Misc Tech Notes

content

2010-06-16T03:53:00.000-07:00

I suppose if I continue to let this blog stagnate I should at least point out that I no longer work at Sun and blogs.sun.com/jameslegg is no longer under my control (though I did write all the content there for what it is worth)

Cheers James

Moving

2008-09-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

On the rare occasions that I post new content I will post it at my new home blogs.sun.com/jameslegg. I'm not migrating posts so this blog will stay indefinitely.

Wet Nokia E71 Reset for idiots

2008-08-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

If like me you are an idiot and you decide that it is a good idea to take you brand new Nokia E71 phone on a very wet Motorcycle ride. You to will likely discover in the Cafe at the other end that you have an very wet phone that no longer turns on. If this sounds like the brain dead sort of thing you would do then try the following.

Step 1
Take the battery out and put the phone in the airing cupboard for a couple of days.

Step 2
Turn it on.

Step 3
If after this it says "Phone failed to Start up - Contact retailer" try holding down the green button the 3 and * button (don't bother holding down the Function button that you would normally use to get numbers) and turn the phone on with the power button. Keeping holding the buttons until the phone boots into the startup wizard. If you lucky you will be back at a blank phone.

Step 4
If your even more lucky you will have synced your contacts with another computer or server and can just re-sync them to get your numbers back.

Step 5
Don't be such a fool again.

Synergy OpenSolaris

2008-08-03T11:00:00.001-07:00

I've been a big fan of Synergy for years and getting it to compile on OpenSolaris is just a question of installing SUNWxorg-headers:

Grab the Synergy source and unpack then cd to the directory and install the SUNxorg-headers:
james@ickle:~/Download$ tar xf synergy-1.3.1.tar
james@ickle:~/Download$ cd synergy-1.3.1
james@ickle:~/Download/synergy-1.3.1$ pfexec pkg install SUNWxorg-headers

then it should compile as normal:
james@ickle:~/Download/synergy-1.3.1$ ./configure
james@ickle:~/Download/synergy-1.3.1$ make
james@ickle:~/Download/synergy-1.3.1$ pfexec make install

As an example here is my synergy config file:

james@frank:~$ cat /etc/synergy.conf
section: screens
ickle:
frank:
douglas:
meta = alt
end

section: links
ickle:
right = frank
frank:
left = ickle
right = douglas
douglas:
left = frank
end

The meta = alt line under douglas is to make synergy play nice with a Mac as a client.

The result is three machines with one keyboard and mouse.

x40 opensolaris

2008-08-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

Have been playing with OpenSolaris on the laptop again and, have discovered that the although SpeedStep is not supported on my old Dothan Pentium M using the Solaris Speedstep drivers. The frkit seems to allow the acpi to combine with the Gnome CpuFreq to step my CPU successfully.

So now I have CPU speed stepping which stops my laptop toasting me to death when i use it under OpenSolaris.
Still waiting on 6644080 to be fixed in build 95 so I can see if suspend will work though.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 Strategy Planning Meeting

2008-06-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

I just listened in on the call for the OpenSolaris (Indiana) community strategy planning meeting to get a bit of an idea where the OS is going. It seems that the road map includes a number of nice bits for the planned 2008.11 release. Some much needed work on the performance of pkg and PackageManager, an update to Gnome and a move to more open development and rudimentary SPARC support.

The Development plan included things like a planned move to a Mercurial repository for the beginning of August from the current SCM. The plans have the goal of eventually having non Sun community members able to make putbacks.

The repository system was described in more detail including how pkg.sun.com and pkg.opensolaris.org related. From my (fairly limited!) understanding it appears that pkg.sun.com will be where the Sun supported releases will live as well as encumbered, paid and other resources that are not going to be generally available in the same way or under the same licences as OpenSolaris itself. pkg.opensolaris.org will continue to be where the bleeding edge stuff lives, and will have a quick release cycle to conincide roughly with SXCE (bi-weekly builds). There will also be a stable version availble from pkg.opensolaris.org and there was mention of a proposed /contrib repositery for Open Source software from the community - if this means community maitained projects like songbird, beta builds of software or others things is not clear to me at the moment. Slides for this talk given by Tim Cramer and Dan Roberts are hear.

Stephen Hahn went into further detail about the way IPS works and the slides he used includes some nice information on the clever bits of IPS like bandwidth efficiency (when updating packages only get individual files needed) and publication safety (packages with incomplete dependencies denied published state).

Dave Miner talked about the Automated Installation (with the some SPARC support) in preview form hopefully making an appearance in the 2008.11 release. Which should make deployment on a larger scale an easier task. Other features like Solaris 10 co-existence (without jumping through hoops) and proper Zones support in the BE management side of things is also due. More details in his slides.

There was some further discussion about hardware compatibility and the HCL list being out of date, at which point I discovered that the Device Driver Utility has the ability to upload your machines specifications to the bigadmin HCL list.

The use of Sun Ray was also mentioned, with OpenSolaris having a nicer desktop experience than Solaris 10 the ability to get Sun Ray working might help with the adoption of Sun Ray as it can provide a more modern environment to the end user. It looks like this work is underway though no time estimations where mentioned.

Overall I got the impression that the people behind OpenSolaris are trying hard to push both usage and adoption as well as trying to fix some of the shortcomings of Solaris to make it more attractive to the Web 2.0 companies, the hobbyists as well as the Enterprise users. It's not there yet but I can see it coming, exciting times to be rejoining Sun!

Transmission Bittorent Client OpenSolaris

2008-06-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Missing from the default OpenSolaris distribution install is a Bittorent client. While not in pkg.opensolaris.com a binary Svr4 package of Transmission is available from hear and seems to work ok once I had installed libcurl

pfexec pkg install SUNWcurl
gunzip SFEtransmission-1.21-sol11-i386.pkg.gz
pfexec pkgadd -d SFEtransmission-1.21-sol11-i386.pkg

OpenSolaris

2008-05-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

With most of my Uni coursework completed I've had some time to devote to what I really enjoy doing - playing about with computers while not getting a lot done. Quite good timing as OpenSolaris the distribution of Solaris that is based on Nevada (Solaris 11) has just been released. Of course being a bit impatient I found a copy of RC2a to put onto my Thinkpad x40 a last week and today I just ran pkg refresh and pkg image-update to get the release version on the laptop. The IPS (Image Packet System) seems to be a fantastically nice addition to Solaris - my laptop is currently sucking down Open Office using the command pkg install openoffice. It uses a ZFS root file system to make a easy roll back from badly installed packages. Sticking ZFS and live upgrade style bits together with a package management system makes a huge amount of sense - I have hosed enough systems by ignoring warnings about incompatible packages now I can ignore the warnings and have a get out of jail free option In addition to the built in OpenSolaris IPS repository Blastwave.org and Sunfreeware both have IPS repos. A list of any more that pop up will hopefully be found on the new OpenSolaris.com (not .org) forums.

The RC2a install was a fairly painless procedure - though as this laptop also has Ubuntu and Windows on I had to make some use of Gparted to move partitions around so that the Solaris partition was the first primary this was to work around 6690194. Booting into Ubuntu to create the partition using Linux's fdisk and was enough to convince the OpenSolaris installer it could use the partition. Power Management for my Pentium M does not appear to work out of the box I'm not sure at the moment if this is because it is not supported or because OpenSolaris includes no power management utilities that I have located. This makes is a little less useful as a full time laptop OS than I would like Ubuntu for example will drop my 1.5Ghz CPU to 800Mhz when it is not in use - better for battery life and for my leg skin if the laptop happens to be sitting there. Suspend resume is not there yet. Compwiz fancy effects don't work on my puny graphics card either! (boo! Hiss!)

Since I started writing this post my network connection has flaked out and my OpenOffice download has failed (I appear to be connected to the Internet by a bit of wet string these days) .
The beadm utility that is used to manage ZFS boot environment allows you to view the snapshots that are taken before the upgrade was started - I misread this the first time and though that the snapshots where what was upgraded and stupidly unmounted and destroyed the snapshots thinking they where of no use now that the upgrade had failed. In fact they are a snapshot of the untouched system and would be useful if the upgrade failing left you with an unusable system - as I was just installing Open Office I hope I will be ok. But the lesson to take from that would be to re-read things before using any destroy commands!

I'm going to download todays OpenSolaris Live CD as well and stick it on my desktop to see what the experience is like adding it to a system that already has a Nevada install on - hopefully they can be persuaded to co-exist peacefully - at least until I am prepared to move the system entirely to OpenSolaris.

The VMs are taking over!

2008-03-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

We have a slight issue with abuse of virtualization in this house.

Hosts you can't see as they don't advertise any services the Mac is aware off or are on other subnets include:

Under xVM on Solaris:

centy - cent OS

fariycake - XP

cupcake - XP

Under VMware Fusion on the Mac:

debs - Debian

VirtualBox on the Mac:

MacBunty - Ubuntu 7.10

Haiku - BeOS clone

Parallels on the Mac

React - ReactOS windows clone

Hank - XP

What is more amazing is that I actually find a use for most of them at some point or other. Ok react OS and Haiku are more curiosity than anything else but because of the huge number of virtualization options I have they to can find a home for them.

Now If I can just start to get rid of the boxes of obsolete hardware cluttering up the room I would be set.

CentOS 5 domU out of thin air

2008-02-27T07:46:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: As Matt pointed out it's DomU not Dom0!

I finally got around to working out how to pull a CentOS install out of thin air without messing about with out of date images from jailtime.org and fiddling about trying to find xen aware kernels to boot (harder than it sounds when you only have one machine of each type of architecture/OS and don't want to dual boot)

root@frank xVM $ virt-install -n centy -r 512 --vcpus=1 --nographics --os-type=linux -p -f /dev/zvol/dsk/tank/xVM/centy -l http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/mirror.centos.org/5.1/os/x86_64 -d

once its up it will drop you back to the shell prompt and tell you to reconnect for the domain console.

Just do

root@frank xm console centy

to get a console connection and run through the normal install wizard from there.

run through install procedure as normal pulling everything down across the internet - it used to be much slower doing this when I used to install redhat across an ISDN connection - thank you broadband.

Solaris Server Setup Notes

2008-02-27T00:39:00.000-08:00

Some notes from my solaris server setup - this has post has been sitting half drafted for a while while I tracked down an odd CIFS server and NFS speed issue on my network shares. Turned out to be due to cat5e cables getting trapped in my door and ending up at about Cat2.5 standard. (Don't run cat5 under/over three doors and expect to still be cat5 at the other end!) This weekend we might finally have to get round to running my network ports with trunking.

As I mentioned before I had hit memory remap issues with the mainboard I was using in my home server. Before Christmas I had ordered a new one (ASUS-P5B-VM) but never had the time to fit it. Yesterday I finally found the time and today I'm reinstalling the system - I've decided to just stick to the two 500GB sata drives I had in already but to loose the single 2.5 sata I was booting from.
First thing I had to do was enable the memory remap feature in the BIOS to allow the 64 bit OS to address all the memory.
I was going to use the gui to install but it didn't appear to give me enough control over reconfiguring my Solaris slices so I used a text console down the serial line.
As I mostly access the box down the serial line I also edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and uncommitted
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600
terminal serial
to allow me to select the boot options from grub on the serial line as well.

The new build detects my integrated network cards as an rge device which is nice as the old mainboard didn't. It's also a not a legacy driver so should be possible to be used with vlans or with xVM - which is nice as I now have three network cards in this machine.

bash-3.2# dladm show-link e1000g0 type: non-vlan mtu: 1500 device: e1000g0 rge0 type: non-vlan mtu: 1500 device: rge0 elxl0 type: legacy mtu: 1500 device: elxl0

All my storage was on my zfs file systems so I had to import using the -f flag like so:

bash-3.2# zpool import
pool: tank id: 15184786189135037151
state: ONLINE status: The pool was last accessed by another system. action:
The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier and the '-f' flag. see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-EY config:
tank ONLINE mirror ONLINE c2d0s7 ONLINE c1d0s7 ONLINE

bash-3.2# zfs list no datasets available

bash-3.2# zpool import -f 15184786189135037151

root@frank bin $ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 264G 177G 21K /tank
tank/fs 224G 177G 22K /tank/fs
tank/fs/downloads 195G 177G 195G /tank/fs/downloads
tank/fs/home 20.4G 177G 156M /export/home
tank/fs/home/burt 20.3G 177G 11.8G /export/home/burt
tank/fs/home/burt@16-oct-2007 8.44G - 8.61G -
tank/fs/home/burt/groupWork 11.6M 177G 7.25M /export/home/burt/groupWork
tank/fs/home/burt/groupWork@17-oct-2007 4.15M - 4.15M -
tank/fs/home/burt/groupWork@28-nov-2007 160K - 4.86M -
tank/fs/pushy 1.33G 177G 1.33G /tank/fs/pushy
tank/fs/xVM 7.19G 177G 7.19G /tank/fs/xVM
tank/xVM 40.1G 177G 18K /tank/xVM
tank/xVM/bunty 20G 197G 16K -
tank/xVM/cupcake 3.24G 194G 2.70G -
tank/xVM/cupcake@installed 545M - 2.67G -
tank/xVM/fairycake 140M 177G 2.67G -
root@frank bin $

and my home dir, media, xVM machines, uni groupwork, are all back including mountpoints - all sitting happily onto of the mirror.

recreate my group and user and set the passwd:
bash-3.2# groupadd -g 501 burt
bash-3.2# useradd -u 501 -g burt -m -d /export/home/burt burt bash-3.2# passwd burt

I figure I may as well install blastwave now as I usually end up wanting something from there at some point.

bash-3.2# pkgadd -d http://www.blastwave.org/pkg_get.pkg

edit /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf to add a local mirror then get wget

bash-3.2# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i wget

at that point you can install things from blastwave.org, It's not as good as apt-get but it is still dam useful if your looking for lots of utils and don't want to have to compile all from source.
Packages are installed in /opt/csw/bin so your PATH will need editing to make use of them.

after that All I needed to do was edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to select my preferred boot option of an xVM xen hypervisor so I'm in a dom0 (I have a few domU virtulised domains running as well which I use for testing)

I'ts worth noting at this point that if you use live upgrade later the /boot/grub/menu.list file only exits on your first Boot Environment (BE).

root@frank bin $ lustatus
Boot Environment Is Active Active Can Copy
Name Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
-------------------------- -------- ------ --------- ------ ----------
build80 yes no no yes -
build81 yes yes yes no -

root@frank bin $ ls /boot/grub/menu.lst
/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory

As you can see I'm booted into build81 at the moment but menu.lst is not where you would expect.
If I mount the BE named build80 then I will find menu.lst on that partition.

root@frank bin $ lumount build80
/.alt.build80

root@frank bin $ ls /.alt.build80/boot/grub/menu.lst
/.alt.build80/boot/grub/menu.lst

So if you install a second BE later and cant find /boot/grub/menu.lst to edit, use lumount to mount it and edit.

This is why you shouldn't mess with you boot order in the BIOS when using live upgrade, even if you are using multiple disks.

Sharing is easy.

root@frank bin $ zfs set sharesmb=on tank/fs/downloads

for cifs shares

root@frank bin $ zfs set sharenfs=on tank/fs/downloads

for nfs shares.

Thats a brief overview of my server it has other stuff running on it - I'm attempting to get the mediatomb upnp server compiled but so far can only get it to compile without libmagic and it fails to correctly identify video media files when run - making it fairly useless at the moment.

cheap mac mini

2008-01-11T05:48:00.000-08:00

Been a while since I posted - I've been snowed under with course work and then christmas so haven't been near much more than my laptops - which I try not to break to much as I need them to work.

I stumbled across an unloved 1.66 Core Duo mac mini in the bargain bin of a PCworld. It was missing a power supply and remote and was a base spec with 512mb/70gb with a cdrw/dvd rom drive, it is also a bit yellow - but was going for £200. I immediately decided against buying it as I already have to many computers. A couple of days later I was back buying the thing - my self control is useless. A PSU cost me £30 from play.com and 2gb of ram cost £32 from crucial. Someone supplied me with a 1.83 CoreDuo so that got put in at the same time.

I installed the last licence of Leopard from my families 5 pack of leopard licences. Leopard comes with front row 2.0. A much improved Front Row interface with the added bonus of being able to use the Saphire plugin to make browsing media better. I installed Perian and flip4mac QuickTime components to allow Front Row to play video encoded with pretty much any codec.

Next I need to hook it up to my nfs shares on my Solaris box and it can browse all of my media.

The really nice thing about using front row 2 is that it can connect to other machines in the house to read from itunes collections (like an AppleTV does) means that I don't have to sync my itunes library to the Mini.

I have a script that I'm working on to automatically rip DVDs on insertion using handbrake cli but its still a bit rough round the edges.

xVM Windows XP Hosts

2007-11-29T06:17:00.000-08:00

I'm still playing around with xVM under build 76 of solaris though as I type build 77 is out to the general public.
I bought some more memory for my system to take it to 4GB to give me some head room to play with domUs, ZFS and SunRay only to find that my BIOS doesn't properly support 4GB. Currently the OS can only talk to 2900 or so MB - the rest has been appropriated by the BIOS. Now of course this being a 64bit OS the 32bit limitations don't apply - unfortunately the BIOS has no memory remap option for 64bit aware OSs I think the chipset does support it as far as I can tell but it looks like ASUS have not implemented it in the V3-P5945G BIOS - most annoying. I've ordered a new mainboard which should do the trick(at least if the BIOS manual I read is to be believed) When that turns up I will reinstall with build 77 - I'm hoping that my problems with biosdev might go away - but I'm not convinced.

Mainly I followed this guide for setting up my HVM domU but with a couple of bits and bobs I have gleaned from the very useful xvm-discuss@sun.com mailing list and the Release Notes have helped me get my XP domU up and running.

6612343
Setting:
set softcall_delay=0x100000
in /etc/system

and

root@frank / $ svccfg -s xvm/xend setprop config/default-nic="e1000g0"
root@frank / $ svcadm refresh xvm/xend
root@frank / $ svcadm restart xvm/xend

To confirm:

root@frank / $ svccfg -s xvm/xend listprop |grep default
config/default-nic astring e1000g0

to make sure it gets the correct network card (I now have two physical cards instead of two vlans to one card after working around my SunRay latency issue)

I also put this in my .hvm file to bridge the interface.

vif = ['mac=0:1b:21:4:b9:1, bridge=e1000g0']
Running the domain
root@frank xVM $ xm create windows-xVM.hmv

Then just vnc to the console, annoyingly Apples screen sharing vnc application doesn't work for connecting to the console session of a dom. Though this is almost definitely a limitation of the client not the server, as most other clients seem to work fine. On the Mac JollyFast VNC seems to be the best free client, vineViewer was a bit nicer but isn't free. vncviewer on Solaris works well as does xtightvncviewer on Ubuntu.

The install was not without some hitches - seemed to hang up and if I didn't have the vnc session open when it prompted for input the domain would get blocked, and I couldn't get back onto the vnc session. Installaition did take a while longer than expected as well.

I'm going to try and dig out some windows server disks at some point as well and give them a go to so I will try and monitor the performance more closely issues then.

Using Live Upgrade to move disks on x86 with a difficult bios

2007-11-19T09:01:00.000-08:00

I'm attempting to move my disks around in my OpenSolaris Box - I have a pair of IDE 120Gb which at one point where mirrored using SVM - but I want to use them in another side project so I need to migrate my install from one IDE disk to the space I have left on the pair of SATA drives where my ZFS pool is (there is space left as I did at one point boot from the SATAs before I reinstalled to the IDEs)

First lucreate for a new BE
root@frank / $ lucreate -c b76a-ide -m /:/dev/dsk/c1d0s3:ufs -n b76a-sata

The lustatus to check whats going on:

root@frank / $ lustatus
Boot Environment Is Active Active Can Copy
Name Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
-------------------------- -------- ------ --------- ------ ----------
b76a-ide yes yes yes Yes -
b76a-sata yes no no no -
root@frank / $

Excellent so I have a identical but relocated boot environment I can use - let luactivate it.

root@frank / $ luactivate b76a-sata

Saving latest GRUB loader.

Setting failsafe console to .

ERROR: No matching BIOS id found for:

ERROR: Cannot determine GRUB id for ABE disk

ERROR: Unable to determine the configuration of the target boot environment

.

root@frank / $

Dam - I've hit this problem again. It seems to resolve around the way /sbin/biosdev reports my disks:

root@frank / $ sbin/biosdev

0x80 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0

0x81 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0

root@frank / $

These two disks are my IDEs - but I want to boot off the first SATA disk.

I'm not sure if this is a limitation of my BIOS or a problem with biosdev but what I have done is: (Ugly Hack time).
To get luactivate to work I need to cludge /sbin/biosdev to output something that will work.

I used the output of /sbin/biosdev -d to produce this

root@frank / $ cat /sbin/biosdev
#!/bin/sh
echo "0x80 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0"
echo "0x81 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0"
echo "0x82 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0"
echo "0x83 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0"
exit 0
root@frank / $

I installed grub on the other disk manually, specifying the slice solaris is on

root@frank / $ installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c1d0s3
Solaris boot partition inactive.
stage1 written to partition 0 sector 0 (abs 16065)
stage2 written to partition 0, 260 sectors starting at 50 (abs 16115)
root@frank / $

Then I mounted the new BE and copied menu.lst from my active boot enviorment on the IDE disk to the new SATA disk.
root@frank / $ lumount b76a-sata
/.

alt.b76a-sata

root@frank / cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /.

alt.b76a-sata/boot/grub/menu.lst

Unmount the new BE and activate

root@frank / $ luumount b76a-sata
root@frank / $ luactivate b76a-sata

reboot and catch the bios and change the disk order to boot from the SATA disk.

Because the system is now hopelessly confused (a bit like me) about which disk is where so my /boot/grub/menu.lst was quite wrong it was attempting to use (hd3,0,d) as my boot slice for the sata dissk so I had to edit it manually at boot to point to (hd0,0,d) - and then once again edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst to match.

The reason for this editing is that I changed the order the disks are chosen from within the bios as otherwise it will continue to boot from the first IDE disk. Basically once the system comes up from the sata disk if I run the original biosdev i get this:

root@frank / $ /sbin/biosdev
0x82 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@1,0
0x83 /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0
root@frank / $

Which are the SATA disks. lustatus shows the correct information as well now.
root@frank / $ lustatus
Boot Environment Is Active Active Can Copy
Name Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
-------------------------- -------- ------ --------- ------ ----------
b76a-ide yes no no yes -
b76a-sata yes yes yes no -

At this point I pulled the IDE disks from the machine (ludelete is also confused because of incorrect biosdev info so wont delete them.) Though I forgot to fix my swap partition and the system failed to boot until I sorted that out. A quick vi session in /etc/vfstab to change the swap partition and the clear the error using svcadm:

root@frank / $ svcadm clear svc:/system/filesystem/local:default

There is some more fiddling to do in /boot/grub/menu.lst to fix the xVM entries and some nasty undocumented mucking around in /etc/lutab to remove the old ide entries but finally I'm back where I started but with a couple of IDE disks to play with ZFS on my mac. (now I need to find some IDE USB caddies)

As I side note I've finally found a use for the PIP (picture in picture) function on my Dell 24 Pannel - I attach a S-Video cable to the output of my graphics card so that I can fiddle with the bios on the server without swapping inputs - though serial redirection in the BIOS would be nicer.

I really miss OBP.

VLAN for the SunRay interconnect and performance issues

2007-11-16T06:57:00.000-08:00

The Sun Ray in the living room has been getting terrible performance - its connected via a NetgearGSM7224 gigabit switch to my OpenSolaris box running build 76 which I recenlty upgraded with a new e1000g intel Gigabit NIC. utcapture was reporting 30% packet loss in some cases - which equates to bad performance.

So I've done a bit of tweaking and the SunRay and the Server now have a dedicated VLAN to themselves.

Its worth nothing that I did this via a serail console - network reconfiguration is hard to do over ssh unless your careful about the order you do things in!

Firstly I configured the switch - it has a gui or a cli but I was feeling lazy and used the gui.

Port24 (my servers port) is now tagged with vlan IDs of 999 and 1 (the default vlan)
Port7 (the sunray) is marked untagged as vlan ID 999

On the solaris box you can bring up vlan aware interfaces using
ifconfig e1000g1000 plumb 192.168.2.252 up
gives a vlan ID of 1
ifconfig e1000g999000 plumb
gives a vlan of 999

though if you want it permanently (like I do) you need to put the ip address in
/etc/hostname.e1000g1000
Though as I'm always going to need interfaces with tagged vlans to use the switch port from now on I will just move the files:
mv /etc/hostname.e100g /etc/hostname.e1000g1000

Next step is to setup the Sun Ray interconnect.

As my dns setup is somewhat lacking (its on the list) I had to set my /etc/hosts file to point my machine at my IP adress not the loopback 127.0.0.1
utadm seems to do a getent hosts and refuses to work untill this is configured correctly.
root@frank sbin $cat /etc/hosts
192.168.2.252 loghost frank

Using the manual I configured the SunRay interconnect for the pre-plumbed e1000g999000 VLAN aware interface.
root@frank sbin $ /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -a e1000g999000

The defaults where fine for me in this case so I just hit Y to confirm and let it do its stuff.
and the system should configure a DHCP server running on your new vlan interface.

After that - the Sun Ray was up and running correctly - though not quite as quick as I feel it should have been. utcapture was still listing 30% packet loss on a regular basis

A bit of further investigation (google) found this forum posting. It seems to suggest that UDP traffic might be getting dropped by the switch because it can't send it to the SunRay fast enough. After playing around with the settings on the switch I discovered that setting the server switch port to 100 Full Duplex massively reduces the packet loss observed using utcapture.
The next stage will be to try a different network card and maybe a different switch for the SunRay interconnect to see if I can get better performance for the SunRay and still keep the Gigabit speed connection for my main connection to the server. I'll keep reading up on the switch to see if their is a way to adjust the way it handles UDP packets - but its only a Level 2 Netgear so I'm not convinced.

Leopard 10.5 Notes

2007-11-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

Adding OPML feeds to mail is not possible (at least not though an import opml import option) it can be done, but to put them all into a nice ordered way just seems like so much hassle compared to leaving them in Vienna!

It looks clean and crisper somehow - I guess thats the unified thing for you.

The Dock is annoying - the icons on the right are broken, they default to the first icon in the containing folder not the folder itself - just moronic. The active application white dot is hard to see on the reflective dock - and I'm not keen on the background reflection thing, I'd prefer the dock on the side in look if not function. I'm also used to long right clicking the icons to bring up a menu - with stacks its now a left click...

CoverFlow in the finder might actually be useful for the hundreds of .doc file my university bombards me with for every single communication.

Tabs in the terminal are ok, I prefer the shortcut for moving between them (Command + }/{) over gnome-terminals ctrl+PgUp/PgDwn. Still no middle click paste like X11 (hey I can dream)

NFS Network drives no longer seem to mount on the desktop - so not sure how I make alias for playing network content through front row just yet... alias or ln -s isn't working. But making an alias of a folder within the mount and moving t

hat to your movie folder seems to work. Front row is much better more responsive, and movie preview icons seem nice though they are no longer moving, which may be why its more responsive. Whenever you enter Front Row iTunes stops whatever its playing - random and annoying.

Finder overall seems snappier to me. (about time!)

ZFS read is here (not tested) - allegedly the beta

ktexts where available from Apple Dev Connection

at one point even apples command line prompt says so! - my brief search couldn't find them.

wpa_supplicant Uni Wifi

2007-11-07T07:11:00.000-08:00

I worked out how to use wpa_supplicant on Ubuntu to do 802.1X authentication at University on my x40 ThinkPad.

It's just a case of getting it all in the right order and getting the CA certificate from somewhere (I exported mine from my Mac under OS X which of course - justs works)
The crucial bits that took me a while where putting ap_scan=0 outside of the network brackets. Now I think about it its obvious thats its a global option but I didn't notice it in the manual. This allows the driver to do the scanning of SSIDs as apposed to wpa_supplicant - the secure uni network is hidden and without this debug output indicated that it was not finding the network. Also for my network I think I have to ensure that I use phase1="peapver=0" I worked that out when I was getting my Nokia E61 running Symbian to working on the same network.

my wpa_supplicant file now looks like this:

burt@bobby:/etc/wpa_supplicant$ cat wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ap_scan=0
network={
ssid="SHU-USS"
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
eap=PEAP
identity="myusername"
password="password"
ca_cert="/home/burt/certificates/myunicertifcate"
phase1="peapver=0"
phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
}

and after that I just start up wpa_supplicant
burt@bobby:/ sudo wpa_supplicant -Bw -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

and then getting a dhcp address:

burt@bobby:/etc/wpa_supplicant$ sudo dhclient eth1

Now I have this working I might think about trying to work out what keep causing nm-applet (the default way of managing to wifi in ubuntu 7.10) to fall over after connecting to the network if I can find the time. For the moment it works and thats what I care about. I get to stay in Linux for longer - which on this laptop is much faster and much as I hate to sound like a fanboi works better than Windows (for my uses) a large amount of the time (wpa Enterprise networks apart).

Update:
Interesting gotcha - wpa_supplicant seems to only work after I run it up with ap_scan=2 in the wpa_supplicant.conf file (which fails) then change it back to ap_scan=0 and run up wpa_supplicant again. - this is after the x40 has been in hibernation.

permissions and gnome font cache

2007-11-02T05:48:00.000-07:00

I managed somehow to break the permissions on /var/tmp on my OpenSolaris box.

I was messing with my users primary groups (and not paying enough attention or making
ing enough notes)

this causes a few issues for gnome and cde failsafe - ie you cant log in and non
root users couldn't even get a failsafe session.

I fixed that, ran gnome-cleanup and tried again cde and failsafe where ok for all
users but, still no gnome goodness
Why do I want gnome for my server? - because I'm thinking of putting a Sun Ray in
the front room - its nice to have google and wikipedia to settle arguments in the house.

Anyway - back to my gnome problem - logs is what I need.

I enabled logging for my user in my $HOME/.dtprofile by changing this line:
export dtstart_sessionlogfile="/dev/null"

to point to /tmp/mydtlog
don't forget to touch the file to create it.

tailing the file on login I was getting segfaults and coredumps when Xsession launched

after some googling, and then some opensolaris searching I eventually found this post

Which while not quite what I was experiencing made some sense to me I remember we had similar problems on our Sun Ray servers in the labs before thought that time Wilson fixed it! so I ran:

root@frank / $ find /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts -name fonts.cache-1 -exec {} \;
root@frank / $ fc-cache -s

Volia - all is well!

gnome is back for my user and it works for root correctly now as well

Thinkpad x40 Ubuntu Linux

2007-11-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

Some notes on how I setup Linux on IBM/Levano ThinkPad X40

Backing Up System Restore Partition

The system came with no disks (I don't think they do even if new) but does come with a system restore partition.
I decided I would like to be able to restore the system to a 'blank' windows state at a later time if I wanted to sell the laptop.

The system allows for the making of backups using a utility under All Programs -> ThinkVantage -> Create Recovery Media.

As I didn't buy a docking station for the system I have no cd rom drive but I decided against using a usb hard disk to back the partition as I didn't really want to dedicate yet another disk to permanent storage, its bound to fail or get wiped by accident. So I used a LaCie USB 3.5 disk caddy connected to an old cd burner. It's only USB 1 ports but seems to do the trick.

This is just a recovery option, so I also used the build in rescue and recovery software to make a backup of the system as it was then copied that back to my macbook pro to burn to dvd.

Testing the backups: boot from the recovery cdrom to check it works correctly (hit f12 at boot)

I was going to install across the network, but since I have a cobbled together cdrom drive I didn't bother.
Ubuntu 7.04 text install boots ok from the cd drive, but then fails to work out what cdrom drive module to use
selecting cdrom from the modules list and entering /dev/scd0 worked for me

Resizing partitions - I used guide resize and selected 20gb to resize to and hoped that it wouldn't blat windows or the system restore partition
(not the end of the world if it did - but would be annoying to have to restore.)

After it was installed I updated it to 7.10 using update manager and all is good.

One minor fix to the behavior of the Fn + F5 button was found in bug 152217

I'm still investigating some odd behavior with the wireless nm-applet and some scary stories about aggressive power management parking the disk to often.
But apart from that the system is great under ubuntu even with 768MB Ram and a 1.5 Pentium Mobile. I carry it most places as it weighs almost nothing even with the larger 8Cell battery sticking out the back.

xVM Solaris and how I can break stuff.

2007-11-02T04:39:00.000-07:00

My forays into xVM (xen for OpenSolaris) in build 75 of OpenSolaris are causing me one or two minor issues.

Firstly I hit:

* 6616311 Live upgrade does not add entry for xvm in grub menu.

There is no xVM entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Workaround:

Run bootadm -m upgrade and reboot the system.

Looks like live upgrade doesn't quite do all the bits needed for xVM just yet.
Unfortunately this didn't work for me, and I ended up having to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst manually to add the following entry's:
title Solaris75a on xVM
root (hd2,0,a)
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/uni
x
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

title Solaris75a on xVM - via serial console shared
root (hd2,0,a)
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz console=com1 com1=9600,8n1
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/uni
x -B console=hypervisor
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

title 32-bit Solaris75a on xVM
root (hd2,0,a)
kernel /boot/xen.gz
module /platform/i86xpv/kernel/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/unix
module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

Though it took me far to long to work out that I had forgotten the root(hd2,0,a) lines the first time.

After that I added:
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600
terminal --timeout=2 serial console

to enable me to select the grub menu option down a serial line (connected to a wrt54g - which is part of my Final Year Project)

The system booted into xVM with a shared serial console with Solaris.

I attempted to create a DomU instance of Windows2003 using a zfs raw disk however during the process the system appeared to lock up hard, I didn't have the serial line attached at the time of the lockup so have no idea what actually whent on - suffice to say it fell of the network and wasn't repsonding to the console (serial and/or keyboard and monitor).

After a while I got board of waiting and reset the box (I get impatient like that) - it seemed to come back up ok - but now whenever it boots it seems to panic when loading dtterm (this box is also a sunray server). I can get it to boot into plain build 75 but whenever I attempt to use the xVM menu it panics again.

I'm not entirely sure if I have mangled something by hard powering the system off or not but for the moment I'm going to boot back to my old build 64 BE and create a new BE based on that and attempt to try again - annoyingly ZFS has been upgraded since build 64 so I can't get to my home dir.

At this point I fiddled fruitlessly for a while before attempting a reinstall only to have the what appears to be the same problem - panic when it gets to the graphical login.

So on the new install I tried disabling graphical login in - as it always seemed to fall over at that point - I also edited grub to give me serial console again (don't forger to remove the splash screen option)

I can now boot into xVM with solaris as Dom0 - but no graphics

I've just come back to this after a while (now on a clean install of build 76) and have located the source of the panics under xVM when xorg loaded it appears to be issues with the shared memory of the intel 950 GMA. This was only located with a bit of help from opensolaris forums and one very helpful mrj at Sun its bug 6624364.
I'm working around the issue by using an ancient ATI card - I only have a head for occasional debugging purposes as I use the serial line for remote access but this being x86 it needs graphics of some sort to boot It's a sunray server I need so I do need x to load - maybe you can configure xorg not to come up on the console and only for use on sunray sessions but I don't know how.

But the long and the short of it is I've booted windows in a domU HVM using xVM.

I've been using zfs raw images for the disk though as I havn't got it installed yet I haven't been able to experiment with ZFS snapshots for rolling back purposes.

The problem is of course that I can't find any Windows MSDN CDs or iso images that my Uni kindly supplies me with to go with the MSDN license keys I have! still the ISOs I do have boot and I can get to the stage of entering license keys.

At some point I intend to try putting a Linux domU on as well - its just a matter of finding the time.