Category computers

I don’t know if anyone who reads this actually cares, but while I was initially taken back* by vinum‘s non-functionality on FreeBSD 5.4, it turns out that gmirror is quite a bit snazzier and thus far seems far, far easier to use. I’m also looking forward to combining it with gstripe to do RAID0+1 once I have the ability to hook four large disks up to this machine all at once.

gvinum exists as a replacement for vinum which hooks into geom, but it isn’t documented very well yet, and (at least in this case) I can’t see a reason to use it.

If anyone is interested in giving it a try, this simple series of steps shows just how easy it is to get a geom/gvinum-based mirrored root disk is. Gone are the days of installing to one disk then using this to bootstrap two more with vinum, a faked disk label with an ‘a’ partition that overlapped the vinum partition, etc.

After this finishes writing the mirror to the second disk I might try the standard tests… Pulling a disk, bringing it back into a sync’d mirror, etc. Or maybe I’ll go to bed.

At least this is getting done.

* I gave up on things for almost a week, thinking I had some weird hardware quirkyness because every other time I’d do a ‘vinum start’ the machine would dump core.

If there is anyone who reads this who knows anything about writing widgets for OS X’s Dashboard, could you take a look at this widget and let me know why it’s not working?

I really, really just don’t know why.

Or, I guess if you just want to try it and see what happens, that wouldn’t be a bad idea either… For me it just.doesn’t.work.

Thanks!

http://www.nuxx.net/files/Liz%20and%20Steve.wdgt.zip

Yeah, I forgot how long it takes to upgrade the package database on a FreeBSD box.

This also means that I can’t do *anything* towards getting IMAP working right now. Guh.

And for some reason courierlogger didn’t compile/install before, so courier wouldn’t start.

Eh, I’ll just keep hammering on it.

Yay, I just trashed the OS install on my PowerBook and dumped a bare 10.4 install on there. Time to reinstall everything.

Has anyone who reads this ever worked with Compaq / HP iLO / RILOe boards? And more specifically, have they used them with Linux?

I’ve got a Linux-based boot floppy here that works just fine when booted in the server, but when you create an image and try to use it via the iLO / RILOe virtual floppy (this is on multiple servers) it doesn’t complete booting. On iLO it finishes reading the kernel early, then gives an error decompressing the kernel (because it didn’t read it all in). On the RILOe boards it reads the kernel and boots it, but gives an IO error when attempting to load the filesystem.

Guh, I just don’t know.