Category Archives: Sysadmin

The ballooning daemon is not running

That’s the funniest err I’ve seen so far in XenServer. But here’s how to fix it.

When you try to start vm you get this:

user@computer:$ xe vm-start name-label=vm1
The server failed to handle your request, due to an internal error. The given message may give details useful for debugging the problem.
message: Failure("The ballooning daemon is not running")

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How to install Etherpad on Debian

Etherpad is a hosted web service that allows really real-time document collaboration for groups of users. It’s like Google Docs, or perhaps Google Docs is like Etherpad on steroids ? Anyway, if you’re looking for a secure real-time document sharing tool (unfortunately Etherpad is only able to server text documents with very basic formatting) here’s how to deploy it on Debian (Squeeze). Read more »

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Load balanced puppet dashboard

Puppet dashboard is a useful tool in terms of reporting and actually seeing what’s going on with your puppets. The things get a bit tricky when you have hundreds of nodes reporting every 5 minutes or so and running dashboard on a single host.

I assume you are using dashboard already and you looking into scaling it, although I’ll describe how to install it from scratch. This post will help you set up 2+ dashboard nodes with one node running MySQL db and shared spool/ directory.
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xenconsole: Could not read tty from store: No such file or directory

Since I’ve changed my job and joined Rackspace Cloud team I didn’t post anything as I’m still learning new things. Here’s a solution for problems with connecting to xen console. Read more »

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Disable root account [Debian]

One of things I like about Ubuntu is that root’s account is disabled by default and you need to use sudo. Here is how to make Debian work the same way. Read more »

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