Category: computers

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January 24, 2004

Yay! FreeBSD is up and running, without any sort of RAID controller. After buying a 3Ware from eBay and having it need *identical* disks, I thought I was sunk. So, I ran out to Micro3000 (thanks, Erik!) and picked up a Promise FastTrak100 TX2. Turns out that this controller only does on-line swaps and rebuilds when using a special Windows driver. Gah! Oh, and manual, off-line rebuilds take forever. It took about an hour and a half to re-sync the mirror after I intentionally broke it. Ah well.

Anyway, to make a long story short, thanks to the wonderful help I received from , I’ve got a working mirrored system, and the know-how to do it again. Now, to get everything configured, test what happens if a disk does die, etc.

Oh, and yes, Erik, I think I will need to return that controller. It just doesn’t work quite how it says on the box. :\ Ah well. Things are good, for now.

:(

January 24, 2004

Not. Happy.

This 3Ware Esclade 5000-series controller will only create a mirror from identical disks. Not identical *size* disks, but identical disks. Subversion number and all. So, now I’ve got two Western Digital WD800JB disks that I can’t create a mirror with, because they were made at different times of the year. Quick fix is to buy a new 80GB, but what do I do with the old one then?

Blah.

In good news, the colocation place looks really nice. I think my server will end up there. They pass all the tests: run by a geek who’s been around, been in business for a while, fair number of servers, nice guy, not-RBL’d, well connected, etc.

So, off to fight with the disk controller.

UPDATE: Now FreeBSD 5.2 dumped core when trying to boot in order to install. This might be because I don’t have any arrays defined. I wonder if I have a set of any old disks I can try this with. Hrm.

computers moved from livejournal

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January 16, 2004

Well, that’s it. My home file/web server has been shut down. Everything that was on the 80GB disk and the contents of the websites are being copied off. Fairly soon the server will be mostly disassembled, I’ll attempt to do the weird vinum install, then decide if I need the hot-swap RAID stuff.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

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January 16, 2004

All, this isn’t all that important, but it looks like I’m going to be moving dingleberrypie.com out of it’s current place and into a full-out colocated server. As part of this, I need to get the server built, configured, secured, etc. So, for a while, dingleberrypie.com will be down. That means no recipes, photo galleries, etc. I’ve also got a bunch of server-moving work ahead of me tonight.

Let’s see… The file/web server will get parted out to become the new colocated server and the file server. The firewall will be moving back to it’s old Gateway 2000 pizza box. Either a second pizza box or the file server will become the new file server, depending on if I can get an external SCSI enclosure or not.

These decisions will come tonight. :D I also need to play with using Depenguinator to set up a vinum-mirrored disk set, per ‘s recommendation. I’ve got it mostly working here under VMware, but Depenguinator doesn’t come with the vinum lkm, so I’ll have to get things working.

This should be a really, really interesting trip. But, with any luck, I’ll finally be running my own, legal, publically accessable web/mail server.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

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December 31, 2003

Well, it seems that I should be able to use the digital out from my motherboard fairly easily. That means I only need one piece of coax for audio run from the computer to the receiver, and it should be relatively noiseless, as it’ll be a digital signal. Video seems like it’ll be a bit more interesting, though. See, iTunes visualizations only run in 640×480 when full screen, so I think that composite *should* do all right. I just need to find a way to extract a composite signal from the board. There’s a five-pin connector that hookes to a $15 Asus TV-out adapter, but I don’t want to pay that. I figure there’s a common ground, one pin for composite, and the other three pins for s-video. If I can only find out which two pins are for the composite, and if the chipset properly detects a TV when this is connected, I’ll be in good shape. :) I think the appropriate thing to do would be to order some Belden 1807A, two s-video connectors, and the Asus adapter, but I’d rather not spend any more on this project.

If this idea had only popped into my head about four days ago. :\

computers electronics moved from livejournal

DHCP Issue

December 12, 2003

Okay, well, I can now reproduce the issue I’m having with my firewall. Here’s how:

1) Reboot Firewall.
2) Log in as root.
3) Kill the dhclient process.
4) Execute ‘dhclient xl0’ to start the DHCP client again.
5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 two more times. (3x total)
6) Network connection goes poof.

I’m not sure if this is an issue with OpenBSD’s dhclient or what yet, although I see no reason why a DHCP server should be able to cause a client to go wacky. If I get a chance, I’ll try it tomorrow on a test machine at work. I’m very curious what will happen if I do this with a non-Comcast DHCP server.

If you’re interested, there are two network captures of the DHCP requests going back and forth at http://www.nuxx.net/files/dhcp_issue.tar.gz. Interestingly, the next packet after the server sending a DHCP ACK is my firewall ARPing for itself. (???)

Hmm, it seems that there is an OpenBSD Patch for arp which patches part of if_ether.c. I wonder if this patch would take care of my troubles…? I think I’ll try to grab the kernel source tonight while sleeping, then give it a try after work tomorrow.

I think I’m at least making headway… I hope?

computers moved from livejournal

:(

December 11, 2003

I lost my fucking IP lease. I should have thought that a transparent proxy is going to cause the cable modem to think a new NIC is connected. Bah.

Stupid, stupid me.

Now I’m sniffing through a hub, but the address has changed.

computers moved from livejournal

Protected: Hmm…

December 11, 2003

computers moved from livejournal

meep.

December 10, 2003

Lots done around here today. First off, I change the firewall. Went from OpenBSD 3.3 to 3.4, to a Celeron 300a (at 450Mhz), new NICs, the works. Hopefully this will cut down on the outages I’ve been having. Big problem with this, though, is my public interface IP changed. It’s now 68.60.146.109. DNS changes have been put into place, and we’ll see how things go. Over the last week I’ve also finished adding entries to the recipes section. As I get more that I commonly use, I’ll add them, but that’s all for now.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

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December 9, 2003

So, I did it. I just ordered the parts to rebuild my old PC.

No, I’m not switching away from Macs, it’s just been sort-of mandated that I get a Windows Server 2003 cert by the end of 1Q2004. So, I need a test machine.

It’s not a bad deal… From Newegg I was able to get a AMD Athlon XP2500+ CPU, Asus A7N8X-VM (nForce 2 IGP) Micro-ATX motherboard, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, and a (free) t-shirt for ~$268.

I figure I’ll assemble the machine into the Doggie Case which housed by old high-end PC. It’ll end up on the rack down in the basement, admin’d via Terminal Service / Remote Desktop. One nice thing, it’ll give me a chance to play with *nix / OS X / Windows integration at home.

Oh, I just realized I haven’t done much of an update lately. So, what’s been going on with me? Well, I had a really good time at ‘s birthday party on Saturday. I was initially hesitant to go, but I’m glad I did. Last night I had an issue where the lamp in my office burned out, and there are no replacement bulbs available. So, two CDs and two trips to Lowe’s later and I had it retrofitted to house an outdoor halogen spotlight. It seems to work well, and will now accept any standard base bulb. And it looks good. I would have just bought a new lamp, but it’s really, really hard to find silver and black torche lamps. They all seem to be nappy black/gold, straight out of 1985, or they have a pricetag upwards of $50. Too much for me.

Tonight I have to give a presentation in class as part of the final project. I’m kinda nervous, but I generally know the material. My biggest concern is running over time, because I have a lot of info. I’m off work tomorrow, so I’m going to try and get the paper for class done. It’s not due until the 18th, but the instructor asked that we get them in earlier so he has more time to read them. I’m going to try to stay in his good graces. I *think* I have the structure of the paper generally done, I just need to write the actual words now. And bibliography. Whee!

Hrm, yeah, that’s it for now. I’m going to go think about eating the indian food I brought for lunch. Mmm….spicy!

around the house computers moved from livejournal