Summer in Germany -2

[singlepic id=247 w=320 h=240 float=left] This Picture::The village and the river and the castle on the top of the hill.

The little village has a ruin of a very old castle on the top of the hill. It is said the castle was build around 1200! It’s amazing such old building is still preserved like this. It was said to be destroyed during the 30 years war around 1650 in Europe by Swidish (need to read history about this…) . The bridge is said built back in Roman time. It’s amazing to see cars driving on it all the time! It has better quality than some bridges built in 20 centrury!

[singlepic id=129 w=320 h=240 float=left] Walking up to the hill was a nice work out. And as soon as we got there, we were rewarded by such beautiful view of the village! The houses with red roofs looked so small from distance, as if they are from a fairy tale. The lovely little village has 2 rivers running by/through. The rivers add a a lot beauty to the it.

Summer in Germany – 1

[singlepic id=245 w=320 h=240 float=left]After 11 hours flight from Los Angeles, finally we were close to our destination, Munich. From the air, my first view of Germany was extremely beautiful. Green or brown farm fields extended, spotted with small villages with red roofs. I felt the tiring flight was worth it already! I didn’t expect to see so many farms here since Germany is famous for its car and machinery industry. On the way driving to the village, there were corn fields, also forests. What a lovely countryside scenery of Germany!

Create my own AWS AMI

Followed this very detailed instruction to create my own CentOS5 AWS AMI image

How to create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 Machine Image (AMI)

Every thing went all right except the problem came when booting the image…it doesn’t boot.

It seems that the kernel 2.6.16 is too old, so download 2.6.18 from Amazon Dev forum.
Rebundled and registered the image with new kernel but still it doesn’t boot….
The next thing I tried is to specify the kernel ID and RAM ID as the same ones which is used to bundle/upload AMI images, when bringing up the instance. It booted this time.

Using the following way to convert the instance-store backed image to EBS backed image.
Bring up a EBS volume and attach to this server,
# mkdir /newos && mount /dev/sdf /newos
# rsync -avHx / /newos
# rsync -avHx /dev /newos
# sync;sync;sync;sync && umount /newos
Then create a snapshot of the volume.

Use command line or aws admin console to register AMI
Register the AMI
# ec2-register -a x86_64 –block-device-mapping /dev/sda1=snap-2715c442::false –name mycentos5ebs_2012 –kernel aki-xxxxxx –ramdisk ari-xxxxxx -K pk-xxxxxxxxxxxxx.pem -C cert-xxxxxxxxxxxx.pem –region us-west-1
IMAGE ami-xxxxxx
(use the same aki-xxxxx and ari-xxxxxx as the original server used for creating image)

Another issue:
When running “yum update”, it shows error message for corrupted rpm db.
It seems that rpm db is using Berkely DB and after tried to fix the db by
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm –rebuilddb
It still shows error “cannot open Packages index using db3”

So initial the db by
rpm –initdb
then install the Base yum packages again
yum -y groupinstall Base

References
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_fedora
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/compiling-linux-kernel-26.html
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/use-your-own-kernel-with-amazon-ec2.html
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/UserProvidedkernels.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linuxboot/
http://amazonaws.michael–martinez.com/

Installing Cent OS 5.5 on EC2 with the Cent OS 5.5 Kernel

New VM network issum

After brought up a new VM on VMware using CentOS template, I had problem to setup the network.
“The network device eth0 seems missing” was shown when I tried to bring up eth0. But actually the system thought the device is eth2!

Here is a good article showing how to fix this issue,

Here

Arroyo seko hike

image It starts at camp site of switzs fall, the trail follows a creek all the way. Even it was a hot day, there’s still a good amount of water in the creek, together with many small waterfalls, pools nearby.

Tiger lily seems love this area very much. I have never seen so many tiger lilies like here on a hiking in south California.