November 2005 - Roundtable

More on 'Niagara'
by Shawn Wallbridge 14 Nov '05

14 Nov '05

Now known as UltraSPARC T1. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5946639.html They will only consume 72W (vs 95W for an Opteron and 135W for a Dual Core Xeon). shawn

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Update on SATA woes
by Kevin McGregor 14 Nov '05

14 Nov '05

Here's a short update on the latest with my SATA woes. First, a correction: The distribution I originally had working was Red Hat Linux 9. After trying many distributions, some with interesting failure modes (e.g. Debian Sarge), I finally got around to Fedora Core 1 (I had to download it this afternoon!). This installs kernel 2.4.22, and it not only recognized my two SATA disks, but the existing LVM setup, too! Under the old installation (I don't recall the kernel version at the moment), I was getting disk-cache reads of ~87 MB/s and disk reads of 1.39 MB/s (as reported by hdparm -tT /dev/hde). Yes, appallingly slow, but it worked. With FC1, I get disk-cache reads of 1500 MB/s (!) and disk reads of ~57 MB/s. After that, I had the job of getting the software RAID 1 working again, as one of the drives got out of sync. I eventually figured out I needed to use raidhotremove/raidhotadd (with no man page installed!). raidhotremove /dev/md0 /dev/hdg said the drive had already been removed, and raidhotadd /dev/md0 /dev/hdg got everything going again. W00t! Now it's happily resyncing at around 10 MB/s (est. 250 mins to completion) according to cat /proc/mdstat. Maybe I should mention that the on-board SATA controller had been disabled by a jumper. :-P Yet another hurdle. I'll check it tomorrow and run some tests.

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Re: [RndTbl] Update on SATA woes
by Kevin McGregor 14 Nov '05

14 Nov '05

Why, yes! Yes, there is a reason! For example, when I boot the Fedora Core 4 disc, the install proceeds to the point where it says "Loading sata_sil driver...Diabling IRQ #11" (the last part in white text on black background, showing up after a few seconds), where it hangs. This happens to other recent distributions. On the behind-the-scenes screen (via Alt-F4) is a screen full of nasty messages including, but not limited to, "irq 11: nobody cared!". So, I figured maybe a distribution somewhere between Red Hat 9 and FC4 might work. I've been trying. The latest fun is the Debian netinst CD image. Someone gave me a copy he burned some time ago, and I just downloaded my own copy and burned it, and both hang at exactly the same place with a md5sum error! I've tried 3 different CD-ROM drives and the two discs and it's weird that they both fail at the exact same spot. Anyway, as I said in my previous message, I did get FC1 running (kernel 2.4.22), but while it *seemed* to work, when I ran md5sum on a directory of the mirrored SATA drives with a number of large files, I get non-reproducible results. I.e. different md5sums for the longer files on different runs. Eeek. That can't be good! I'm running out of options and patience. If I can get Debian sarge running, I'll try that (kernel 2.4.27). Yes, I've read the status reports, and I am depressed. ----- Original Message ----- From: Gilles Detillieux <grdetil(a)scrc.umanitoba.ca> Date: Monday, November 14, 2005 10:33 am Subject: Re: [RndTbl] Update on SATA woes > Hey, Kevin. Is there any reason you're sticking with older Linux > distros like RH9 & FC1, rather than using the newer 2.6 kernel- > based > distros like FC4? My own experience with SATA-based systems has > been a > bit spotty, even with the 2.6 kernel. ... > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable >

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eth0 doesn't work.... no matter what
by Sean A. Walberg 14 Nov '05

14 Nov '05

My firewall (FC1) had a 3COM 3c900B and a 3c905b, the former being the outside interface and only running at 10/half. I was seeing collisions that were making my VoIP run poorly, so I decided to swap it out with another 3c905b. And, for some reason, mii-tool reported eth0 as always having no link status, the interface never showed as RUNNING, and I had to ifconfig eth0 UP manually all the time, but it worked. I replaced the 900b with the 905 and it didn't work. The interface showed up and was detected, but I couldn't get a DHCP address. Kudzu found it though. Long story short, I even went so far as replacing both cards with intel e100s, but the same behaviour was seen for the card in eth0. No link, no DHCP, -UP -RUNNING. No matter which card was eth0, no matter which interrupt I had it on. Finally, I put 3 NICs in and am running off of eth1/eth2 and it works fine. I have no clue why this is happening. I wiped any trace of network stuff in /etc/mod*, rebuilt the initrd, and grepped under /etc for any mention of eth0. It even does this in single user mode. No kernel paramaters either, and I'm running the latest FC1 kernel from Legacy. Any idea where else to look for this configuration? Thanks, Sean -- Sean A. Walberg <sean(a)ertw.com> http://www.ertw.com

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Re: [RndTbl] Sveasoft firmware
by Kevin McGregor 12 Nov '05

12 Nov '05

To respond to (part of) my own query: Future Shop still carries the older version of the Linksys WRT54G. Check the serial numbers on the box; the ones with serial numbers starting with CGN0 through CGN5 have 8 MB ROM/32 MB RAM. Avoid the CGN6 series. At two Future Shop stores I checked today, they had a total of one CGN6 and a dozen or so CGN3. I think I'll pick one up this week. They're $85 after mail-in rebate. ----- Original Message ----- From: Kevin McGregor <kmcgregor(a)shaw.ca> Date: Friday, November 11, 2005 4:44 pm Subject: [RndTbl] Sveasoft firmware > To anyone out there who is using the (paid-for) Sveasoft firmware > for the Linksys WRT54G/WRT54GS routers: > > Are any other routers officially supported? OpenWRT.org supports a > variety, including the ASUS models with USB 2.0 ports. I'd like to > get one soon, but I'm not sure what I should buy. The latest > hardware revisions of the Linksys routers apparently now has > VxWorks firmware and less RAM/Flash ROM, making it unsuitable for > replacement firmware. > > There's a rumour that a "Linux hobbyist" version will be coming > out soon, but not much is known about it. Does anyone have any > details? > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable >

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Sveasoft firmware
by Kevin McGregor 11 Nov '05

11 Nov '05

To anyone out there who is using the (paid-for) Sveasoft firmware for the Linksys WRT54G/WRT54GS routers: Are any other routers officially supported? OpenWRT.org supports a variety, including the ASUS models with USB 2.0 ports. I'd like to get one soon, but I'm not sure what I should buy. The latest hardware revisions of the Linksys routers apparently now has VxWorks firmware and less RAM/Flash ROM, making it unsuitable for replacement firmware. There's a rumour that a "Linux hobbyist" version will be coming out soon, but not much is known about it. Does anyone have any details?

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Re: Roundtable Digest, Vol 11, Issue 8
by Michael Boyd 11 Nov '05

11 Nov '05

I am currently away from the office returning on Wednesday, November 16/05 and will not be accessing email. I will answer all correspondence upon my return. If your email is of an urgent nature, please contact Stevi Dram at 982-1168 or s.dram(a)uwinnipeg.ca. Take care.

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Making a DVD with opensource
by Montana Quiring 10 Nov '05

10 Nov '05

Hello, Someone asked about creating a DVD using Linux. I'm not going to be at the next MUUG (going to Chicago) but I thought I would share this URL that I've recently tried and found works very well: http://www.wlug.org/files/howto_dvd_talk/HOWTO_MAKE_DVD -Montana Quiring

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vmstat and free
by Sean A. Walberg 09 Nov '05

09 Nov '05

Further to the discussion of free/vmstat and monitoring memory, I dug up some old articles that explain how to interpret the output of some tools. Using top: http://ertw.com/~sean/news/Aug-23-2001.html Using free: http://ertw.com/~sean/news/Aug-30-2001.html Using vmstat: http://ertw.com/~sean/news/Mar-7-2002.html Sean -- Sean Walberg <sean(a)ertw.com> http://ertw.com

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Burning a DVD
by Mike Pfaiffer 08 Nov '05

08 Nov '05

Tonight at the meeting I was asked to post what I did to get a video DVD burned. I'm more than happy to do so. I'm tickled pink I got it to work so it's a pleasure. This is the simplest case where a single video file plays automatically on a console unit. There are separate steps one needs to go through to burn a video DVD. First is to get the video file into an appropriate format. Next is to take the resulting file and place it properly into a directory structure expected by the player. The final part is from the URL Montana Quiring posted earlier. Namely burning the directories to the DVD. This is where I was having trouble before. The tools needed are mplayer (specifically mencoder), videotrans (has a bunch of dependencies including mencoder), dvdauthor (also has some dependencies), and growisofs. I understand transcode can substitute for mencoder and videotrans. Here is what I did from the commandline to get it to work. ============ # part of videotrans - Translate to vob file movie-to-dvd -m ntsc -M 'sample01.avi' # part of dvdauthor - Create the file structure dvdauthor -o DVD 'sample01.vob' dvdauthor -T -o DVD # part of growisofs - Put the directory structure on a DVD growisofs -Z /dev/hdb -dvd-video DVD =================== NOTES: -DVD is an empty directory where the directory structure is created. -/dev/hdb is my burner (found from the KDE hardware browser). -I did not have to be root to do this. There are other things I could do such as lowering the quality or size. Eventually I could create menus. The man pages say subtitles aren't supported yet. I would presume multiple language streams aren't either. I'm not sure if I missed the "-Z" parameter or I used something like "/mnt/cdrom" (in hindsight, this would have been really dumb) last month. Whatever it was, this last line solved my problem. Later Mike P.S. Good meeting. I understood the principals of what he was talking about even if I missed the specific references. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Call-A.P.P.L.E. and the Digital Civilization http://www.callapple.org | | http://members.shaw.ca/pfaiffer = Mike Pfaiffer (B.A., B.Sc.) | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ ----- BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK ----- Version: 3.12 GCS/G/IT/PA/SS d s+:- a? C++ UL L++ W++ N++ o+ K- w(---) O+@ M++@ V PS+ PE !PGP t+ 5+ X R tv b+ DI+++ D++ G e++* h! r-- !y-- UF++ ------ END GEEK CODE BLOCK ------

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