Linux-Hardware Digest #898, Volume #14 Wed, 13 Jun 01 13:13:13 EDT
Contents:
Creating Raw Devices ("Jaishni Govender")
Re: Hard Drive Mess !! (Dances With Crows)
Re: Kernel Panic ("CN")
Re: RedHat v7.0 installation on Alpha 164LX (P.Ravialahan)
2 network cards 3c905b-tx-m ("Kelly Watts at Ring's End")
Re: Hardware Blues Too noisy and hot..Need a new setup ("Kelly Watts at Ring's End")
Re: Budget Linux compat. Laser printer recommendations ? (Georges Giralt)
Re: 2 network cards 3c905b-tx-m (Georges Giralt)
Re: Network / NFS Hangs help please. (Joshua Baker-LePain)
ISP set up under Debian potato ("Will Muir")
Glidepoint mouse/touchpad (Clayton Weaver)
Re: Capacity of Dell Server running as a web server? ("Heikki Tuuri")
Mikrosekunden in Pixel umrechnen? (Hans-Joachim Zierke)
Re: Starband on Linux ("Ron Bellomo")
Re: Can anyone help me on a best notebook choice ("Patrick Draper/Austin/Sector 7
USA, Inc.")
Best way to find out the right parameters? (DTCT-436P) (Gustav W. Schauwecker)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Jaishni Govender" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Creating Raw Devices
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 13:44:26 +0200
Hi everyone,
Can anyone please help or point me in the right direction. I need info on
how to create raw devices as I am trying to install oracle parallel server
on RedHat 6.2. I can't find any info or documentation on this. any help
would be greatly appreciated.
Thanx
Jaishni
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dances With Crows)
Subject: Re: Hard Drive Mess !!
Date: 13 Jun 2001 13:31:13 GMT
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 10:49:07 GMT, cj101 staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
>A friend of mine gave me a an old PC that had W98 & Mandrake Linux on
>it. Well, ..... I wanted to fdisk both partitions & fomat the whole
>drive so that I could install RH 7.0 from scratch.
>
>Mistake 1: Removed partitions (Non-Dos).
>
>Mistake 2: Formatted HD. Apparentely, it still had Mandrake somewhere
>on HD after formatting. RH FIPS boot disk says that I can't partition
>"less that 12.??..?" CD started working at first, but then locked up
>on me.
>
>My cdrom is reading W98 & ME, but not the RH Linux (from a book). I
>want to TOTALLY wipe out my hard drive and then run just RH.
Boot Linux in some way. http://www.toms.net/rb/ for the best rescue
system you can fit on one floppy. Then do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
...et voilà, no more partitions of anything. Replace hda with sda if
you're booting from a SCSI disk, of source. When you use the install CD
for any OS, it will detect that the disk is unpartitioned, and start up
a partitioning utility so that you can do whatever you want with the
free space.
--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best
http://www.brainbench.com / friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark
=============================/ to read. ==Groucho Marx
------------------------------
From: "CN" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Kernel Panic
Crossposted-To: alt.linux,alt.os.linux
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 23:32:11 -0400
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Paige" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> After proprorly shutting down my linux box I can no longer reboot. I
> first tried to boot and it didn't work. And came to a point that said
> something along the lines of:
>
> Kernel panic: unable to boot somthing about booting with the parameter
> initd
>
> I shut down and tried again. Now it just hangs never even boots. The
> curser just blinks. So I attempted with the rescue disk I had made
> prior. It successfully lists eth0 and then:
>
>
> EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
> isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=03:05, iso_blknum=16, block=32
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05
>
> I suspect the harddrive has failed. Is this a correct assumtion? Is
> there anything I can do to recover? What should be my next test? I
> guess the system diagnostics would be a good try.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.
>
>
> Mojo Nichols
>
Did you compile the kernel recently and selected the file system to be
compiled as modules, this is one of the possible explaination for what
you are experiencing.
All the best,
CN
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (P.Ravialahan)
Crossposted-To:
comp.os.linux.alpha,comp.os.linux.redhat,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.hardware
Subject: Re: RedHat v7.0 installation on Alpha 164LX
Date: 13 Jun 2001 06:40:20 -0700
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (P.Ravialahan) wrote in message
news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> recently I got to install RedHat Linux 7.0 on an AlphaPC with the
> configurations given at the end of this message
>
> NONE of three installation modes are working out >>>
Is any one how to get rid of this problem???
>
> 1)Installer gets crashed while loading the UI on GUI installation mode
> SRM console commamd used:
> boot dqb0 -file /kernels/vmlinux.gz -flags "root=/dev/hda
> initrd=images/ramdisk.img"
> gives "Gdk: error"
>
> 2) When I was trying to install by "Text mode" with the SRM console
> command as follows:
> boot dqb0 -file /kernels/vmlinux.24 -flags "root=/dev/hda
> initrd=images/ramdisk.img"
> during this process, installation went well for first two
> steps[Language selection, Locale settings, ]
> on third step [installer source location-- Local
> CDRom/HardDisk/NFS/FTP-HTTP]
> It gives a message as follows "unable read Local CDROM......"
>
> 3) while using the command
> boot dqb0 -file /kernels/vmlinux.j -flags "root=/dev/hda
> initrd=images/ramdisk.img"
> Its geting stucked in "uncompressing process" --- no error
> message/running process
>
> Hardware configuration & SRM level used as follows:
>
> SRM level: 5.8-1
> Graphics card: Fire GL 1000 ---- PCI
> Mother board: Alpha PC 164LX
> Processor: Digital Alpha 21164, 600 MHz
> Display: COMPAQ Presario V410 Model 304u
> HDD: Quantum FireBall LM A35 -----IDE
> CD-ROM: Asus 50x CD-S500/A 2.0H ------IDE
> Sound Card: Creative Labs sound Blaster 1.5, Pro 16 ---- ISA
------------------------------
From: "Kelly Watts at Ring's End" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: 2 network cards 3c905b-tx-m
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 08:29:49 -0400
Redhat 7.0 installer finds both my 3com905b-tx-m's and allows me to
configure them.
But after installation I can only ping the bottom card though ifconfig shows
both cards there. It looks like an IRQ problem but I am not sure. Is there
any other linux stuff to do to make this work and should one mess with IRQ's
rather than let the BIOS handle it? IRQ's assigned are 5 (works) and 11
(doesn't work) and I have
USB turned off and pnp off as well. ps I am new to linux so please be
gentle
Later...
I forced irq of eth1 to 4 and disabled com1 and ifconfig now shows eth1 with
irq4. Now when ping out at least ifconfig shows xmit and rcv packet count
incremented whereas before it was not. I can ping each card from within
linux but I still cannot ping eth1 from another machine whereas I can ping
eth0. I can swap the cards and thus prove that the cards ar OK. Any
thoughts appreciated.
Thanks
------------------------------
From: "Kelly Watts at Ring's End" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Hardware Blues Too noisy and hot..Need a new setup
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 10:07:23 -0400
I buy my parts from a place in NYC:
http://www.pc-beyond.com/
These guys are hard to get ahold of but are generally reliable and good
prices; not the cheapest, but they have been around a while. I recommend
Athlon processor and Asus motherboard. Any of the new cases will be much
quieter
"Stephe Thayer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:C8IP6.384$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Harry Putnam proclaimed:
>
> > I have been running linux for several years so not completely green
> > but really have no idea what kind of new hardware is out there that
> > may solve my problem.
> >
> > My machines are too noisy and produce too much heat (Mine are pentium
> > 200s circa 1997 tall towers). My wifes machine has a different look
> > size and shape (shorter and fatter) and is very quiet and seems cooler
> > too.
>
> >I have
> > enough ethernet cards and hard disks scattered around to start a small
> > war so no problems there unless compatibility problems.
> >
>
> Just a note, the newer hard drives are a BUNCH quiter than the old ones...
>
> The heat is less on the newer small die chips. I'm using a P3 800 and the
> whole box runs about 20 deg cooler than my P2 350 did and is MUCH faster.
> Asus makes a nice mother board and any of the later32 meg nvidia boards
> should do what you need. Antech makes a nice case that has a pull out
board.
>
> Good luck and have fun building it!
>
> Stephe
>
> Stephe
------------------------------
From: Georges Giralt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Budget Linux compat. Laser printer recommendations ?
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 16:28:18 +0200
Sean Akers wrote:
> My trusty old Laserjet III has finally died after years of faithful
> service. It's therefore time to replace it with the latest trendy
> model. I'm on a very tight budget so can any of you wonderful fellows
> recommend a cheap Linux compatible laser printer. I imagine even the
> crappest model on the market today can out perform my old Laserjet
> which I've been very happy with so I really don't need anything fancy,
> but it must be able to print full page graphics and be compatible with
> Linux and Windows.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sean.
Hello !
Have you considered the buy of a second hand HP laserjet 4 or 5 ?
If you buy the 4 go for the 4Mplus which is postscript enabled and
perhaps you could buy it with the MIO ethernet Jetdirect card and some
extra memory for it (really usefull for graphic printing)
Check the total printed pages (but this can be changed if the guy wo
sold it is somewhat undelicate) mine has passed the 890 000 barrier...
Hope this helps
--
Georges Giralt Administrateur Système et Réseaux
Silogic 78 Chemin des Sept-Deniers 31200 Toulouse
Tel +33 (0)5 61 13 53 00 Fax +33 (0)5 61 57 96 60
------------------------------
From: Georges Giralt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: 2 network cards 3c905b-tx-m
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 16:33:43 +0200
Kelly Watts at Ring's End wrote:
> Redhat 7.0 installer finds both my 3com905b-tx-m's and allows me to
> configure them.
Infos snipped............................
>
>
> Thanks
Every time I've tried to make two ETH card at work on the same machine in a Redhat
install, I've found that putting the really same cards won't work.
My explanation is that they share the same driver code, maybe the same
interrupt (if PCI) and perhaps the same of next I/O region.
On the other hand I've always had instant success using say a 3Com one
and a SMC one in the same machine. Different drivers are at help.
I've now standardised this method with great success.
Hope this helps
--
Georges Giralt Administrateur Système et Réseaux
Silogic 78 Chemin des Sept-Deniers 31200 Toulouse
Tel +33 (0)5 61 13 53 00 Fax +33 (0)5 61 57 96 60
------------------------------
From: Joshua Baker-LePain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Network / NFS Hangs help please.
Date: 13 Jun 2001 14:57:29 GMT
Peter P. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> - The mount is slow. Takes few seconds for the first update, and when I try
> to copy large files ~30 meg across the NFS, the connection stalls sometimes
> resumes and stalls again, system load jumps to anywhere between 2-4 and the
> system eventually hangs. (possible NIC module / kernel networking problem.)
Is there anything in /var/log/messages on the Linux client? What does
'dmesg' say? How is network connectivity on the box in general?
You have to determine whether it's a NFS issue, a networking issue,
or a hardware issue. To test the last (and the network drivers) you
could throw a different NIC in there, and see how that works.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
------------------------------
From: "Will Muir" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: ISP set up under Debian potato
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 09:05:33 -0600
This is the first time that I have set up an internet account account under
Linux, and I finally got my winmodem working this week. I have read the ISP
hookup howto, but the problem is that my provider has a dynamic DNS and it
makes no mention of how to connect to a dynamic DNS my IP address is also
dynamic.
Is there a configuration tool under Debian that I can use to write all these
config scripts and address the above mention problem. Any help in this
matter would be greatly appreciated.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Clayton Weaver)
Date: 13 Jun 2001 15:17:36 GMT
Subject: Glidepoint mouse/touchpad
I noticed on an ALPS Electric (Japan) web site an announcement that
they are no longer licensed to distribute their Glidepoint input device
products or drivers for same. (Someone must have bought the rights
from them.)
Does anyone else make an equivalent to the Desktop Glidepoint,
ie a 3-button touchpad about 4" x 6"? The Cirque that I once had
was inconveniently small. It needed to be velcro-ed to the desk
and rotated 90 degrees to do drag-and-drop, and even then it
was a tighter curl between thumb (to operate the button) and
finger (to drag the whatever) than I found convenient.
(Note: this doesn't really affect keyboards w/ touchpad pointing
device particularly, because the buttons can be in arbitrarily
convenient locations relative to the touchpad itself.)
Besides, the Cirque didn't do software-free serial mouse emulation
(which was a nice-feature of the ALPS).
So. Anyone know of such a product, and if so, has anyone used one
with Linux?
TIA,
Regards,
Clayton Weaver
<mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Everyone is ignorant, just about different things." Will Rogers
------------------------------
From: "Heikki Tuuri" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Capacity of Dell Server running as a web server?
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 15:18:51 GMT
Steve,
Steve Wolfe wrote in message ...
>> I was wondering if someone could que me in on what kind of capacity I
>> might possibly get from a Dell 2500 series server running Red Hat 7.0
>> (or 7.1) as a web server that accesses mysql on the same machine. I'm
>> just looking for a rough estimate based on experience. The machine
>> will be dedicated to this task. I'm assuming that the network isn't a
>> bottle neck to the machine, but if you could tell me what kind of
>> connection you think would be necessary to max out this machine, I
>> would appreciate that information too.
>>
>> The specs on the machine are:
>> 2 - 933Mhz Pentium III processors
>> 1 GB of RAM - PC 133 ECC
>> 3 - 18 GB 10,000RPM SCSI drives using RAID 5
> <snip>
>2. MySQL only does well with three or fewer simultaneous connections,
>above that, it's performance really sucks. (see www.greatbridge.com for
>benchmarking performance under various numbers of connections.)
>PostgreSQL is the only DBMS out of MySQL, MS SQL, and Oracle that truly
>can scale efficiently, and in a web-serving environment, it's very common
>to have many simultaneous queries running.
are you talking from your own experience, when you say that 'MySQL
performance really sucks' and 'only PostgreSQL scales'? A detailed report
of your performance problem could help to solve it.
Below are the numbers one user of MySQL/InnoDB posted for his application
running on a 2-CPU Dell server:
.........................
mysql Ver 11.15 Distrib 3.23.38, for pc-linux-gnu (i686)
redhat 6.2 with kernel, 2.4.4. This is on a dual PIII650 with 1 gig of ram
Threads: 30 Questions: 122988857 Slow queries: 118 Opens: 347 Flush
tables: 1 Open tables: 133 Queries per second avg: 285.944
These were taken at 3:22 am on a Monday morning, in the afternoon we
peek at 200 threads and 950 Queries per second!! Not to shabby for a
MySQL server running a 4.4 GB database with a few million rows!
..........................
><snip>
> Assuming a little bit of DB work, but not terribly complex queries, you
>should be able to do at least 150,000 hits per day. If the DB work is
The above numbers I pasted translate to 25 million DB queries per day,
and that is not close to the maximum capacity.
MySQL/InnoDB seems to scale well at least to 200 connections.
I have posted at my website http://www.innodb.com benchmarks against
PostgreSQL 7.1.1 and a market-leading database. Simple join speed
in MySQL/InnoDB-3.23.39 is over 10 times larger than in PostgreSQL 7.1.1.
Best regards,
Heikki Tuuri
Innobase Oy
>more complex, that will drop. As you reach the capacity of the machine,
>you'll notice that your traffic will tend to level out, rather than
>continuing going - there's a negative-feedback loop, where the more
>heavily-loaded the machine, the slower it's response, and the fewer people
>will stay there. I've seen traffic numbers almost double within a couple
>of days of upgrading to faster servers. : )
>
> When you do get to the point when the machine won't handle it, get
>another machine just for database work.
>
> Oh - as to what sort of connection you'll need to max out the machine,
>it depends on the "cost" of executing the CGI and DB work, and the size of
>your result set. If you're doing a fair amount of DB work (like my
>company does), then it will take a lot of very powerful CPU's to even fill
>a megabit of bandwidth. We currently use a little over 9 GHz of
>processor power between DB and CGI servers to do that much - but if we
>were just serving static pages, we could probably fill that much bandwidth
>with a single Pentium. : )
>
>steve
>
>
>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hans-Joachim Zierke)
Subject: Mikrosekunden in Pixel umrechnen?
Date: 13 Jun 2001 15:58:50 GMT
Hi,
mein Modeline-Errechner möchte folgende Angaben:
Front porch pixels
Sync pulse pixels
Back porch pixels
Ich habe aber keine Pixel, sondern
front porch - 0.942 usec.
Sync - 1.88 usec.
back porch - 1.88 usec.
Wie übersetze ich?
hajo
------------------------------
From: "Ron Bellomo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Starband on Linux
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 10:12:49 -0600
It does better when I point it at the Windows machine running as_agent. =
Mail and news don't use it, of course, so they work great. Some have =
been running VMWare and Win98 with as_agent on the linux box. But, that =
seems like a bit of overkill to solve this problem. It really isn't a =
problem for me to keep the Windows machine on when surfing with the =
Linux machine. But, I would prefer to find the best solution available.
>
NO AS_AGENT for linux that I know of. I'm just using netscape on my =
lnux box
and speed seems reasonable to me.
--=20
Dick Freedman
------------------------------
From: "Patrick Draper/Austin/Sector 7 USA, Inc." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Can anyone help me on a best notebook choice
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 16:48:32 GMT
I have an IBM A21m and everything on it works perfectly. The video is
recognized by all the distributions automatically. The sound works
perfectly. Even the built in Winmodem works perfectly with the Lucent
driver.
This is the third Thinkpad that I've owned, and all of them have been
outstanding machines.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Gustav W. Schauwecker)
Subject: Best way to find out the right parameters? (DTCT-436P)
Date: 13 Jun 2001 09:50:53 -0700
Hello everyone,
I got a little problem with my DTCT-436P SCSI-card (for my Mustek
1200SP Scanner), Kernel 2.4.4. After doing some research on the
Internet, I think the g_NCR5380 module will do it. But how can I find
out the right paramters? I really NEED a scanner under Linux.
Thanx for any advice
Gustl Schauwecker
------------------------------
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******************************
