Somewhere out there!

Some useful information about SATA on Linux. Particularly which chip sets give hardware RAID, and the difference between the IDE and SCSI versions of the SATA drivers.

Since the SI 3112 is quite a common chipset, this is an important comment to take note.

Migrated my UML systems to UMLazi this evening while waiting at the office for an air plane to arrive. I must say is very clever use of bash scripts and a clean system design. I need to spend a bit more time understanding how the template system works, but it seems from the discussions on its website that the author has 100s of systems running with UMLazi.

Only a couple things I felt it was lacking. Still bash is easy enough to write. 😉

Instruction by Jorrit Waalboer for Installing Debian on a RAID 1 pair.

Nice clean method, seems to work without having to resort to a initrd image. Not sure sure about the use of swap on a RAID 1 device, although I guess it makes re-configuration very easy.

The IMMS author also has this application: FunFS, a secure replacement for NFS:

The primary design goals of FunFS are reliability, security and performance. To achive these goals, FunFS uses an unconventional approach to network filesystems: it moves the majority of the filesystem implementation to userspace.

DRBL is a fat-client method for Linux. In contrast to the thin client method of LTSP.

Will have to investigate how their scripts work.

Discovered QEMU today.

After a quick apt-get install qemu I was able to run a quick test successfully:

nic@thunder:/vol/nfs/lode/other/bsd/openbsd/3.4$ qemu-fast -fda floppy34.fs


At the moment, I’m running my openbsd dev machine on an old Tecra 8100 (P3-600) laptop. I use this to compile sources for my flashboot based routers. Qemu both seems like a easier mechanism than boches to test these images, plus a method to retire that laptop to some other use and centralise the openbsd dev work to another machine. I’ve tried this previously on vmware, but it was never reliable. make world would always throw sig-11 faults.

Supposedly Qemu (non fast version) has about an 8 time slow down. My dual 2.4Ghz Xeon would be perfect.

The ideal I searching for though is not quite there. I’d love to be able to run openbsd and linux side by side on my colo machine. Let openbsd/pf+altq deal with the firewall and traffic management, and have linux provide the application server. I was hoping that Xen might do this job, but I don’t think quite there yet.

I’ll have to do some testing with the bsdjail patch. Seems like a good lightweight mechanism which is more powerful than chroot.

xargs is one of things that every unix admin should have in their tool box. Here is a nice discussion of its various uses.

Unix Review: v12, i06: Using the xargs Command

New kdm (3.3) in unstable fails source /etc/X11/Xsession and thus ssh-agent. Here’s the bug report with a work around:
Debian Bug report logs – #265865 – kdm doesn’t use common modular Xsession from xfree86-common.

Don’t you hate it when you have to download a 50Mb openoffice.org deb, just because the developer has changed one line in debian/*. I think someone some work on a binary patch system not just for security releases but for all updates.

Work on the principle subversion uses. DIskspace is cheap and bandwidth is expensive.

While we are at it the other thing Debian needs is mastermerge.