Wrote a couple of articles on games for a magazine. Beta’d a couple of games. Managed to play a couple of older games from my backlog (still huge). Catalogueing my collection. Now preparing for the GamesCom in Cologne next month. Hope to finally be able to play Gray Matter, a game by Jane Jensen I am looking forward to, and to see a couple of other games that have been announced such as The Witcher 2, Black Mirror 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Drakensang.

I am also using that strategy in Fallout 3, which turned out not a very wise one. After discovering Big Town, essentially a cluster of five or six houses where inhabitants have barricaded themselves in, I was sent out on a mission to find out what had happened to two of them. They had likely been abducted to the nearby headquarters of police (in Germantown) by super mutants. So I went to investigate in my usual manner, checking every nook and cranny of the building, gathering hidden ammo, bottle caps and food, as well as the courage to go on. After a while the message that Red had been killed appeared on my screen. I went on, only to be told that Shorty had also been killed. When I had finally killed all radroaches and mutants I returned to Big Town, where everyone was understandably disappointed with me. I was disappointed myself, too, as the quest registered as failed and I did not get any experience points. So, very uncharacteristically for me, I loaded an old savegame and tried again. I usually tend to accept the outcome of a quest if I have failed it for this kind of reason (being too slow or unprecise). This time I took care to run through the building a lot faster, skipping some of the smaller enemies and leaving some rooms undiscovered. I managed to free Red and gladly saved the game. Fortunately, there is an option to tell her to stay put while you clear the rest of the floor. You can also give her a gun. I did both and went on to find Shorty. Rescued him too, and gave him a gun too. The three of us went back to Big Town and were greeted by the others. They offered me a reward that I refused, but did get the experience points. I only regret giving them my guns as I did not get them back and they were quite good ones, too..

Now I am off to Minefield to defuse some mines for Moira’s book. I am using the “progress slowly, save often” method again as I desperately need all those little bits of experience you get from a successful defusing. Whenever I don’t manage to unarm one, I load and try again, even if I did not get harmed by its explosion. Hopefully, there is no time penalty on this quest!

The road to Megaton was uneventful from there on. As soon as I arrived, I was greeted by the sheriff, who did not know if my father had been there but he did have some information on who might. He also told me the town is built around this big bomb that may or may not blow up any second. The residents aren’t afraid, some even worship it. They say that if it blows, everyone will get vaporized into a billion atoms, and each of those atoms will form a new world. Kinda scary and weird… Next I visited Walter at the water processing plant. He asked me to repair some leaks and bring him scrap metal I may encounter on my travels. Seems like a nice fellow. There’s also a trader in this town who is writing a survival guide. She gives me all kinds of little errands to run so she can complete her chapters as she can’t leave her shop to do her own research. She asked me to get radiation poisoning so she could study the disease, and promised she would heal me properly. I did get a mutation though… She also sent me out to visit a nearby supermarket to find out if there were still supplies left. Well, there were, but it was also crawling with Raiders. They are good for building up some experience though! I found two computers in the supermarket that I could hack into. The mini-game to do that is kind of fun to do, it involves guessing a password and getting clues a little like in the “Mastermind” board game (after each attempt you will see how many letters in the word are correct and in the correct place). Ofcourse, I had already helped nipeng solve several of these so I knew what to expect. The words seem to be randomized for each game though, as I had different solutions than nipeng. Now she wants me to go visit a minefield and try to disarm one before it blows up. That’ll have to wait until next time…

As Nipeng played, I watched and enjoyed the game more than I had expected. Then when I discovered there is a “very easy” difficulty setting, I could no longer hold off and decided to have a go at it. In the next couple of weeks (or months, probably, this is a long game and I am a slow player) I will post my views on the game as I play short sessions.

Right after starting the game, I got to experience my own birth, then had to choose a name and gender. Soon after, something went wrong with my mother… and the screen went blank. A little later I was apparently now a year old. My father told me he had to go do an errand and he locked me into my play pen. Fortunately, I am a resourceful little girl and I managed to escape and explore the room in no time at all. I found a little book that let me choose some basic statistics. I distributed the points as I thought they would be best for me. Another white-out and it’s my tenth birthday. Daddy and my friend Amata have prepared a surprise party! Pity the local bully is also invited and decides to spoil my fun… I receive a Pip-boy, a watch-like device that is pretty handy as it has a map, an inventory, keeps track of your health and quests you are doing plus it has a light. Daddy has another surprise, for which I have to follow him to his office where his colleague has something to show me. My very own BB-gun! And I get to practise on an oversized cockroach. The V.A.T.S. I remember from earlier Fallout games works smoothly and looks awesome (quite a lot of gore, though). The screen goes white once more and I am now 16, the age at which all Vault Dwellers have to sit a G.O.A.T. exam. On my way there, I see some wannabe tough classmates harass my friend Amata, and I punch them in the face to make them stop. She can’t help being the daughter of the Overseer. I tell the teacher I don’t need to take the test to decide my future career, I can bloody well choose my own path. Which means I get to distribute points towards skills on my own rather than let my answers to some stupid questions do that for me. One more white screen and I am roughly awakened by Amata. She tells me a somewhat incoherent story about my father escaping the vault and the Overseer’s men killing his colleague and now hunting me down. I have to get out, and soon!

Escaping the vault seemed easy enough when Nipeng did it, although I remember how confused we were the first few times we looked at the map. Having seen him figure it out sure helped me find my bearings. It also prepared me for the kind of (and number of) enemies to expect. Still, it got my heart racing and my adrenaline pumping. Soon I encountered a security officer that tried to stop me. I had no other option than to club him to death with my baseball bat. I went through his belongings and found a small gun. He also had some armour that offered better protection than my standard issue Vault jumpsuit. It fits like a glove. After killing what feels like a dozen men and thirty radroaches I finally reach the Overseer’s office. I threaten him to give me his password so I can escape the Vault without further violence, but he is not impressed. I decide not to kill him and go through his desk and lockers, then his living quarters. When I finally succeed in finding the password and opening his secret tunnel, the Overseer sends some more men after me. But I now have quite a bit of ammunition and I quickly kill them. He could have just let me go…

Once outside, I need to blink a couple of times as I am not used to so much light. I glance round but don’t see any enemies. The Vault Door behind me is securely locked. This seems like a good point to end the session.

If you have installed Slackware on a LVM partition you must pay some attention to the step where you create the new initrd (initial ramdisk). You use an initrd to load kernel modules (not compiled statically into the kernel) before mounting the root filesystem.

In my case I need the ext3 and LVM related modules to be available. The following command creates the desired initrd:

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.27.7-smp -m ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/vg00/root -o /boot/initrd-generic-smp-2.6.27.7-smp.gz -L

With:
-c = clear the cached initrd-tree in /boot before making the ramdisk
-k = points to the kernel specific modules in /lib/modules
-m = the modules that must be included in the ramdisk
-f = filesystem type of the rootfs
-r = root partition
-o = output file (bij default /boot/initrd.gz)
-L = enable LVM support

Relevant info:
Slackware Readme on initrd
Slackware Readme on LVM

I am using the following setup:.
A Ubuntu server with VMware server 1.x or 2.x as a host.
Centos 5.2 guests with Red Hat Cluster suite with all updates installed.

So what do you need to get fencing to  work?

Fence driver
Not really a driver but the fence_vmware perl script. I am using the 1.4 version from the main branch. Placed it as /sbin/fence_vmware on the nodes and made it executable. I commented out some sections:

Stuff regarding release info:

#print “$pname $RELEASE_VERSION $BUILD_DATE\n”;
#print “$REDHAT_COPYRIGHT\n” if ( $REDHAT_COPYRIGHT );

The password script option ($opt_S) on two locations in the script:

#if (defined $opt_S) {
#       $pwd_script_out = `$opt_S`;
#       chomp($pwd_script_out);
#       if ($pwd_script_out) {
#               $opt_p = $pwd_script_out;
#       }
#}

I did not pursue fence_vmware_ng, solving its errors in my setup seemed too much trouble.

Perl Api
The vmware perl api. Download the tarball, extract it and run the perl install script inside. Install this software on all cluster nodes. You need GCC, kernel-devel packages and some crypto libraries  (openssl-devel) for the installation to complete successfully. After the installation I had to make two symlinks because the api was expecting some libraries in /usr/bin instead of /usr/lib.

ln -s /usr/lib/libcrypto.so /usr/bin/libcrypto.so.0.9.7
ln -s /usr/lib/libssl.so /usr/bin/libssl.so.0.9.7

Cluster configuration
A modified cluster.conf. First modify the the clusternodes in the <clusternodes> section to contain <fence> entries for each node.

<clusternode name=”node1″ nodeid=”1″ votes=”1″>
<fence>
<method name=”1″>
<device name=”node1_fence”/>
</method>
</fence>
</clusternode>
<clusternode name=”node2″ nodeid=”2″ votes=”1″>
<fence>
<method name=”1″>
<device name=”node2_fence”/>
</method>
</fence>
</clusternode>

For each fencedevice, in above case node1_fence and node2_fence, an entry must be added to the <fencedevices> section with the relevant options configured.

<fencedevices>
<fencedevice agent=”fence_vmware” name=”node1_fence” ipaddr=”vmware_server” switch=”8333″ login=”fence_user” passwd=”fence_passwd” port=”/vmware/node1/node1.vmx”/>
<fencedevice agent=”fence_vmware” name=”node2_fence” ipaddr=”vmware_server” switch=”8333″ login=”fence_user” passwd=”fence_passwd” port=”/vmware/node2/node2.vmx”/>
</fencedevices>

Options explained:
agent = relates to fence_vmware in /sbin
name = name of the fence device as mentioned in the <fence> section of the <clusternode>
ipaddr = ip or hostname of the vmware server
switch = the portnumber the vmware server listens on (for 1.x it is 902, for 2.x it is 8333).
login = the login of a user with enough privileges to powercycle this particular vm
passwd = password of above user
port = path to the vmx of the to be fenced server

Sources of information:
VMware Communities
VMware Fencing in Red Hat Cluster 5
Red Hat Cluster FAQ
Red Hat Fencing FAQ

After a few days of use I found the web interface a showstopper. I understand what VMWare did in 2.0, they created a feature rich management client as a web application which removes the need to install extra software on your pc. For me personally this new interface is too slow and generates too many errors.

I have reinstalled Server 1.x. The “old” VMWare server console, drawing on local resources, is lightning fast compared to the 2.0 management interface.

I will give Server 2.x another try in the future when it has had a few upgrade/bugfix releases.

Although Cologne is considerably closer to home (in fact, I used to drive to Cologne to catch a plane to Leipzig) I am not really enthusiastic about this. First, I liked the GC Leipzig as it was and had a lot of fun the three times I visited. The GamesCom will be much larger than the GC was and I don’t like large masses of people. Second, I fear it will be aimed at a different public, more toward the general gaming crowd, which means there will be less room for the obscure adventures and RPGs I love. I always came back from the Leipzig GC with tons of information about upcoming adventure games, and I had a lot of my old game boxes signed by legends like Jane Jensen, Noah Falstein, Hal Barwood and Steve Ince. I guess that’s not going to happen this year… but I’ll keep checking the line-ups of the individual developers and publishers to see what they will be presenting before I decide to go or not.

Just go the the module config of bind in webmin and enable the “Support DNS for IPv6 addresses” option.