six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2022-05-21

A Convenience Wrapper for the Puppet Agent

At work we're doing config management with Puppet, and although using the Puppet agent is mostly fine, I have some workflows where it becomes rather unwieldy. For example, when debugging something or developing a new role I usually want to keep the agent disabled, but still do manual (dry-)runs every now and then to check what Puppet would change in the config or apply changes selectively. Which tends to look somewhat like this:

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Posted 12:09 [permalink]

2020-06-25

Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation (Update)

This is a brief update to my previous post Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation. In recent versions the name of the actual installer binary has changed to UiConsole. The problem and solution remain the same, though.

Download and unpack the archive, then run

echo '/opt/barracuda' | ./lin/$(uname -m)/UiConsole

to install the agent to a different directory. To uninstall run

echo 'u' | ./lin/$(uname -m)/UiConsole

Note that uninstallation leaves an auto-generated SSL certificate in the directory <installdir>/config, so you need to clean up manually afterwards. Also, the public download location for the agents has apparently been removed. Now you need to download the agent from the Cloud Control web UI (System → Software-Downloads).

Posted 21:32 [permalink]

2020-05-23

Barracuda Backup Reports Missing Drive

Barracuda Backup reports show a warning when the Windows agent cannot find a drive that is supposed to be backed up:

A Volume (drive) that was previously backed up is no longer there and being backed up.: Removing volume X: because it no longer exists.

The vendor documentation has an article that describes how to bring the missing drive back online. But what if the drive was removed on purpose and people just forgot to adjust the backup configuration first? You can't simply change the backup configuration to ignore the drive after the fact, since the drive is already absent and thus cannot be de-selected.

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Posted 11:05 [permalink]

2015-12-31

Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation

Barracuda Networks provide agents for their backup appliance for various operating systems. Unfortunately the Linux agent (unlike the Windows agent) does not come with an option for a silent installation, and it doesn't look like the vendor can be bothered to do anything about it.

Instead of being able specify a path on the commandline (or at least force a silent installaton to the default path) you're always prompted for the path where the agent should be installed:

/tmp # tar xzf barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x.tar.gz
/tmp # cd barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x
/tmp/barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x # ./install
Please choose an installation path, or press enter for default.
[/usr/local/barracuda/bbs]: _

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Posted 01:13 [permalink]

2015-03-12

Repairing a Suspect msdb Database

Sometimes a situation arises where an SQL Server instance comes back up with a database tagged as "suspect". Apparently there is a number of possible causes for this, like transaction log corruption, insufficient memory or disk space, or unexpected shutdowns due to hardware or power failure. In our case the reason was probably a hardware failure, since the database resides on an iSCSI volume, and we were making changes to our iSCSI network. And to make things a little bit more interesting, our msdb database just had to be among the affected databases.

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Posted 19:07 [permalink]

2013-12-20

Automatic Updates Consuming 100% CPU

For a couple months now I've been observing the Automatic Updates service (wuauserv) causing high CPU load on hosts running Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP after new updates had been released. The problem vanished after the updates had been installed.

Apparently this is a problem with the Windows Update Agent, caused by inefficient handling of superseded updates. Installing the latest cumulative Internet Explorer update should resolve the problem.

Posted 12:13 [permalink]

2012-11-17

Importing VMs From external Hyper-V Hosts

I've been working on a project where I needed to migrate (clone actually, in order to maintain a fallback scenario) virtual machines from external (standalone) Hyper-V hosts to a Hyper-V cluster. The external hypervisors were not members of the same domain as the cluster nodes. The networks were separated by a firewall. A trust relationship between the domains was not desired.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) supports this scenario, but there are several steps that must be performed to prepare for the migration.

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Posted 20:03 [permalink]