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Changing PCI IDs of Intel wireless cards from Linux for Thinkpad laptops
by Toby Corkindale 19 Jun '13

19 Jun '13

So I bought another Lenovo Thinkpad laptop recently. (I like them, they work well with Linux, they're solidly built.) After having some minor annoyances with the Broadcom wireless in my previous thinkpad, this time I ordered one with an Intel wireless chip that'd be well supported in Linux. However once the laptop arrived, I discovered that the Intel option doesn't support the 5GHz band, which I really need at home. (There's some kind of ridiculous non-802.11 interference on the 2.4GHz band) Oh well I thought, I'll just pop a different mini-PCIe card into the laptop. I popped the one out of my old thinkpad and put it into the new one.. Which then promptly refused to boot with "Error 1802 - Unauthorised wireless card detected" *sigh* You'd think a card from one Thinkpad would be authorised to work in another, but apparently not :/ The detection is done via the PCI ID. So anyway.. I found some rumours online about being able to switch the PCI IDs of the Intel wifi cards from within Linux, permanently. (I guess it's adjusting the EEPROM somehow) (If I can switch the ID of the new card to the old one, then I'll also need to recompile the Linux driver to recognise it, but that's easy enough) I don't suppose anyone here has had to do this for their own Thinkpad (or HP) laptops, and if so, has any pointers? Thanks, Toby PS. It used to be the case that modified BIOSes existed that removed the stupid whitelist, or changed it, but with the advent of secure boot and Windows 8, it seems the BIOSs are cryptographically signed and so this is harder to achieve.

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iview-cli
by Russell Coker 18 Jun '13

18 Jun '13

I'm getting problems such as the below from iview-cli. Is it working for other people or have the ABC changed something? I'm asking here because I don't expect Jeremy to take support requests given the recent legal issues. $ iview-cli -d news/730s_Tx_1306.mp4 Starting rtmpdump... RTMPDump v2.4 (c) 2010 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL WARNING: You haven't specified a protocol (--protocol) or rtmp url (-r), using default protocol RTMP WARNING: You haven't specified a port (--port) or rtmp url (-r), using default port 1935 Connecting ... ERROR: RTMP_Connect0, failed to connect socket. 110 (Connection timed out) -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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stable filesystem
by James Harper 17 Jun '13

17 Jun '13

Can anyone comment (anecdotal will do) on the most stable filesystem for USB backup disks? I just had a server stop (no keyboard, no ping, etc) because I attached a usb disk with an ext3 fs that had gone bad. The event log was being hit so hard with messages that it couldn't do anything else. Unplugging the disk made the server responsive again, but obviously this isn't the behaviour I was expecting. A FS with better quality kernel code (eg rate limiting in kernel logging would be a good start!) would be preferable to something that might perform a few % better. I've gone with xfs for now but changing is easy enough. (The disk itself could be bad, but a SMART selftest doesn't indicate that this is the case.) Thanks James

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Re: Fwd: MySQL and NFS
by Petros 17 Jun '13

17 Jun '13

Hi Russell, From: "Russell Coker" <russell(a)coker.com.au> > I've got a virtual server running MySQL where I'm going to convert > the Dom0 to > ZFS. Currently the Dom0 exports a LVM volume to the DomU which uses Ext4 for > the database. My options are to use a ZFS zvol instead of a LV for the Ext4 > filesystem or to use a ZFS filesystem that is NFS exported. There may be a third option: Running MySQL in a Linux container. This way the "Dom0" is sharing the kernel with the "DomU" and provides the filesystem directly, without any layer in-between. Definitely a plus for a database server. It's the setup I use with FreeBSD and jails and it works well. In some cases it is worth to consider whether you need OS virtualisation at all. E.g. database servers on dedicated hardware shared by multiple instances. I agree with Arjen to stay away from NFS. Partially because of the way NFS adds networking and locking over it and all that complexity (and potential implementation problems and bugs..) I see issues reported around ZFS and NFS under FreeBSD but I did not bother to look into it - I don't use it that way (and can afford to avoid it;-) Arjen, I am surprised to hear the ZFS is faster than ext4. I did not benchmark (the performance is "good enough" for my purposes) but I believed a COW system isn't the best for databases. Regards Peter

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Re: baseline config checker
by Petros 17 Jun '13

17 Jun '13

Quoting "James Harper" <james.harper(a)bendigoit.com.au> > I need something that can scan my network for Linux machines and > then log in to anything it can find and check configs to make sure > everything is set up correctly, eg things like that ssh settings are > correct, smartd is configured and enabled (if physical machine), no > blank passwords, permissions on sensitive config files, etc. This is > more of an automatic check of the install process than a tripwire to > check for malicious reconfiguration (I just found a machine with a > failed harddisk on which I hadn't enabled smartd!) > > What's out there? 'baseline config' is a term I'm more used to > hearing in the windows world so maybe I'm googling on the wrong > keywords... Puppet was mentioned here. At the moment my "Unix universe" is quite uniform on the OS level (FreeBSD machines and jails, with only one Ubuntu VM for a Zimbra mail server) That gives me the ability to script configurations easily - so machines are uniform from the start. Most configs and admin scripts (e.g. for backup and system mirroring for failover) are symlinked against a directory tree that is under version control. Regular updates keep the scripts in sync. Installation includes defined package sets, including configuration scripts (the install script is a wrapper around the package installation which looks for post-install script adapting them to our environment) The repository used for "cloning" (including compiled base systems and packages) is distributed via ZFS (send/receive) so all installations are the same. In other work environments I used templates for virtual machines. Don't run manual installs - you will always forget something, or things end up in different spots and are harder to maintain. I only use CDs or USB sticks for booting - everything else comes scripted from the network. Then there is nagios. The systems all belong to pre-defined hostgroups so they check what's expected from every container (e.g. response, update check for installed packages), physical machine (e.g smartd) and services (e.g. HTTP(S) response) I think all of it as very basic, in fact doing it in a similar way for 20 years by now - and I am still surprised how many admins are out there doing manual installs, and every system looks different and every time something pops up it's just: "oh, forgot to install this or that". My zoo isn't too big (ca. 30 systems) and I don't have had many unforeseen problems caused by configuration neglect for a while. You can do "configuration distribution" in many ways. I use shell scripts, SVN, ZFS and nagios because its easy for me but there are others: Puppet as an example, or Capistrano written in Ruby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capistrano) I am pretty sure there are more. BTW: We are using nagios/nsclient for ca. 50 Windows machines as well, the machines have directories under version control too (Tortoise SVN) and it checks basic parameters (CPU, hard disk space etc.), installed programs, available updates, anti-virus protection etc. That reduces the frustration in that area as well. Just thinking of the TCO/admin work claim recently.. Okay, most Windows admins don't seem to know much about scripting? So, in that case the Windows-man on my side (who actually wrote some Windows scripts triggered by NSClient) and the Unix admin, seem to be the best you can have for a Windows network;-) Regards Peter

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Fwd: [SFD-announce] SFD 2013 registration is now ON!
by Kathy Reid 16 Jun '13

16 Jun '13

FYI re Software Freedom Day this year - haven't heard if anyone is putting together a team, but now would be the time to do so :-) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [SFD-announce] SFD 2013 registration is now ON! Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:21:08 +0800 From: Frederic Muller - DFF <fred(a)digitalfreedomfoundation.org> Reply-To: sfd-discuss(a)sf-day.org To: SFD announcements <sfd-announce(a)sf-day.org> Dear all, It is with a great pleasure that we are opening registration for SFD 2013. The wiki has been prepared with the current localized languages available and some of the translations for the Frontpage still need to be updated. We are still finishing some of the design including the countdown which will start working 99 days before the event. As usual we are available for support through email on sfd-discuss or on IRC (#SFD on freenode). The deadline for registered teams to get the free goodies is July 21st which should give us enough time to ship everything everywhere. Simply create your team page under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2013 (/country/city/team for most) and complete the form on http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py. All information and links are of course available from the SFD website. As usual artworks are available under http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/Artwork and CC-BY licensed. Feel free to use, enhanced and eventually localize them. I want to particularly thank our sponsors who are making this possible, namely Canonical, Google, and Linode for the time being. Should your organization be interested to sponsor DFF to be able to send more goodies please get in touch with us. Note that there is a deadline to be listed on the magazine ads we run with our media sponsors, Linux Magazine, Ubuntu user, Admin, Smart developer and Linux Journal, which is around mid July or early August. We will be going through various changes in terms of blog location and ways to hear about us, the main reason being that we have moved our non-profit to Hong Kong and the requirements are a bit different than in the US. Besides we are a lot of projects going on and those require some changes. So let's get started and happy SFD preparations! The Digital Freedom Foundation Board ps: do check the SFD 2011 winners for inspiration and thanks again to Lemote and FSF for the prizes. http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/en/competition/winners-2011 [1]: http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss [2]: http://planet.softwarefreedomday.org (language specific planets available through the language switcher) _______________________________________________ SFD-announce mailing list SFD-announce(a)sf-day.org http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-announce

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IPv6 PPPoA and MTU
by Brian May 16 Jun '13

16 Jun '13

Hello, At Julien Goodwin's talk in April, he said, if I understand correctly, Internode has a bug in their implementation of PPPoA and IPv6 in that 1500 size packets will get silently dropped. Only for IPv4, not IPv6. I am not seeing this however, and just want to check my calculations are correct. (just to be confusing: with IPv4, both tcpdump (with -v) and ping will quote the ethernet packet size of 1492 or 1500, but this doesn't happen with IPv6) TEST #1: 1472 + 8 bytes ICMP + 20 bytes IPv4 header = 1500 huey:~# ping -s 1472 -M do hqrouter.vpac.org PING hqrouter.vpac.org (202.158.218.252) 1472(1500) bytes of data. 1480 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org (202.158.218.252): icmp_req=1 ttl=57 time=35.3 ms ^C --- hqrouter.vpac.org ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.350/35.350/35.350/0.000 ms 13:11:27.668571 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 1500) 59.167.180.194 > 202.158.218.252: ICMP echo request, id 18672, seq 1, length 1480 13:11:27.703559 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 57, id 33509, offset 0, flags [+], proto ICMP (1), length 1492) 202.158.218.252 > 59.167.180.194: ICMP echo reply, id 18672, seq 1, length 1472 13:11:27.703628 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 57, id 33509, offset 1472, flags [none], proto ICMP (1), length 28) 202.158.218.252 > 59.167.180.194: icmp I can confirm that the outgoing packets are not fragmented in this case, by running tcpdump on remote system: 13:11:27.694702 IP (tos 0x20, ttl 57, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 1500) huey.microcomaustralia.com.au > hqrouter.vpac.org: ICMP echo request, id 18672, seq 1, length 1480 13:11:27.694728 IP (tos 0x20, ttl 64, id 33509, offset 0, flags [none], proto ICMP (1), length 1500) hqrouter.vpac.org > huey.microcomaustralia.com.au: ICMP echo reply, id 18672, seq 1, length 1480 TEST #2: 1464 + 8 bytes ICMP + 20 bytes IPv4 header + 8 bytes PPPoE overheard = 1500 huey:~# ping -s 1464 -M do hqrouter.vpac.org PING hqrouter.vpac.org (202.158.218.252) 1464(1492) bytes of data. 1472 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org (202.158.218.252): icmp_req=1 ttl=57 time=34.3 ms 1472 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org (202.158.218.252): icmp_req=2 ttl=57 time=33.6 ms ^C --- hqrouter.vpac.org ping statistics --- 2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1003ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 33.642/34.010/34.378/0.368 ms In this case no fragmentation occurs: 13:13:00.502010 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 1492) 59.167.180.194 > 202.158.218.252: ICMP echo request, id 18683, seq 1, length 1472 13:13:00.536331 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 57, id 33510, offset 0, flags [none], proto ICMP (1), length 1492) 202.158.218.252 > 59.167.180.194: ICMP echo reply, id 18683, seq 1, length 1472 TEST#3: 1452 + 8 bytes ICMP + 40 bytes IPv6 header = 1500 huey:~# ping6 -s 1452 -M do hqrouter.vpac.org PING hqrouter.vpac.org(hqrouter.vpac.org) 1452 data bytes 1460 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=35.2 ms 1460 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=36.9 ms ^C --- hqrouter.vpac.org ping statistics --- 2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1003ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.263/36.128/36.994/0.886 ms In this case fragmentation occurs on the returned packets (like test #1): 13:14:17.853662 IP6 (hlim 64, next-header ICMPv6 (58) payload length: 1460) 2001:44b8:4112:8a04::2 > 2001:388:60ac::5: [icmp6 sum ok] ICMP6, echo request, length 1460, seq 1 13:14:17.888746 IP6 (hlim 57, next-header Fragment (44) payload length: 1448) 2001:388:60ac::5 > 2001:44b8:4112:8a04::2: frag (0xd268db04:0|1440) ICMP6, echo reply, length 1440, seq 1 13:14:17.888839 IP6 (hlim 57, next-header Fragment (44) payload length: 28) 2001:388:60ac::5 > 2001:44b8:4112:8a04::2: frag (0xd268db04:1440|20) In this case though, unlike test #1, the response packets are fragmented by the sender: 13:14:17.880311 IP6 (hlim 57, next-header ICMPv6 (58) payload length: 1460) huey.microcomaustralia.com.au > hqrouter.vpac.org: [icmp6 sum ok] ICMP6, echo request, length 1460, seq 1 13:14:17.880340 IP6 (hlim 64, next-header Fragment (44) payload length: 1448) hqrouter.vpac.org > huey.microcomaustralia.com.au: frag (0xd268db04:0|1440) ICMP6, echo reply, length 1440, seq 1 13:14:17.880343 IP6 (hlim 64, next-header Fragment (44) payload length: 28) hqrouter.vpac.org > huey.microcomaustralia.com.au: frag (0xd268db04:1440|20) So somehow the sender must be working out the reduced MTU. TEST#4: 1444 + 8 bytes ICMP + 40 bytes IPv6 header + 8 bytes PPPoE overhead = 1500 huey:~# ping6 -s 1444 -M do hqrouter.vpac.org PING hqrouter.vpac.org(hqrouter.vpac.org) 1444 data bytes 1452 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=34.3 ms 1452 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org: icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=35.7 ms 1452 bytes from hqrouter.vpac.org: icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=34.4 ms ^C --- hqrouter.vpac.org ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2004ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 34.348/34.852/35.721/0.617 ms Like #2 no fragmentation: 13:16:03.105321 IP6 (hlim 64, next-header ICMPv6 (58) payload length: 1452) 2001:44b8:4112:8a04::2 > 2001:388:60ac::5: [icmp6 sum ok] ICMP6, echo request, length 1452, seq 1 13:16:03.139572 IP6 (hlim 57, next-header ICMPv6 (58) payload length: 1452) 2001:388:60ac::5 > 2001:44b8:4112:8a04::2: [icmp6 sum ok] ICMP6, echo reply, length 1452, seq 1 Maybe this is a bug that Internode has fixed? Or maybe I have got something wrong? It does appear that PPPoE limitations apply even for PPPoA, at least with received packets. For both IPv6 and IPv4. -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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baseline config checker
by James Harper 16 Jun '13

16 Jun '13

I need something that can scan my network for Linux machines and then log in to anything it can find and check configs to make sure everything is set up correctly, eg things like that ssh settings are correct, smartd is configured and enabled (if physical machine), no blank passwords, permissions on sensitive config files, etc. This is more of an automatic check of the install process than a tripwire to check for malicious reconfiguration (I just found a machine with a failed harddisk on which I hadn't enabled smartd!) What's out there? 'baseline config' is a term I'm more used to hearing in the windows world so maybe I'm googling on the wrong keywords... Thanks James

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MySQL and NFS
by Russell Coker 16 Jun '13

16 Jun '13

I've got a virtual server running MySQL where I'm going to convert the Dom0 to ZFS. Currently the Dom0 exports a LVM volume to the DomU which uses Ext4 for the database. My options are to use a ZFS zvol instead of a LV for the Ext4 filesystem or to use a ZFS filesystem that is NFS exported. Using LVs for DomUs decreases space efficiency as each separate block device needs to have adequate free space. It also makes backups a little more inconveniant as the block device needs to be snapshotted and mounted in the Dom0 instead of just using regular file access or ZFS filesystem snapshot plus regular file access. I expect that both of these options will give a greater latency than the current situation. It's either NFS latency or Ext4 latency on top of ZFS latency as opposed to just Ext4 latency on it's own. As write latency is probably the main performance criteria for a database which is heavily dependent on synchronous writes this would surely be a problem in some situations. However in this case the server averages 71KB/s of writes for 24*7 operation with iowait always staying below 4% so I don't think that a drop in performance is going to cause any problems. What do you think? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Debian firmware package version query
by Mark Trickett 13 Jun '13

13 Jun '13

Hello All, I am about to load Debian 7 (Wheezy) on an Acer notebook. I have the .debs from Squeeze, will they work, do I need to rename, where might I be able to get the appropriate Wheezy variants. I found these via Google, and have in the root directory on a USB stick. firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb firmware-linux-nonfree_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb Regards, Mark Trickett

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