieve their full potential and realize their dreams. Through our member clubs, people throughout the world can improve their communication and leadership skills, and find the courage to change.

Values
Toastmasters International’s core values are integrity, dedication to excellence, service to the member, and respect for the individual. [...]

We meet every two weeks at the IBM Klub in Böblingen. Meetings usually begin with the so-called Table Topics: Members present one-to two-minute impromptu speeches on topics assigned to them immediately prior to the speech. To make a great Table Topic is a real art, you need to be:

- creative: you need to tell a story that is actually going to interest the audience
- organized: a good speech has an introduction, a body and a conclusion. The introduction must be powerful to catch the attention and the conclusion must be clear and precise to close your speech in an elegant way
- focused: some speakers speak a lot in order to fill up the two minutes, however the goal of a Table Topic is to answer a question. Hence the speaker needs to focus on answering this question.

After this come prepared speeches, when up to three members present speeches based on projects from the Toastmasters Program manuals. Projects cover such topics as speech organization, voice, language, gestures, and persuasion.Their are ten projects in the Toastmasters “Competent Communicator” manual. So far, I have finished six of them and will finish the manual at the end of the Toastmasters year (June of 2010).

Every prepared speaker is assigned an evaluator who points out the speaker’s strengths and weaknesses and offers suggestions for improvement; the evaluations follow the prepared speeches. Here again, the evaluator needs to be precise, focused and friendly. The evaluation is an art: you have to make suggestions to the speaker so that he can get better, without hurting him.

What I love about this organization is that everything is planned to make the members better persons:
- better speakers, through the table topics and prepared speeches
- better listeners, through the evaluations, which require a lot of attention
- better leaders. Why ? Because Toastmasters is a worldwide organization, and like any organization, it has goals and need people to reach them. There are different levels within the organization: worldwide, regional, local and club. I am currently officer in the club as a Vice President Public Relations and I really like the job. I think that I can help  our club grow and fulfil its objectives. This is undoubtedly an extremely valuable opportunity to gain some leadership experience outside of the job.

If you need some more information, please visit the site of the international organization, or my club’s !

HP-UX is one of the few remainig commercial Unices out there. Today, only 3 play a significant role on the enterprise OS market : IBM AIX, running on Power processors, SUN Solaris, running on SPARC and x86 processors and HP-UX, running today on Intel Itanium-based servers. The latter used to run on HP’s own processors PA-RISC (for Precision Architecture) but after HP consolidated its portfolio on the only Itanium processors, it can only be purchased on IA64 processors.
HP-UX’s last version is HP-UX 11i v3, and this version has been enhanced and extended by three following updates.

File Hierarchy Standard (FHS)

HP-UX is a System V Unix. Let’s take a look at the root directory structure:

- /dev
This directory contains all device files, representing all devices attached to the system. Raw devices can be found under /dev/rdisk, block devices are in /dev/dsk and logical volumes are also placed in /dev

- /etc
As usual on Unix systems, all configuration files are stored in this directory.
All files controlling system startup and shutdown and daemons are located in /etc/rc.config.d. For instance, to configure your network interfaces for each boot and setup routes, you will edit the file /etc/rc.config.d/netconf and insert

INTERFACE_NAME[0]=lan0
IP_ADDRESS[0]=xx.xx.xx.xx
SUBNET_MASK[0]=xx.xx.xx.xx
BROADCAST_ADDRESS[0]=”"
INTERFACE_STATE[0]=”"
DHCP_ENABLE[0]=0
INTERFACE_MODULES[0]=”"

- /home
The usual home directory

- /sbin
The files located here are needed at boot time. The rc script that controls the the system startup is located in this directory as well as all runlevel dependent links to scripts respectively in /sbin/rc0.d/ , /sbin/rc1.d/ , etc. All available startup scripts are located in /sbin/init.d/

- /stand
The HP-UX kernel is kept in this directory. The kernel file is /stand/vmunix and the configuration file is /stand/system.

- /net
Reserved for remote file system mount points

- /opt
This directory is used to install applications on HP-UX. Each application has its own directory hierarchy. For the Apache Webserver, this will look like the following : /opt/hpws/ (for HP web services, the root directory, where Apache, Tomcat, and others are located) : /opt/hpws/apache/bin for executable binaries, /opt/hpws/apache/etc for the config files, and so on…

- /tmp
The temporary directory where anybody can create or delete files. Unlike Solaris, this directory is not flushed after reboot.

- /usr
Most HP-UX files are located here, especially user-relates commands, libraries, doc & manual pages and contributed software.
/usr/bin : user commands, applications and utilities.
/usr/include : include and header files for programming
/usr/lib : libraries for programming
/usr/sbin : many administration commands are located here
/usr/share/man : man pages

- /var
/var contains log files distributed across different directories:
/var/adm : system administration related programs (for instance /var/adm/sw for software installation/removal, /var/cron for cron log files, etc.)
/var/opt : application-related logs
/var/spool : print services related files

Virtualization

On the virtualization side, there are one feature shipped with any HP-UX instance : the Secure Resource Partitions (SRP) which are somehow similar to the Solaris zones.
You can assign particular resources to these partitions such as CPU shares, entire CPU’s (psets), memory as well as disk bandwith. Moreover, the security features of the SRP allow you to assign disk and network access to a particular partition. On the top of that, the SRP will make sur that your files (sockets, links, whatever…) cannot be accessed from outside the partition, unless a rule has been expressly defined in the config file. The SRP’s also use the capabilities of the role-based access control (RBAC) that allow a user to gain privileges to execute a single operation (e.g. a user can get privileges to mount a disk without having to be root). This allows the admin to define precise roles and increases the accountability of each user.

Beside the Base Operating Environment (BOE), which is shipped with any HP-UX, the user can also choose between the High Availibility OE and the Virtual Server Environment OE (or the Datacenter OE that contains everything).

With the VSE-OE, you have the choice between different virtualization types :
- nPars
nPars (for Node Partitions) are only available on mid-range and high-end cell-based servers. These cells consist of a kind of a plate on which CPUs and memory reside. Npars are just grouped cells that act as a single server.
- vPars
vPars (for Virtual Partitions) are more fine-grained: you can assign here resources on a per CPU basis. They run on HP-UX 11i v1, v2 and v3 only.
- Integrity Virtual Machines
The Integrity Virtual Machines are some kind of VMware-like virtual machines. They run on the top of a HP-UX guest that emulates the hardware and can paravirtualize the I/O drivers to accelerate the I/O throughput. Sysadmins create then virtual switches that can be internal or related to a physical interface to let the IVM communicate with the outside world. For network intensive workloads, you can assign an interface to a dedicated VM over a virtual switch to enhance performance. The last feature brought by the third update of HP-UX 11i v3 is the capability for IVM to migrate from one physical host to another (just like VMotion or Citrix XenMotion do).

Software and patch management

HP-UX’s software and patch management is based on Software Depot (SD-UX). Software packages are divided in different structures:

- Filesets: a collection of files
- Subproducts: group of filesets
- Products: examples are X11, Oracle, etc.
- Bundles: group of products
- Software depot: repository where software packages are made available for download and install on clients

Software depot can be used with an X or text-only interface, or for some tasks with the command line.

You can list the currently installed software on your system by entering the “swlist” command.
To install a new package, find out first on which server server has software depots. Then enter
# swlist -l depot @ hostname
to list all available depots on this server. Since you want to install a single package, enter
# swlist -d @ hostname:/path/to/the/depot
in order to list all applications and their description.
# swinstall -s hostname:/path/to/the/depot packagename
will then install the required software, resolving automatically the software dependencies.

Patches are managed in the same way and are also installed with the swinstall command.

Applications

HP-UX and the Integrity servers are designed for mission critical applications. Running an Apache server is possible, but it is not the kind of applications you will expect to see on such machines. Databases and Java application servers are rather the sweet spots of this OS.

A lot of commercial applications are available (to name a few : Oracle, Websphere, Weblogic,…) but MySQL, Tomcat, Apache and other Free Software are also ported and maintained on HP-UX.

The default shell is the Bourne shell, set in vi mode. Coming from a Linux/Bash world, it took me a little adaptation time.

Network

The network is managed with the tools lanscan (which will give information about the interfaces) and ifconfig (that will help configuring them). As we have seen it, the interfaces can be configured automatically at boot time in the file /etc/rc.config.d/netconf.

The domain names are resolved with the following files: /etc/hosts,  /etc/nsswitch.conf

Managing disks / SAN / Filesystems

The disks files are placed in the /dev/disks/ directory, the raw devices in /dev/rdisks/ . Note that you will only have one file to manage for a presented SAN LUN. The multipathing and failover are handled at the kernel level.

The most commonly used file system is onlineJFS, which is in fact a rebranded Veritas VxFS, and offers such features as online shrinking and extending of the filesystem and online refragmenting, which are much more reliable than, for instance, for ext3.

Resources : http://www.amazon.com/HP-Certified-HP-UX-System-Administration/dp/0130183741

That’s fine for users running proprietary software, but I have found a simple solution to flash your BIOS without even have to run WinFlash with Wine (which did not work for me anyway).

1) Download the BIN file provided on the Shuttle website for your version of the Shuttle

2) To install the flashrom package on Ubuntu (from the universe repository) enter

$ sudo apt-get install flashrom

3) Determine what is your BIOS by entering

$ sudo flashrom
[sudo] password for user1:
Calibrating delay loop… OK.
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset “NVIDIA MCP67″, enabling flash write… OK.
Found chip “PMC Pm49FL004″ (512 KB) at physical address 0xfff80000.
No operations were specified.

I obviously own a PC with the chipset Nvidia MCP67 and I check if this chipset is supported
I perform a backup of my existing BIOS and then I flash it

$ sudo flashrom -r backup.bin
$ sudo flashrom -wv SN68SP0P.BIN

SN68SP0P.BIN being the file downloaded in 1)

Reboot to check if you really have the latest version of the BIOS (press Del if you just see the hiding screen instead of the real BIOS screen) and you should see “SN68SP0P” on the top-left corner of your screen.

ATTENTION : to flash a BIOS can have severe consequences for your PC so be careful when doing it and do not make me responsible for having screwed your box

SUN’s stock has increased of 78% yesterday, meaning that Wall Street is taking the rumors pretty seriously.

This move would create an industry giant and would reinforce IBM on the server as well as on the software and services market. Synergy effects resulting from this acquisition would especially help IBM compete against HP on the server and storage market. SUN’s latest financial results were poor and even put in question the viability of the company itself. SUN’s customers can now be sure that one strong company will support them. On the hardware side, IBM’s and SUN’s blade market shares account respectively for 25% and 5% of the total. A consolidation of these portfolios could help IBM compete against HP’s unrivaled leadership on this fast-growing market. IBM and SUN already work together (Lotus Symphony, IBM’s collaboration suite, already integrates SUN’s open-source OpenOffice.org tools suite) and these two companies are known to be strong open-source advocates. However, this acquisition still raises lots of questions.

SUN develops (with Fujitsu) its own SPARC processor line for high-end, business-critical servers and IBM’s POWER processors are their direct competitors. Processor development is an extremely expensive process and I cannot imagine IBM maintaining two different processor lines within the same company and I assume IBM would eventually drop SPARC. So what about customers, especially in the financial and communication industries which have a big SPARC install base ?

AIX, IBM’s Unix, competes directly versus SUN’s operating system Solaris on SPARC, moreover, Solaris is a direct competitor to Linux on the mass market x86. SUN’s strategy toward Linux has always been from hesitant to hostile whereas IBM has always been a great Linux supporter. Big Blue will have to deal with a portfolio problem, as well as with internal cultural problems. Solaris’ users and admins are very loyal to it and SUN has put Solaris at the heart of its datacenter strategy. If IBM was to drop Solaris for AIX, this would mean a lot of frustration for the Solaris community.

Finally, on the database level, IBM’s DB2 and Informix compete versus MySQL and PostgreSQL (the latter not directly owned but pushed by SUN) and SUN’s open source application server Glassfish is a direct threat to IBM’s middleware technology Websphere.

A merger between SUN and Dell would have made more sense from a pure portfolio perspective :
- Dell has a strong blade and x86 portfolio
- it owns no business-critical line of servers
- it could have pushed Solaris on x86
- Dell has no footprint neither on the application, nor on the middleware, nor on the application layer.
Perhaps has IBM moved before Dell did, fearing an emerging third strong player on the datacenter market.

Even though SUN’s acquisition by IBM is not official yet, I think the two companies will have really a hard time until they are completely integrated. The two companies have different technology and business cultures and SUN’s products mostly directly compete with IBM’s. Furthermore, today’s economic climate will make things even harder, since Big Blue could loose a lot of energy for the integration instead of focusing on customers. Of course, both companies together can leverage their huge portfolio to create synergy effects, however, I doubt this would happen soon.

sudo modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In order to fully use your Intel processor on a HP laptop, follow the following steps :

- boot your computer
- when the BIOS window shows up, enter the BIOS manager
- enable the Virtualization technology in the BIOS menu
- save the changes and exit
- shut down your computer
- remove the battery and put it back in your PC
- boot your computer

and Intel VT should work without problem.

The usage of Linux is fostered within the company : each employee has access to LinuxCOE (which is a HP product and licensed under the General Public License) and can install his favorite distribution pretty easily on his personal computer. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Gentoo and others are at disposal and HP even provides licenses for SUSE and Red Hat.
Since MS Office is the most widespread office suite and most of my colleagues have Windows XP, it is unfortunately hard to work without it. With Crossover, which is a product based on Wine, allows me to use the MS Office suite as well as Internet Explorer 6 in some cases (*sigh*…).
The officially supported instant messaging protocol was Jabber, which is ideal to use in a GNU/Linux environment (for instance with Pidgin) but has been changed for Microsoft Communicator that I use via its web-based interface.
Due to the massive demand of employees, Firefox is officially supported by the internal IT service, in addition to IE.
On the customer side, HP is committed to Linux : the ProLiant servers are the most sold servers running GNU/Linux on the world and the Integrity servers shipped with the Itanium processors also run RHEL 5 and SLES 10 SP1. Moreover, there are lots of people at the company working as developers for open-source projects or kernel developers.

Nevertheless, the situation is not perfect for GNU/Linux or alternative software desktop users.
Linux is not officially supported by HP’s IT and there is an evident lack of communication around LinuxCOE. I even personally made senior technical consultants aware of it.
Not all internal web-based applications run correctly with Firefox and some multimedia streamed videos are encoded with codecs Linux cannot play.
I cannot share my calendar with my colleagues because Evolution does not work perfectly with Exchange 2007 (even if my e-mails and meetings invitations work fine) and there is no native application to take part to Netmeeting conferences (did someone try this solution ?). The move to Vista and MS Office 2007 is also planned but, so far, Crossover does not support this version so I hope there will be a workaround until here.

So far, using GNU/Linux as a primarily desktop operating system as an HP employee was not hard and I have been pleasantly surprised by the LinuxCOE offering, among other things. Even though I experience a little loss of productivity, I prefer to stay a little longer at work than use an other OS than GNU/Linux. If things need to do something which is really urgent and only doable under Windows, I have a VMware virtual machine ready to boot, however, this happens really rarely. So if you are hesitating to apply for a job or an internship at HP, thinking that you will not have the right/possibility/authorization tu run GNU/Linux, I hope this article will help to change your mind.

Of course, HP is a huge company and from an IT perspective, support multiple operating systems is a big effort. One the other hand, this is the best example of the advantages of respecting standards (real ones…) in order every user to have access to the information, independently of his OS.

After I wrote my degree dissertation about Xen, I took a Citrix Xenserver 4.1 training and I successfully passed the Xenserver certification.

Even if I disagree on the evolution of the project (Red Hat resigned from it, Linux distributions are optionally supported if you install the Linux pack from another DVD and, as we expected from Citrix, virtual servers running Windows are the priority of this platform), I already have a good knowledge of this technology and since it will be soon part of HP’s Insight dynamics, a management software managing virtual machines, I thought it was a good opportunity to go on with Xen. Moreover, it is still an open-source project and that is the reason why a VMware training would not have interested me that much.

Finally, I hope that HP will continue to support other virualization projects such as KVM, which is already part of the Linux kernel, and is really being pushed forward by IBM and Red Hat, for example. ]]> http://www.hmarcy.com/2008/09/citrix-certified-administrator-xenserver-enterprise-edition-4/feed/ 0 http://www.hmarcy.com/2008/09/disaster-recovery-with-xen/ http://www.hmarcy.com/2008/09/disaster-recovery-with-xen/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:45:21 +0000 admin http://www.hmarcy.com/?p=23 Xen has been the subject and of my degree dissertation (German : Diplomarbeit) I have been writing between June and September 2007.

I have been doing an internship at Hewlett Packard Germany between April and September in the Technology Solution Group division (the business division of HP for servers, storage and so on…), in the Outsourcing part of TSG.
This degree dissertation is a report of a disaster-recovery program implemented for the German bank MLP located in Wiesloch. This program has been designed by both MLP an HP people and implemented by HP colleagues and myself.

Basically, the concept is to shift a complete productive environment from one data center to another. This is achieved by a virtualized environment based on two servers SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 with Xen, two EVA 8000 (SAN solution of HP) and a HP product named “Continuous access” that mirrors constantly the content of one SAN to another.

If you want to learn more about my work, here is a link to my degree dissertation (only in German available). It is, of course, licensed under a Creative commons license.