JRRZZ blog

Aye! The time has come to show you scrubby land creatures what makes this cap’n twitch! We are now at sea. All the bulkheads have been closed and with the right winds and a little help from the weather gods this new pirate vessel will stay afloat even when the fat men come by to steal our music!

Eye have taken some pictures from our old vessel and it’s inhabitants. In between the RAM modules you can see our skipper, Skinny John the Legend. Don’t be scared. Only 6 of his legs are real, the other two have been lost in one of the many attempted raids!

Skinny doesn’t like the new vessel, so it’s open for a new crew. Have you got the guts to live a rough life on the seven seas of the internets? Yarrr! Then you’re the new skipper of this beauty.

Regards,
Cap’n Jolly Firewater

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Aye! The radio broadcast willst be down for a few days on a rough sea as the stream mpd pirate server will be moved from danoontje.wasda.nl, our good-ol trusty fit-for-a-parrot vessel, to our new IBM vessel, a damn beauty she is! Eye has granted her the name of yarrr.wasda.nl. This should make the audio stream across the southern seas a bit more reliable and hickup less. And hopefully make me hickup more, aye! More rum please, skipper!

Regards,
Cap’n Jolly Firewater

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I thought I’d seen most of it by now. I guess I was wrong.

The new file server, the X2100M2, has problems keeping lockd alive. The process keeps running, but somehow the connection dies on the gigabit ethernet link in between vielapeople and this machine, vielawarez. The only solution until now seems bumping the nfs-kernel-server every five minutes or so. I’ve talked to several people on IRC but the problem doesn’t sound familiar to them. I can think of two possible causes. The kernel version on vielapeople (the client) is 2.6.18 and on vielawarez (the server) 2.6.22. I’ve seen a lot of fixes in the nfs and sunrpc 2.6.22 source tree. Maybe this problem resides there. The other possibility is the second link, the one over the internet. Because both boxes have one NIC connected straight into the internet their hostnames obviously are available to each other. Maybe some weird RPC call uses the actual hostname of the machine and creates an RPC or data connection over the internet, where it doesn’t belong. The showmount utility clearly shows vielawarez accepting the vielapeople.wasda.nl hostname. This setup needs some work.

My new IBM system turned out to be a Pentium D Dual Core 2.8Ghz. It’s still not bad and still way too poweful for the task at hand. But you know, it’s not the Xeon. This isn’t really a problem. The real problem is IBM’s hardware vendor lockin scheme. I didn’t realise this until I tried mounting my brand new Seagate Barracuda 750GB SATA disks. They wouldn’t fit. This system needs special guiding rails for every drive inserted. The disk assembly itself looks really solid (of course I’ve already disected the entire machine) but has no room for standard 3.5″ screws. Normally the rails would be shipped together with the casing, or in a bad scenario, ordered seperately. But IBM doesn’t want you to use custom hardware. I’ve just ordered a 80GB IBM drive just for the rails. The bastards actually managed to put a price of 140 euros on an 80 GB drive. You don’t want to know what they dare to ask for a 750GB drive. And these drives aren’t special at all. Just standard Hitachi bulk drives. After I ripped the rails from the 160GB IBM drive and inserted the 750GB disk it just worked. So it’s just childish business keeping people from using their own parts. I was surprised the thing booted when I inserted custom DDR2 memory. Not everything on this system is bad news. On the contrary. It’s a rock-solid heavy duty case with top notch Intel hardware. Nothing exotic (except the ATI VGA). The cooling is surprisingly silent. During the POST process it does tend to lift a few feet above the ground when it tries to take off. But after it realises it’s at room temperature it turns silent again and lands safely. I wish I had the resources to upgrade it with the optional SAS controller. Now I’ve got to bootstrap a Debian install on software RAID-1. This is going to be a challenge since I’ve been spoiled with hardware RAID all the time.

Finally, the postal service (TNT) managed to loose my laptop twice in a row. I hope I’ll get the thing tomorow. I’ve already got the extended life battery. It looks a bit sad without the x61s sitting on top. The postal service also managed to loose the case badges I’ve ordered from Munnikes. Now the IBM machines have to go without Tux graffiti for a while. At times like these the socialist in me kicks in screaming “The service was so much better when it was owned by the government back in the day!”. Oh well, if they keep screwing things up like this they will be, some day.

Update (18:00):
I just got off the phone with TNT. Now it’s official. They actually have lost my thinkpad. They say they’ll try to ship it again tomorrow. That’s if they can find it. If not, they will have a problem with me. Some of my work isn’t done because of them, so they will have to pay for their stupidity. Also, the bogus hard drive I’ve ordered somehow isn’t where the hardware supplier thought it was. They said they had a few in stock, but it turns out they didn’t. So none of my new toys work right now. This really pisses me off.

Tags: Tech by jorrizza
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I’ve got some new toys to play around with, and some toys are going to be here very soon.

At work, we’ve got a brand new Sun Fire X2100M2 with two 750GB disks, two gigs of RAM and a dual core AMD AM2 processor. It’s happily running Debian GNU/Linux and is going to be shipped to Amsterdam this week. It’s still a joy to work with these Sun machines. This will be our fourth Sun machine in almost two years. I think we’re going to place another one later this year, to get the load off of grebbehout.

Also at work, our high-end desktops are complete with the arriving of the monitor stands for the dual 22″ LCD setups. It just looks like CSI at out office right now, but without the Mac OS X. These desktops pack quite a puch, with 4 gigs of DDR2 and a speedy AMD X2 5600+ processor. Did you know Linux loves big pipes? I do now! Our software still manages to get these behemoths down to a crawl, though.

This week my new laptop will be shipped. After a collegue of mine bought an IBM Thinkpad x60s I had to have one too. It’s a great and at the same time tiny little laptop. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t want to beat the guy. So I’ve asked to ship an IBM Thinkpad x61s with 12 cells of battery power in total. With the latest tickless patches in the -mm Linux kernel tree Tux will be able to operate for almost 12 hours(!).

And oh no, it doesn’t stop there! Danoontje, my dear ol’ file server, is getting a little hammered lately by the 24/7 OGG encode needed for radio.jrrzz.net. Constant loads of 1.00 - 1.20 on a uniprocessor VIA chip are outside it’s design parameters. Whenever I browse for files on it’s terabyte of storage LVM makes my radio stream hickup. Also panzertux, a ten year old Compaq Deskpro 3000 routing all my traffic, needs to be replaced. I’m sure it can run for another decade without servicing but I want to be sure my network keeps it’s uptime. So I’ve called in the help from the big guys at IBM. Sure, why not? They brought a nice IBM System x3200 for me to fuck around with. Two 750GB barracuda drives (what’s up with the 750GB disks lately?) in RAID-1, a dual core Intel Xeon and (only) 1GB of RAM. I’m going to put the two 500GB ATA-133 drives in there too, just for the fun of it. This new machine will be replacing both panzertux and danoontje and will be running Debian GNU/Linux, of course. With the demise of panzertux the last LFS based machine disappears from my network to leave a 100% Debian GNU/Linux powered network. To make up for the loss I’m going to use what’s left of danoontje to create a NetBSD workstation. It does have the VIA padlock, a cryptographic coprocessor. It’s a shame not to use it.

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