six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2020-06-11

Installing Discourse on Devuan

Before deciding on setting up my Q&A site with Question2Answer I evaluated several programs, one of them being Discourse. And even though I ultimately decided against Discourse (because the setup was too complex and it doesn't have all the features I wanted) I don't want my experiences go to waste, so I'll publish them here.

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Posted 19:57 [permalink]

2020-06-02

Privacy-friendly Logging With Nginx

IP addresses are considered personal information, so your web server is not supposed to log them, at least not in a way that would allow tracing the address back to a person. The usual way to comply with this requirement is to mask part of the visitor's IP address, e.g. 192.168.23.42 → 192.168.23.0 (IPv4) or fd22:e03e:f88a:ea84::42 → fd22:e03e:: (IPv6).

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Posted 15:27 [permalink]

2014-03-26

Cleanup of DB2 Backups Fails with Return Code 136

Recently I encountered a rather weird problem with the cleanup of backups of some of our DB2 databases. The database backups are done via TSM by running the following command:

db2 "backup db DBNAME online use tsm"

Cleanup of obsolete backups is done by running the following commands via a scheduled task.

db2adutl delete full older than TIMESTAMP db DBNAME without prompting
db2adutl delete logs between S0000000.LOG and S(xxxxxxx-1).LOG db DBNAME without prompting
db2 "connect to DBNAME"
db2 "prune history DATE and delete"
db2 "prune logfile prior to Sxxxxxxx.LOG"
db2 "connect reset"

Sxxxxxxx.LOG is the oldest log of the oldest backup to be kept, which is extracted from the output of db2adutl query full db DBNAME. S(xxxxxxx-1).LOG is that log number minus one.

Although this setup had been working for several years without problems and no changes were made to the system, the log cleanup step suddenly started to fail for some databases while it still worked fine for the others.

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Posted 21:10 [permalink]

2013-03-12

TSM BA Client 6.4 on Debian

Although IBM doesn't officially support its TSM client on Linux distributions other than SLES and RHEL the client works quite nicely on Debian. With version 6.4 you need at least the following 4 packages on AMD64 systems:

  • TIVsm-BA
  • TIVsm-API64
  • gskcrypt64
  • gskssl64

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Posted 00:46 [permalink]