Recieved my results for this semester and scored two HDs. Both units were enjoyable and I put a fair amount of work into them so it was good to see it pay off.
Today I enabled the Arch Linux testing repo on my laptop. At the moment testing is fairly empty and the only packages that were upgraded as a result of enabling testing were licenses, vim, vi and ruby 1.9. It will be interesting to see how it goes and I will enjoy getting some of the X – ATI related packages early.
Before installing OpenSolaris on my file server while I was running Linux I noticed weird behaviour with the on board USB 2.0 controller of my ASUS A7V333. For some reason I was only getting USB 1.1 transfer speeds with an external USB hard drive. I didn’t think much of it at the time however after trying a ZFS send – receive I was getting awful performance on OpenSolaris too. A check of the log files found this:
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): Due to recently discovered incompatibilities
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): with this USB controller, USB2.x transfer
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): support has been disabled. This device will
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): continue to function as a USB1.x controller.
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): If you are interested in enabling USB2.x
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): support please, refer to the ehci(7D) man page.
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): Please also refer to www.sun.com/io for
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): Solaris Ready products and to
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl for additional
Jul 16 21:34:26 argon usba: ... (ehci0): compatible USB products.
Bugger! The fact I was experiencing trouble with this controller in Linux as well doesn’t give me a good feeling about using this workaround. I think I will look around tomorrow for a USB PCI card.
Managed to finally copy my data off my file server with no errors and install OpenSolaris 06.2009. Previously I was using an Adaptec AAR-1210SA sata controller as the mainboard pre dates SATA. Unfortunately this card is not supported by OpenSolaris and had to be replaced with a Sunix SATA4000 SATA controller. Out of the box this card does not work with OpenSolaris but if you re-flash the cards BIOS with the base 5.4.0.3 BIOS available here as described at Sun’s BigAdmin Portal it seems to work fine.
My file server is an aging Athlon XP 2100 1.7GHz single cored CPU. It took quite a while to install OpenSolaris and boot times are less than impressive. Once it is running it seems fine though. OpenSolaris is a strange beast compared to Linux. Same ideas but implemented differently. Even a simple task such as configuring a static IP address on a network interface is completely different to Arch or Debian Linux. The OpenSolaris Bible has been a great help.
Once the OS was installed I setup my main data zpool. I mainly followed A Home Fileserver using ZFS for this. I copied all my data back and exported my file systems via NFS and mounted them on my Arch workstation. It’s difficult to be sure but I think I am taking a performance hit especially on writing. I should have performed some benchmarks before reformatting to compare with the performance figures I am getting now. There are quite a few settings that can be tweaked with ZFS so I may be able to improve the speed a bit. ZFS looks impressive. I have yet to play around with snapshots or volumes though I intend to do so. ZFS’s snapshot feature and send and receive commands should make implementing backups fairly simple.
I have also finished configuring Postfix on my mail server. This is the first time I have configured a mail server for anything but basic local delivery. The Postfix web page is a wealth of information.
It’s been a busy week in the open source world.
Currently running the new Firefox 3.5. It is hard to be objective but it does seem to be faster than the 3.0.x versions. Unfortunately my current theme, Full Flat 3.0, is not compatible with Firefox 3.5 so I have had to find another theme. At the moment I am using Chromifox Basic and am pretty happy with it. I have also been using the Hide Menubar add-on. It is a great way to gain a little bit more screen real estate and works well with a minimal tiling window manager.
Google has finally taken the beta status from gmail and announced their own operating system called Google Chrome OS.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
From the brief information available at this stage it doesn’t sound like something I would run however it will be interesting to follow its progress. I’m sure that the folks from Redmond will be doing exactly that.
At the moment I am waiting for 100+ GB of data to copy off my file server so that I can reformat it with Open Solaris and start playing around with ZFS. This is the second time I have tried to copy my data off as the first time I tried, rsync gave an error message on completion that turned out to be caused by missing execute permissions on a couple of directories. Hopefully it will complete without errors this time.
My new Debian 5.0 router is performing well. I’m currently in the middle of configuring Postfix and then want to setup traffic shaping using tc and htb. Apart from that it is just about complete.
As I have a short break from study at the moment I am catching up on some reading. I have just finished:
I’m currently running a combined router and file server. In the interests of security I’m in the process of setting up a new router. I’m installing Debian Lenny on the router as it doesn’t get rebooted often (in the past it has gone over a year without being rebooted) and a rolling release distribution such as Arch doesn’t suit this usage pattern.
I normally use dhcpd and bind for serving up dhcp and dns but this time tried dnsmasq. Dnsmasq is described on it’s webpage as:
Dnsmasq is a lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server. It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP/TFTP/PXE for network booting of diskless machines.
Setup is dead easy. Add your local machines to /etc/hosts and check that you have a dns server listed in your /etc/resolv.conf file. I used OpenDNS’s servers for this. Once this is done you will be able to resolve global names and local names. Much easier than mucking around with bind zone files. I wish I had tried it earlier.
Earlier this week one of Australia’s adopted, he is actually from New Zealand, prize idiots Richard Wilkins reported the untimely death of Jeff Goldblum. Stephen Colbert’s response is fitting and quite funny.
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