Re: nice: Badly formed number

2011-12-06 Thread Freddie Cash
On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:16 PM, william opensource4you 
william.o...@gmail.com wrote:

 Am I the only one having troubles with the command nice ?
 I'm running: DragonFly mydfbsd 2.10-RELEASE DragonFly
 v2.10.1.1.gf7ba0-RELEASE #1: Mon Apr 25 19:51:42 UTC 2011
 r...@pkgbox32.dragonflybsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC_SMP  i386

 Here the results (the last example is coming from the man page):
 mydfbsd# nice -5 date
 Tue Dec  6 22:11:19 CET 2011
 mydfbsd# nice -n5 date
 nice: Badly formed number.
 mydfbsd# nice -n 5 date
 nice: Badly formed number.


nice is both a binary (/usr/bin/nice) and a shell built-in function.
 Depending on the shell you are using, you will either be using the
built-in or the binary.  And the syntax for them is very different.

I believe you are using the csh above, thus using the built-in nice, which
does not support -n.


 If I take the source code on the gitweb:
 http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/HEAD:/usr.bin/nice/nice.c
 I compile it by doing gcc nice.c

 here the results:

 mydfbsd# ./a.out -5 date
 Tue Dec  6 22:11:08 CET 2011
 mydfbsd# ./a.out -n5 date
 Tue Dec  6 22:11:11 CET 2011
 mydfbsd# ./a.out -n 5 date
 Tue Dec  6 22:11:14 CET 2011


Here you are giving the full path to the nice binary, so you are always
using that binary.

Try the above using /usr/bin/nice for each test, and you'll get the same
results.

Read the man page for your shell to see if nice is a built-in function or
not.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: Can DFly mount ext4?

2011-06-26 Thread Freddie Cash
At the grub prompt hit esc to get the grub menu. Then press the e key to edit 
the first entry. Add a 1 to the end of the line. Press enter to save the line 
then press b to boot.

That will drop you into run-level 1 aka single user mode, with root access.

You should be able to fix things from there.

Sent from my iPod

On 2011-06-26, at 5:44 PM, Pierre Abbat p...@phma.optus.nu wrote:

 A friend gave me an Ubuntu laptop which I proceeded to install a few programs 
 on and then hose. It came with a user a which I decided to change 
 to phma. I renamed the home directory, edited /etc/passwd and /etc/group, 
 and rebooted. I had forgotten to edit /etc/shadow, so I can't log in. It's 
 set up to show Ubuntu and four dots instead of a GRUB prompt. I tried 
 mounting it in the USB enclosure on my Linux box; it said unsupported 
 features, which a bit of googling tells me means it's an ext4 filesystem. I 
 try mounting it on DragonFly as ext2fs and get invalid argument. Is there a 
 way to mount ext4fs?
 
 Pierre
 -- 
 sei do'anai mi'a djuno puze'e noroi nalselganse srera



Re: Filesystems

2011-04-23 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 3:43 AM, Tomas Bodzar tomas.bod...@gmail.com wrote:
 3) FreeBSD probably best port outside of  Solaris, but main porter
 died (sad) and he was great regarding internals so it's quite harder
 now for them

The main porter of ZFS to FreeBSD is Pawel Jakub Dawidek (probably
spelt a bit wrong)  aka p...@freebsd.org, who is most certainly still
alive, and continuing work on ZFS, HAST, GEOM_GATE, and other
interesting storage stuff.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com



Re: ctrl alt backspace does not exit X server

2010-11-05 Thread Freddie Cash
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Sdävtaker sdavta...@gmail.com wrote:
 X.org removed that feature few versions ago, if you want to have the
 ability to use it again need to start it with -retro.

Or, you can add the following to your xorg.conf:
Section ServerFlags
Option  DontVTSwitch  False
Option  DontZap   False
EndSection

The first allows you to use CTRL+ALT+Function keys to switch between
the console and X.

The second allows you to use CTRL+ALT+Backspace to kill the X server.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com



Re: HEADS UP: BIND Removal. Short instructions for migration to pkgsrc-BIND

2010-05-06 Thread Freddie Cash
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Chris Turner
c.tur...@199technologies.orgwrote:

 Sascha Wildner wrote:

 The only question is: Do we want to _maintain_ a drill and libldns in our
 base from now on? Because that's what we would have to do if it's in base.


 there needs to be some way to verify DNS out of the box. period. without
 pkgsrc. period. this is non optional, IMHO.

 otherwise I might as well port System-III unix and start UUCPing my email
 with a 300bps acoustic coupler..

 kernel!dragonfly!ucbvax anyone?


If you just need to verify that DNS works (resolve hostname to IP), then
what's wrong with ping some.host.com?  ;)  Kills two birds with one
stone:  DNS lookups work, and Internet connection is live (if using a
hostname on the Internet).

No need for host, dig, nslookup, etc.  ;)
-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: enabling RGB output

2010-02-16 Thread Freddie Cash
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Pierre Abbat p...@phma.optus.nu wrote:

 Last Saturday I brought my laptop to church to show someone the DVD (it's
 about Bible translation and two people had tried to play it on their
 Windows
 boxen without success - I'm going to ask them to try VLC). I put the laptop
 on the table and he pulled a sound cable and a video cable and plugged them
 into the laptop. The sound immediately came out of the room's speakers. He
 then tried pressing function keys to get the video to come out, but nothing
 happened. How can I tell the laptop to output to the video connector?


The simplest method is to plug in the external monitor while the laptop is
off.

Some laptop BIOSes will auto-configure the ports based on what's detected at
startup.  Some will enable/disable the external ports via a Fn (blue
function key near the left Control key) key combo (usually Fn+F5), but that
doesn't always work with X11.

If X11 is configured correctly, and RandR 1.2 support shows as enabled in
/var/log/Xorg.0.log, then you can use either the CLI xrandr tool or a GUI
version like krandr (for KDE) to configure all the screens.  However, this
will only work if X detects the external port at startup, which usually
requires the cable be plugged in before X starts.


-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: SAS RAID controllers support

2010-02-01 Thread Freddie Cash
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 4:41 AM, Francois Tigeot ftig...@wolfpond.orgwrote:

 On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 12:02:38PM +0100, Francois Tigeot wrote:
 
  I'm curious about the state of hardware RAID controllers in DragonFly.
 
  Would a LSI1068-E controller be usable with DragonFly-2.4 ?

 This page answers my question for this controller:


 http://blogaristoo.lqx.net/index.php/2009/01/14/sassy-lip-from-the-lsi-1068e

 LSI1068e is *not* usable at all.


You'd be better off going with separate PCI-X/PCIe controllers.  Not sure
about DragonFlyBSD, but FreeBSD fully supports these cards (mpt(4), mfi(4),
twa(4)):

4-port PCI-X:  LSI SAS 3041X-R
8-port PCI-X:  LSI SAS 3080X-R

4-port PCIe:  LSI SAS 3041E-R
8-port PCIe:  LSI SAS 3081E-R

There's also the 3Ware cards (these are SAS and SATA):

4-port PCIe:  LSI 3Ware 9690SA-4I
8-port PCIe:  LSI 3Ware 9690SA-8I

These are SATA, but include support for mini-SAS connectors and do work with
SAS drives:

4-port PCIe:  LSI 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML
8-port PCIe:  LSI 3Ware 9650SE-8LPML

4-port PCI-X:  LSI 3Ware 9550SXU-4LP
8-port PCI-X:  LSI 3Ware 9550SXU-8LP

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: nextboot(8)

2009-11-19 Thread Freddie Cash
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:29 AM, Francis GUDIN fgu...@droog.sdf-eu.orgwrote:

 Three quick questions regarding nextboot(8):
 - by default, fdisk(8) uses /boot/mbr and boot0cfg(8) uses /boot/boot0
  (which differ, cmp tells me). Which one should be installed to enjoy
  nextboot(8) ?
 - does nextboot(8) handle the 'serno' enhancements ? just in case the
  manpage lags a bit behind actual functionality…
 - almost off-topic, but the knowledgeable people here might save my
  time: would another slice (Linux) be still bootable after nextboot(8)
  configuration, given that for now the host uses GRUB ? anyone kind
  enough to give pointers as to which file to include in nextboot's
  bootstring for that Linux slice ?

 The idea is to have two OS+pkg slices: one production config + an
 alternative one to lower risks on upgrades (à la «Linux from scratch»).
 The server is remote, and I don't have any KVM, so disasters would be
 painful to recover from…

 Unless things have vastly diverged in the way DFly boots compared to FBSD,
nextboot doesn't have anything to do with which partitions are booted from.
 All it does is tell the loader which kernel to use.  Mainly used for
testing a kernel, since a reboot will load the normal kernel.

Have a look at boot.config(5), which is a file that you can use to tell the
loader and the kernel which partition to use as the root filesystem.

Or, look into using a boot manager.  DFly comes with a simple one that will
list each bootable partition.  Or you can install a simple one like GAG.  Or
you can use GRUB, since you already have it installed on the Linux
partition.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-23 Thread Freddie Cash
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 2:35 AM, Robert Luciani rluci...@gmail.com wrote:
 Freddie Cash wrote:
 Booting FreeBSD 7.1 into a full KDE 4.2
 desktop takes less than 5 minutes.  This is using 3x 120 GB SATA
 drives in a single raidz1.

 Wow 5 minutes?!
 I don't think I'd be pushing it if I said that seems really slow. :S
 On such a fast machine I'd be irritated if it took over a minute to boot. On 
 my
 3Ghz Athlon X2 w/ 2Gb RAM, DragonFly boots vkernels, hosting services, and 
 Gnome
 in about a minute with my two 500Gb hammer drives.

That includes the BIOS/POST delays to find the USB stick, a
boot.config delay, the boot menu delay, loading the kernel off a USB
stick delay, loading a bunch of kernel modules off the USB stick, the
SCSI sub-system delay, starting a bunch of daemons including Samba,
DHCPd, Apache, NFSd, and KDM, and then logging in.  The time from the
kernel being loaded to the desktop appearing is about 2 minutes.  It
just takes a long time to get to the point where the kernel is loaded.
 :)

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-23 Thread Freddie Cash
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Jeremy Chadwick j...@parodius.com wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 05:19:14PM +0100, Jasse Jansson wrote:
 On Feb 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Bill Hacker wrote:
 Robert Luciani wrote:
 Freddie Cash wrote:
 Booting FreeBSD 7.1 into a full KDE 4.2
 desktop takes less than 5 minutes.  This is using 3x 120 GB SATA
 drives in a single raidz1.
 Wow 5 minutes?!
 I don't think I'd be pushing it if I said that seems really slow. :S
 On such a fast machine I'd be irritated if it took over a minute to
 boot. On my
 3Ghz Athlon X2 w/ 2Gb RAM, DragonFly boots vkernels, hosting
 services, and Gnome
 in about a minute with my two 500Gb hammer drives.

 One minute 45 seconds into Xfce4 for a VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz, 2 GB DDR-533,
 all-hammerfs on 2 natacontrol RAID1 'antique' 60 GB PATA UDMA 100 HDD.

 One minute 4 seconds into Xfce4 for an Intel T2130 @ 1.86 GHz 2 GB ?
 RAM, 1 X 120 GB 2.5 HDD, DFLY on 33 GB ad0s1, UFS2 with one hammer
 partition.

 RIADz looks to be the wall-time hog

 RAIDZ is known to be slow, even the main developers admit it if you
 force them to it.

 I'd recommend the individual seeing ~5 minute boot times try disabling
 ZFS prefetching.  Place vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1 in
 /boot/loader.conf and reboot the machine.

Prefetch is disabled.  The delays in the boot on this system are from
using a USB stick for the / partition.  From kernel load to desktop
load is about 2 minutes.   It takes about 2 minutes to get the kernel
and modules loaded, though.

However, my Debian Lenny station at work takes almost 5 minutes to get
to a KDE 4.2 desktop, and that's using a single SATA harddrive with
ext3 and xfs.  Doesn't botther me, though, as I reboot maybe once per
month, sometimes only once per quarter.  I've never really understood
the reasoning for 30-second boot times.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-23 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 11:10 PM, Bill Hacker w...@conducive.org wrote:
 Freddie Cash wrote:
 On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Csaba Henk csaba.h...@creo.hu wrote:
 I need to setup a backup machine, and I intend to utilize today's
 snapshotty filesystems (which boils down to Dfly+Hammer or FBSD+ZFS --
 btrfs is not there yet, and I don't feel like dwelving into Solaris).
 Set up such an OS with such an fs, and backup by syncing to the
 snapshotty fs and create a snapshot.

 I wonder about the following things:

 1) Any idea how does this approach scale related to more conventional
 solutions,
 like rdiff-backup or dump(8)? I see the the pros, but are there any
 cons? How effective is taking regular snapshots space-wise?

 2) Is there any practical argument for choosing between Dfly+Hammer and
 FBSD+ZFS? (Feel free to give biased answers :) )

 3) I'd like to encrypt stuff, either at device or fs level. For
 FreeBSD there is geli(8). I haven't found anything for DragonFly.
 Is there any way to get at it on DragonFly?

 We do this at work, using FreeBSD 7.1 and ZFS, for backing up over 80
 remote Linux and FreeBSD servers, and 1 Windows station.  We have two
 servers, one that does the backups every night, and another that
 mirrors the backups during the day.

 *trimmed* (description of a quite decent ZFS approach)


 After the initial rsync of a server, which can take several days as it
 can easily max out an ADSL link's upload bandwidth, the daily run
 takes about 6 hours, most of which is waiting for rsync to generate
 the file listing.


 *snipped*

 But there we are, Startup 'seeding; is unavidable, but thereafter ... among
 other things, looking to reduce the reliance on rsync (and similar CVS'ish
 or git'ish techniques) having to 'inventory' stuff at a high per-file level
 that a 'hammer mirror-stream' (or GMIRROR to networked RAID) could do 'as
 you go along' at a lower level - closer to the actual blocks as they are
 being written.

 How, and how well, would ZFS handle redundant pools on separate sites?

 And can that be a streaming process - even if that means the redundancy
 target is r/o for 'the duration', as a hammer slave would be?

ZFS includes snapshot send and snapshot recv commands for
streaming snapshots across the network.  However, there is currently a
bottleneck in the recv code that prevents it from saturating even a
100 Mbit link.  This affects ZFS v6 which is in FreeBSD 7.x, and I'm
fairly certain that it hasn't been fixed in ZFS v13 which is in
FreeBSD 8.  Once that has been fixed, then it can be used for
near-real-time streaming of snapshots across the network.

Until then, you can rsync snapshots from the master to the slave
server(s), which is what we're doing.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-22 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Jeremy Chadwick j...@parodius.com wrote:
 I've been through this procedure twice in the past year, as I replaced
 250GB disks with 500GB, and then 500GB disks with 750GB.  It's a *huge*
 pain, and I cannot imagine anyone in an enterprise environment using ZFS
 to emulate a filer -- it simply won't work.  For individual servers
 (where disks are going to remain the same size unless the box is
 formatted, etc.), oh yes, ZFS is absolutely fantastic.

Oh, and you don't have to re-create the pool in order to use the extra
space.  Just zpool replace the drives with larger ones, then zpool
export the pool, and zpool import the pool, and the extra space
becomes available.  I did this on my home server a couple of months
ago.  I started with 3x 120 GB drives split into 3 slices (2 GB for
use by gmirror for /, 1 GB for use as swap, rest for use by ZFS).
Later I moved / onto a 2 GB USB key.  A simple iteration of zpool
replace pool ad4s1 ad4  for each of the three drives, an export and
import, and I had an extra 9 GB of space in my pool.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-22 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Jeremy Chadwick j...@parodius.com wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 01:36:28PM +0100, Michael Neumann wrote:
 Okay zpool remove doesn't seem to work as expected, but it should
 work well at least for RAID-1 (which probably no one uses for large
 storage systems ;-). Maybe zfs replace works, if you replace an old
 disk, with a larger disk, and split it into two partitions, the one
 equally sized to the old, and the other containing the remainder of the
 space. Then do:

   zfs replace tank old_device new_device_equally_sized
   zfs add tank new_device_remainder

 But you probably know more about ZFS than me ;-)

 In this case, yes (that I know more about ZFS than you :-) ).  What
 you're trying to do there won't work.

 The zfs command manages filesystems (e.g. pieces under a zpool).  You
 cannot do anything with devices (disks) with zfs.  I think you mean
 zpool, especially since the only replace command is zpool replace.

 What you're trying to describe won't work, for the same reason I
 described above (with your zpool add tank ad8s1 command).  You can
 split the disk into two pieces if you want, but it's not going to
 change the fact that you cannot *grow* a zpool.  You literally have to
 destroy it and recreate it for the pool to increase in size.

 I've been through this procedure twice in the past year, as I replaced
 250GB disks with 500GB, and then 500GB disks with 750GB.  It's a *huge*
 pain, and I cannot imagine anyone in an enterprise environment using ZFS
 to emulate a filer -- it simply won't work.  For individual servers
 (where disks are going to remain the same size unless the box is
 formatted, etc.), oh yes, ZFS is absolutely fantastic.

This is patently false, and you've been creating unnecessary work for
yourself.  :)

You most definitely can add drives to a pool, thus increasing the
total amount of storage space available in the pool.  It's as simple
as:
  zpool add poolname type device1 device2 ...

That's the whole point of the add keyword ... you add storage to the
pool.  For example, you can create a pool using a 6-disk raidz2 vdev
like so:
  zpool create pool raidz2 da0 da1 da2 da3 da4 da5

Later, you can add another raidz2 vdev like so:
  zpool add pool raidz2 da6 da7 da8 da9

Your pool has now become, effectively, a RAID60:  a RAID0 stripe made
up of two RAID6 arrays.

You can later add a mirrorred vdev to the pool using:
  zpool add pool mirror da10 da11

And data will be striped across the three different vdevs.  This is
the whole point of the pooled storage setup ... you just keep adding
storage to the pool, and it gets striped across it all.

You're getting tripped up by the same thing that I did when I first
started with ZFS:  you can't extend raidz vdevs (ie you can't start
with a 6-drive raidz2 and then later expand it into a 10-drive
raidz2).  But there's nothing stopping you from adding more raidz2
vdevs to the pool.

One of the servers we have at work uses 3x 8-drive raidz2 vdevs:

[fc...@thehive  ~]$ zpool status
  pool: storage
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

NAME  STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
storage   ONLINE   0 0 0
  raidz2  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk01  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk02  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk03  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk04  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk13  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk14  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk15  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk16  ONLINE   0 0 0
  raidz2  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk05  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk06  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk07  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk08  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk17  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk18  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk19  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk20  ONLINE   0 0 0
  raidz2  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk09  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk10  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk11  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk12  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk21  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk22  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk23  ONLINE   0 0 0
label/disk24  ONLINE   0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

[fc...@thehive  ~]$ zpool list
NAMESIZEUSED   AVAILCAP  HEALTH ALTROOT
storage10.9T   3.90T   6.98T35%  ONLINE -

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-22 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Bill Hacker w...@conducive.org wrote:
 Side issue again - just brought up DFLY 2.3.0, default all-hammer layout.

 - atop a natacontrol RAID1 on a pair of salvaged 60 GB IBM 'Deathstars'.
 - VIA C7 1.5 GHz CPU (the el-cheapo MB aimed at Wal-Mart)
 - pulled half the RAM, leaving only 1GB

 Periodically, the aged IBM's sound like squirrels having a go in a gravel
 pit, Xfce4 is *very* slow, but it hadn't started swapping, and based on what
 'top' is showing should actually work decently for basic file, web, or mail
 serving, especially as the OpenSSL recognizes the VIA padlock engine.
  Planty fast enough with 2GB, BTW.

 ZFS is not famed for tolerating that meagre a resource ration as well as
 HAMMER

ZFS on FreeBSD 7.1 runs well with 2 GB of RAM and a 2.6 GHz P4 CPU
(32-bit).  It just requires tuning of a couple of kernel tunables via
loader.conf.  It runs better with a 64-bit CPU and more RAM, but it is
perfectly usable with 2 GB.  Booting FreeBSD 7.1 into a full KDE 4.2
desktop takes less than 5 minutes.  This is using 3x 120 GB SATA
drives in a single raidz1.

ZFS will try to use every bit of RAM that it can as a cache.  But you
can limit how much it can use.  There are reports on the FreeBSD
mailing lists of people using it on laptops (slow drives), and on
systems with only 768 MB of RAM.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-22 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Csaba Henk csaba.h...@creo.hu wrote:
 I need to setup a backup machine, and I intend to utilize today's
 snapshotty filesystems (which boils down to Dfly+Hammer or FBSD+ZFS --
 btrfs is not there yet, and I don't feel like dwelving into Solaris).
 Set up such an OS with such an fs, and backup by syncing to the
 snapshotty fs and create a snapshot.

 I wonder about the following things:

 1) Any idea how does this approach scale related to more conventional 
 solutions,
 like rdiff-backup or dump(8)? I see the the pros, but are there any
 cons? How effective is taking regular snapshots space-wise?

 2) Is there any practical argument for choosing between Dfly+Hammer and
 FBSD+ZFS? (Feel free to give biased answers :) )

 3) I'd like to encrypt stuff, either at device or fs level. For
 FreeBSD there is geli(8). I haven't found anything for DragonFly.
 Is there any way to get at it on DragonFly?

We do this at work, using FreeBSD 7.1 and ZFS, for backing up over 80
remote Linux and FreeBSD servers, and 1 Windows station.  We have two
servers, one that does the backups every night, and another that
mirrors the backups during the day.

The main backup server is:
  - Chenbro 5U rackmount case with 24 drive bays and hot-swappable
SATA backplane
  - Tyan h2000M motherboard
  - 2x Opteron 2200-series CPUs @ 2.6 GHz (dual-core)
  - 8 GB ECC DDR2-667 SDRAM
  - 3Ware 9650SE PCIe RAID controller
  - 3Ware 9550SXU PCI-X RAID controller
  - 24x 500 GB SATA HDs (Seagate and Maxtor)
  - 1350W 4-way hot-swappable PSU

All 24 drives are configured as Single Disk arrays, and show up as
24 separate SCSI devices in the OS.  This allows the RAID controller
to use the 256 MB of onboard RAM as another level of cache and allows
us to use the 3dm2 management console (as opposed to JBOD-mode where
it becomes just a dumb SATA controller).

The main backup server has 2x 2GB CompactFlash in IDE adapters that
house the base OS install.  The second backup server has 2x 2GB USB
sticks for the OS install.  All space on all 24 drives is used for the
ZFS pool.

The main backup server has a single 24-drive raidz2 dataset.  Not
optimal, but we didn't know any better back then.  :)  The second
server has 3x 8-drive raidz2 datasets.  Not as much usable space, but
better performance and redundancy.

/ and /usr are on the CF/USB.  Having /usr on there makes single-user
mode a lot nicer to use.  /usr/local, /home, /usr/ports,
/usr/ports/distfiles, /usr/src, /usr/obj, /var, /tmp, and /backups are
ZFS filesystems with various properties set (like compression on
/usr/src, /usr/ports, and /backups).

We have a custom rsync script that does the backups of the remote
servers everynight, and that creates a snapshot named after the date.
And another custom script that does an rsync from a snapshot on the
main server to the backups directory on the second server, and then
creates a snapshot on there.

After the initial rsync of a server, which can take several days as it
can easily max out an ADSL link's upload bandwidth, the daily run
takes about 6 hours, most of which is waiting for rsync to generate
the file listing.

This setup works wonders, and has been used to re-image servers,
restore files from backups, and even re-set the permissions/ownerships
for /home after a teacher did a chown -R on /home by mistake.  Being
able to cd into a snapshot directory and directly access the files is
a god-send.

We've been running this setup since August 2008.  Disk usage so far is
just over 6 TB.  Daily snapshots average 10 GB.  With ~10 TB of drive
space in each server, we won't run out of space for a while yet.  And
when we get under 1 TB of free space, we just start swapping drives
out for larger ones and the extra space is automatically added into
the pool.  Theoretically, we can put just under 50 TB of disk into
these systems.  :)

For the curious, these boxes cost under $10,000 CDN.  We like to
mention that when the storage vendors call with their $50,000 US
budget storage systems with 5 TB of disk space.  :D  They tend to
not call back.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

2009-02-22 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Jeremy Chadwick j...@parodius.com wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 11:59:57AM +1100, Dmitri Nikulin wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Bill Hacker w...@conducive.org wrote:
  Hopefully more 'good stuff' will be ported out of Solaris before it hits 
  the
  'too costly vs the alternatives' wall and is orphaned.

 Btrfs has been merged into mainline Linux now, and although it's
 pretty far behind ZFS in completeness at the moment, it represents a
 far greater degree of flexibility and power. In a couple of years when
 it's stable and user friendly, high-end storage solutions will move
 back to Linux, after having given Sun a lot of contracts due
 specifically to ZFS.

 The fact that btrfs offers grow/shrink capability puts it ahead of ZFS
 with regards to home users who desire a NAS.  I can't stress this point
 enough.  ZFS's lack of this capability limits its scope.  As it stands
 now, if you replace a disk with a larger one, you have to go through
 this extremely fun process to make use of the new space available:

 - Offload all of your data somewhere (read: not zfs export); rsync
  is usually what people end up using -- if you have multiple ZFS
  filesystems, this can take some time
 - zpool destroy
 - zpool create
 - zfs create

According to the ZFS Admin manual, doing an online replace of the
drive with a larger one, than a zpool export and zpool import is all
that's needed to make use of the extra space.

In theory, one can replace all the drives in the storage array one at
a time, allowing the resilvers to complete each time, and then just
export/import once, and have a massively larger pool to use.

 And if you add a new disk to the system, it's impossible to add that
 disk to the existing pool -- you can, of course, create an entirely
 new zpool which uses that disk, but that has nothing to do with the
 existing zpool.  So you get to do the above dance.

You can add vdevs to a pool at any time.  Data will be striped across
all vdevs in the pool.  What you can't do is extend a raidz vdev.  But
you can add more raidz vdevs to a pool.

If you create a pool with a 3-drive raidz vdev, you can later extend
the pool by adding another 3-drive raidz vdev.  Or by adding a
mirrored vdev.  Or by just adding a single drive (although then you
lose the redundancy of the entire pool).

I've done this several times when playing around with ZFS on FreeBSD
7.1 on a test system with 24-drives.  Started with a 12-drive raidz2
vdev.  Then addded a 6-drive raidz2.  Then another 6-drive raidz2.
Then played around with 3x 8-drive raidz2 vdevs.  And a bunch of other
setups, just to see what the limitations were.  The only one is that
you can't start with an X-drive raidz2 and later extend that single
raidz2 vdev out to Y-drives, like you can with some hardware RAID
controllers.

 I'll also point out that ZFS on FreeBSD (at least 7.x) performs very
 differently than on Solaris 10.  We use Solaris 10 x86 + ZFS at my
 workplace, and the overall usability of the system during heavy disk I/O
 is much more refined (read: smooth) than on FreeBSD.  It's interesting
 to do something like zpool iostat 1 on FreeBSD compared to Solaris 10;
 FreeBSD will show massive write bursts (e.g. 0MB, 0MB, 0MB, 70MB, 0MB,
 0MB, 0MB, 67MB, etc.), while Solaris behaves more appropriately (50MB,
 60MB, 70MB, 40MB, etc.).  zpool scrub is a great way to test this.

Hrm, we haven't run into that, but we're mostly limited by network
speeds in our setup.  zpool iostat shows a fairly constant 2 MB read
or write to each of the 24-drives in the servers.  But that's all
rsync usage, and limited by the ADSL links we use.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com


Re: Hammer on snapshot cd's

2008-07-16 Thread Freddie Cash
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 1:41 AM, Simon 'corecode' Schubert
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Matthew Dillon wrote:

 : cc -Wall x.c -c -O2
 : x.c: In function 'fubar2':
 : x.c:16: warning: 'error' is used uninitialized in this function
 : : (edit so *valuep is set to 0)
 : : cc -Wall x.c -c -O2
 : (no warning reported)
 :
 :So you need to go -O2?  -O alone doesn't work?  Maybe we should -O2
 :after the release then :)
 :
 :cheers
 :   simon

No, we will always stick to -O.  GCC is a moving target too, even if
-O2 works now there is a high chance it will break something in future
GCC rolls.

 Why should -O2 break things and -O never break things?  That doesn't seem
 obvious to me.  I think all the breakages that happened in the last couple
 of years which were connected with optimization happened with -O, -O2 and
 -Os.

 There seems to be a traditional, irrational fear of -O2 in the FreeBSD
 community, which I can't explain.  I've heard something about -O2 and inline
 assembly, but that's probably old as well.

The default CFLAGS for FreeBSD 7+ (possibly 6+) includes -O2.

-- 
Freddie Cash
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: fdisk implementation

2008-07-10 Thread Freddie Cash
On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 3:43 AM, Jost Tobias Springenberg
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Wed, 9 Jul 2008 10:27:49 -0700
 Freddie Cash [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 10:35 AM, Matthew Dillon
 We could probably use a new fdisk, I think this would be a good
 project.

 You may want to have a look at
 http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/sfdisk/  This is the fdisk tool
 used in sysinstall, and has a decent interface.  It's similar to
 cfdisk from the Linux-world (but nicer to use IMO).

 Ok I guess I will take a look at it tonight and also search for alternatives.
 I'll have 2 weeks of time during the next 2 months so it should be possible 
 to finish this.
 Question to the sfdisk, I am not an expert regarding FreeBSD code,
 but doesn't sfdisk depend on some internal FreeBSD disk abstractions ??

Sorry, couldn't tell you about that.  I'm just a user of sfdisk, don't
know anything about its internals.

-- 
Freddie Cash
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: fdisk implementation

2008-07-09 Thread Freddie Cash
On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 10:35 AM, Matthew Dillon
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 :just a quick sidenote... while I decided to finally play around with hammer
 :I had to fiddle around with dragonfly's fdisk implementation and I think it 
 is a mess!
 :The menu driven mode is horrible, and absolutely not self explaining.
 :We should definitely adapt the OpenBSD or newer FreeBSD version.
 :Is there any reason there could occur bigger problems with this ?
 :Otherwise I'm actually willing to try to port it over during my semester 
 break,
 :because I really believe it is necessary to do this.
 :If there is any special super mode I missed about the fdisk we are using 
 right now just let me know!
 :Regards,
 :Tobias
 :
 :--
 :Jost Tobias Springenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]

We could probably use a new fdisk, I think this would be a good
project.

You may want to have a look at
http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/sfdisk/  This is the fdisk tool
used in sysinstall, and has a decent interface.  It's similar to
cfdisk from the Linux-world (but nicer to use IMO).

-- 
Freddie Cash
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: 7-Zip / Bzip2

2008-05-11 Thread Freddie Cash
Compression algorithms are something that should be handled via an
extendle library.  And the front-end apps (gzip, bzip2, 7z, etc)
should just use that library to do the heavy lifting.

Instead of pulling in another app, consider pulling in libarchive and
friends from FreeBSD 6+, and then adding 7z support to that.

Then you can remove compress, gzip, gunzip, bzip2, bunzip2, 7z, etc,
and just put in stub programs that call the library functions.

-- 
Freddie Cash
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: 7-Zip / Bzip2

2008-05-11 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Joerg Sonnenberger
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 10:46:38AM -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
 Instead of pulling in another app, consider pulling in libarchive and
 friends from FreeBSD 6+, and then adding 7z support to that.

 You know that one of the two reasons I wrote the compression_program
 support in libarchive was 7z's lack of a proper library interface?

Well, there you go.  :)  It looks like all the pieces are in place.
What more needs to be done?  ;)

-- 
Freddie Cash
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: Xen vs VMware

2006-10-22 Thread Freddie Cash
On Sun, October 22, 2006 9:41 am, Andreas Hauser wrote:
 wa1ter wrote @ Sat, 21 Oct 2006 10:25:31 -0700:
 Andreas Hauser wrote:
 dillon wrote @ Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:34:02 -0700 (PDT):
 Unless you use a current processor (Intel or Amd e.g.) which come
 with hardware virtualization...

 Can you point out which processors have this hardware -- are they
 the 64-bit models only?  My instincts tell me that the 64-bit
 hardware could virtualize a 32-bit machine -- but that's a pure
 guess on my part.

 No, it has nothing to do with 32-bit or 64-bit.
 Amd calls it Pacifica and Intel Vanderpool or VT.
 Newer Athlon 64 (AM2), Opteron, Core 2, All Intel from Apple etc.
 have it. AFAIR the non Apple mobile Core don't have it.

The codenames for the hardware virtualisation projects are Pacifica
for AMD and Vanderpool for Intel.  The official release names are
AMD-V and Intel-VT.  From research I've been doing online, it seems
that (again) the AMD implementation is much better, virtualising a lot
more of the CPU and providing better support for virtual I/O.

The Xen wiki has a nice list of CPU model numbers that have AMD-V and
Intel-VT support:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_Processors


Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLPHelpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73(250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: Xen vs VMware

2006-10-18 Thread Freddie Cash
On Wednesday 18 October 2006 12:42 pm, Steve Mynott wrote:
 On 10/18/06, Matthew Dillon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Generally speaking I prefer the VMWare concept over the Xen
  concept. Xen actually has to run two operating systems, one serving
  as the master and the other as the 'guest' OS, and this compounds the
  number of potential bugs you might run into a lot more then a machine
  emulator does.

 I'm surprised by this.  Xen (abstracting out some sort of meta
 operating system) seems a cleaner and simplier solution to me than
 running a  complex software copy of real hardware.

 Anyway aren't we just talking about lines of C in both cases?  I
 suspect the number of bugs in either would just be a function of the
 total lines of C.

 Xen is relatively small.   Although vmware source, isn't available
 AFAIK would anyone care to estimate lines of source for it?

Xen itself is small.  However, every OS that you want to run on top of Xen 
needs to be made Xen-aware, with a custom kernel that uses Xen features.  
For that reason, you can really only run open-source OSes on top of Xen 
right now.  You also lose the ability to query the hardware 
(lspci/pciconf for instance return empty statements on Xen) from within 
the guest OS.

VMWare emulates a full PC, with a BIOS and everything.  You can run any OS 
on top of VMWare, without changing the OS in any way.  Everything runs 
the same as if it were installed on real hardware.  You can even query 
the virtual hardware using things like pciconf/lspci.

With the new CPUs from Intel/AMD that include hardware virtualisation 
features, it is theoretically possible to run any OS on top of Xen 3.0+, 
but I have not heard of anyone successfully doing that as yet (not that 
I've searched all that hard).

Xen's para-virtualisation method is said to be a lot faster than VMWare 
full virtualisation method.  With support for hardware virtualisation 
features in newer CPUs, VMWare's latest products are supposedly almost as 
fast as Xen.  And they've started using a few para-virtualisation tricks 
as well to speed things up.

Basically, it boils down to whether you want a virtual OS or a virtual PC.  
Xen is the former, VMWare is the latter.
-- 
Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLP  Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73  (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- 
Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLP  Network Support Technician
School District 73  (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: disk diagnostics

2006-07-25 Thread Freddie Cash
On Tue, July 25, 2006 12:34 pm, Bill Hacker wrote:
 Pieter Dumon wrote:
 how can I diagnose my disk read/write throughput under DFLy ? my
 system runs well except that untarring even small tar files or
 deleting files takes a lot of time (e.g. the removal of
 /usr/obj/usr/src/world_i386 during a make buildworld takes about 25
  minutes (I admit it's got a lot of files, but still)).

 I don't know if it can have anything to do with my strange
 configuration of having the two harddisks on ATA1 while the CDs are
 on ATA0. The disk with the DFly slice is only UDMA33 (there are no
 DFLy
 slices on the other disk), but still, under windows and linux I
 don't have this slow disk access.

 ad2: 28629MB ST330621A [58168/16/63] at ata1-master UDMA33
 ad3: 76319MB WDC WD800BB-00JHC0 [155061/16/63] at ata1-slave
 UDMA100
 acd0: DVD-R AOPEN DUW1608/ARR at ata0-master PIO4
 acd1: CDROM CD-ROM 36X/AKU at ata0-slave PIO4

 Agree that is not an optimal set up - faster IDE drives uusally fare
 best on 80-pin cable to ad0 (master) and ad2 (master) with CD's as
 slaves, or better yet, on a PCI-bus add-on controller so there is no
 master/slave speed difference.

It really depends on what your data transfers across the IDE bus will
look like.  You want to put the sender and receiver on separate
channels (not as master/slave on the same channel), regardless of what
the devices are.

So, if you do mostly CD-HD or HD-CD transfers (ripping or burning
CDs/DVDs) then you will want the HD and CD to be master on separate
channels.

If you do mostly HD-HD transfers, you will want those as master on
separate IDE channels.

If you do mostly CD-CD transfers (on-the-fly copying of CDs/DVDs),
then you will want them on separate channels (preferably as master,
but that's not always possible with only onboard IDE controllers
available).

If you do a fairly balanced mix of HD-HD and HD-CD, then it doesn't
really matter where the devices are.

And you'll want your fastest device to be master on the IDE channel,
if you have multiple devices per channel.

Granted, the best setup is to only have a single device on each IDE
channel.  And to have add-on IDE controller sitting on separate PCI
buses from other devices (if possible).



Freddie Cash, LPCI-1 CCNT CCLPHelpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73(250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: Replacing Sendmail with Postfix in the base system

2006-06-14 Thread Freddie Cash
On Wed, June 14, 2006 7:54 am, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
 On Wed, June 14, 2006 9:49 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Right now, we can switch out to any MTA people want, including
 Postfix.

Several people have mentioned that you can remove sendmail from the
base by just setting NO_SENDMAIL in make.conf and rebuilding the
world.  BUT, nobody has mentioned if that actually removes the old
pieces of sendmail that are already in the filesystem.  For example,
if you install DFly on a clean harddrive, set NO_SENDMAIL in
make.conf, rebuild the world, install the world, reboot, and look in
/usr/lib ... will sendmail still be there?

If it is, then someone should probably have a look at revamping the
build process so that those bits listed as NO_* in make.conf are
actually removed.

Just because you can build the world with sendmail support (or bind
support, or whatever support) doesn't mean those pieces are actually
removed from the running system.

From my experience, the only way to actually remove bits of DFly (or
FreeBSD) is to add all the NO_* entries to make.conf, then build a new
release, and reinstall the system using those release bits, aftering
formating the drive.

So, saying you can just remove sendmail is a little misleading.  :)

(Unless things have changed in DFly, of course.  In which case, point
me to the docs, and I'll keep quiet.)

IMO (which counts for as much as a lady-bug's), sendmail should be
removed from base completely.  Include a simple local-only mailer. 
Then add an option to the installer that asks which MTA the user would
like, and install that using packages built from pkgsrc (similar to
how Perl was removed from FreeBSD's base in 5.x, but still gets
installed as a package).  Have the package install edit mailer.conf to
point to the correct binaries.  Voila!  Everyone can have their MTA
and eat it too!


Freddie Cash, LPCI-1 CCNT CCLPHelpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73(250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: A mobile user's wishlist

2006-06-06 Thread Freddie Cash
On Tuesday 06 June 2006 11:23 am, Thomas Schlesinger wrote:
 I'm using DragonFlyBSD for a few weeks now on my notebook an miss some
 pieces of software:

 3. A battery tool for KDE
 gkrellm is available, but as a KDE user I would like to see something,
 that fits better in the KDE desktop. The DesktopBSD guys have created a
 nice tool for that:
 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/pds.cgi?ports/sysutils/desktopbsd-tools .
 There's also a tool in KDE's svn repository:
 http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdenonbeta/kbatterymonitor/

KControl - Power Control - Laptop Battery doesn't work for you?  This 
starts the klaptop daemon that monitors the battery.  I haven't tried it 
on DFlyBSD, but it worked nicely for me in FreeBSD.  It's part of the KDE 
release, although I do not recall exactly which part includes it.

There's also the KPowersave daemon, although I believe it might be very 
Linux-specific.
-- 
Freddie Cash, LPIC-1 CCNT CCLP  Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73  (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: Sound question.

2006-06-01 Thread Freddie Cash
On Thu, June 1, 2006 12:31 pm, Max von Seibold wrote:
 Sorry for a somewhat open question here. I have just installed
 Dragonfly on my machine and am considering which directions to take
 with sound.

 Can anyone tell me which sound server they would recommend (I saw
 JACK in the pkgsrc list) and have heard good things about it. However
 im somewhat daunted about getting ALSA to work...

ALSA == Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.  ie:  it's not available on
anything but Linux.  :)

Getting sound working on BSD is much simpler.  Just load the kernel
module for all the sound drivers, run cat /dev/sndstat to see if the
kernel detected your sound chipset, then add a line to
/boot/loader.conf to autoload that kernel module at boot.  I do not
remember what the kernel module name is to load all the sound drivers
on FreeBSD4/DFlyBSD, though.  I think it's just snd (kldload snd; cat
/dev/sndstat).

Anyway, read through the snd(4) man page, and all the man pages
referenced by it.

Getting sound working on BSD is easy, if the chipset is supported.  :)



Freddie Cash, LPCI-1 CCNT CCLPHelpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73(250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: Any serious production servers yet?

2006-05-31 Thread Freddie Cash
On Wed, May 31, 2006 11:50 am, Danial Thom wrote:
 --- Matthew Dillon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Er.  Well, if I were talking about today I would be talking about
 today. I'm talking about the near-future, 2-3 years from now.  It
 would be the height of stupidity to have programming goals that
 only satisfy the needs of today.

 It might be the height of stupidity, but it takes 2-3 years to
 convince people that you have something worth using, even if you have
 something great, so are you prepared to wait 4-5 to have a mainstream
 O/S? Once you get the groundwork done, you should ramp up to be
 production quality so you can get some noteworthy people using the
 O/S in real-world servers. Then you can keep it stable and work in
 your roadmap.

 We're approaching a critical point where a lot of companies are going
 to start looking to move into MP who haven't been there before.
 Saying you'll have something really great in 2 years isn't going to
 get people involved with the project.

 Your project will move ahead at an exponential pace once you get more
 funding and more important people working on it. You can't do that
 with an OS that can't be used by anyone with the money to contribute.
 You're thinking like an engineer, and not a marketeer. Its sort of
 ^^^

Thank god for that.  It's about time!!  There are two many OSes out
there that are managed by the marketing dept.  Marketers should not
get involved with an OS at the get go, or even in the first few years.
 We need more engineers working on OSes, not more marketing droids and
script kiddies testing out their compiler for the first time.

:D



Re: make -jn not necessarily helpful

2006-03-14 Thread Freddie Cash
On Mon, March 13, 2006 8:52 pm, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
 Out of curiousity, I thought I'd try running make buildworld with the
 -j option in a few different configurations to see what difference
 it made. I know it's supposed to speed up the process by a certain
 amount because of the parallel processing, but there's no direct
 quantifier.

 I put together a shell script that had this several times over

 make clean
 echo `date`  /home/justin/benchmark.txt
 echo 'make -j2 buildworld'  /home/justin/benchmark.txt
 make -j2 buildworld
 echo `date`  /home/justin/benchmark.txt
 echo/home/justin/benchmark.txt

 I did this with no -j, -j1, -j2, and -j3

Try moving the make clean to the end, and rebooting between runs. 
That will eliminate any caching or disk buffering that may be
happening.

I haven't timed the buildworld runs on my systems in a long time, but
the last time I did, -j2 was faster than -j1 on a UP system.  All
higher -j settings were slower.  And on a dual-Opteron sytem, -j4 and
-j6 alternated between being the fastest.



Freddie Cash
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: recommend kvm switch

2005-12-02 Thread Freddie Cash
 The nice thing about IOGear KVM's is that they come with cables and
 are at a decent price. The one I have at home cost me about 150 bucks
 but that was about 2-3 years ago. They cost much less these days,
 though.

 Seems like alot of people here have had good luck with Belkin.
 Personally, I will never buy a belkin product again. I have had an 8
 port KVM and a 4 port KVM crap out on me. I've had problems with other
 Belkin products as well.

Guess it all depends on the product / use.  :)

We (the school district) have 20 4-port Belkin OmniView KVMs in
various schools, as well as 4 8-port KVMs daisy-chained in the server
room.  All came with cables (early ones were nice, all three cables in
one sheath, later ones were just extension cables twist-tied
together).  And only 1 died due to overheating under a desk.  :)

-- 
Freddie Cash, CCNT CCLPHelpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73 (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]   [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: recommend kvm switch

2005-11-30 Thread Freddie Cash
On November 30, 2005 01:14 pm, Bob Bagwill wrote:
 Can anyone recommend a really bullet-proof 2 or 4 port kvm switch
 (that's DBSD compatible)?  Thanks.

The Belkin 2-port (with built-in cables), 4-port, and 8-port KVM switches 
work really well.  Tested with Windows 98/XP, FreeBSD 
4.10/4.11/5.3/5.4/6.0, and an early release of DFly (1.0 or 1.2).  The 
only issue with BSD is that you either have to boot with the KVM set to 
that port, or add flags=0x100 to the keyboard driver (atkbd I think).  
Otherwise, the keyboard won't work for that boot session.

-- 
Freddie Cash, LPIC-1 CCNT CCLP  Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73  (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Re: Warning about installing DragonFly and FreeBSD to same disk

2005-08-25 Thread Freddie Cash
On August 25, 2005 12:45 pm, Rob Andrews wrote:
 [25-Aug-2005 17:59.00 (BST) / Chris Pressey]
   I haven't tested any workarounds yet, but I suspect that marking
   the DragonFly partition with some other partition id (like MS-DOS)
   before installing, and marking it back after installing, would be
   enough to trick FreeBSD's installer into ignoring it.

 grub has an option parttype that can change the partition type
 before proceeding with the boot process. I used it to change
 freebsd's partition type back to 0 and dragonfly's to 165 before
 booting dragonfly, and vice versa for freebsd. Popping this into the
 menu file will do the grunt for you at boot time.

 If you install the loader to the FreeBSD and DragonFly partition boot
 sectors and skip the MBR loader installation you can install grub and
 have it chain load the boot loader from the boot sector.

 Be warned, grub may not support the ufs filesystem you choose to
 install it upon. If grub can't read the stage2 files from your
 filesystem, keep an ext2 or FAT filesystem somewhere.

GRUB 0.9.5 and above supports UFS1 and UFS2.  And you don't need to use  
chainloader to load the BSD loader.  You just set the kernel option in 
GRUB to /boot/loader.

I used GRUB 0.9.5 to tripleboot FreeBSD 4.8-4.11 and 5.2.1-6.0B2, and 
Windows XP (using chainloader and makeactive for XP) without issues.

Haven't tried with DragonFlyBSD, but it should work.
-- 
Freddie Cash, CCNT CCLPHelpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73 (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]