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Dell R210 IPMI firmware upgrade
by Brian May 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

Hello, After attending Matthew Garrett's talk at LCA, I had this sudden urge to upgrade my IPMI. Just wondering how to do this without the extra steps of buying a windows license and installing windows on the server. Which seems kind of excessive. Looks like it is simple, all I need to do is: 1. Download IMC ( file with latest firmware. 2. Log into website, and upload it. Step 2 is easy. Step 1 is the problem, the only file Dell provide is a Windows executable: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=9… >From here I can download Dell_Lifecycle_Controller_Integration_v3.0_SP01.exe This is actually a zip file, I can unzip the following files: Dell_Lifecycle_Controller_Integration_v3.0_SP01.exe ReadMe_Dell_Lifecycle_Controller_Integration_v3.0_SP01.txt >From here I seem to be completely stuck. I do not seem to be able to turn the *.exe file into an IMC file. I cannot run the executable on a Windows computer without the iDrac6, it immediately comes up with an error before installing, and I couldn't see any signs of any new files installed. In fact the information from http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/3206.upda… says it is not possible to use the Windows DUP image on the website. Any ideas? Have also tried asking twitter. https://twitter.com/penguin_brian/status/570727507210604544 Thanks -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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Re: Strange network situation
by Peter Ross 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

From: "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck(a)gmail.com> > If you want both links up at once to double your throughput, or for > failover (to avoid a SPOF in the NIC), you want what's called "trunking" > or "bonding". It's slightly tedious and flaky; mostly I wouldn't bother. I did this in the past... I just used Google to search for "Linux bonding" to see that not much has changed it seems(?). You find "generic" Linux commands and configuration examples for Red Hat/CentOS and Ubuntu etc. I use it under FreeBSD just now, it's called a "lagg" interface there (link aggregation and link failover interface) but the result is the same. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-aggregati… The only "flakiness" I experienced had to do with confused switches. The Ciscos I have at the moment are okay. The handbook above touches the Cisco part too, as well as "how it works" (also useful for penguins). Regards Peter

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dual-boot Win7/Linux software RAID
by Russell Coker 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

I have a system that's dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux (Debian/Jessie not that it matters). I want to use software RAID. Converting a BTRFS root filesystem to RAID-1 is trivial and I'm not too bothered about RAID for the boot loader (happy to rely on backups for that). When running Windows 7 I try to convert disk0 to a "dynamic disk" and the "Virtual Disk Manager" says "The selected GPT formatted disk contains a partition which is not of type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID', and is both preceeded and followed by a partition of type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID'.". Now the disk in question has MBR format (verified from Linux fdisk) and the option to convert to GPT is grayed out (so I couldn't make it GPT if I wanted to). Is this problem related to having Linux partitions on the disk with Windows 7? When offering to convert to a dynamic disk Windows said that it would make all partitions other than the current boot partition unbootable, so obviously this wasn't well designed for boot options. http://tinyurl.com/l49zt23 The above URL has the MS Technet article about dynamic disks. It seems to be a combination of LVM and software RAID which wants to control the disks. Is it possible to have Linux use disks that have the windows "dynamic disks" format or do I need to get separate disks? If I got 3 disks (RAID-1 for Windows and a single disk for Linux) how would I get it to boot? A quick Google suggests that GRUB can't deal with dynamic disks, but if I have GRUB on a separate disk can it chain to a Windows boot loader? It seems that the BIOS (HP SFF desktop PC) doesn't support selecting from multiple hard drives to boot so I guess GRUB would have to be on the first disk. Can Windows 7 support being chain-loaded if it's not on SATA disk 0? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Ubuntu / Linaro developer image for Raspberry Pi 2
by Toby Corkindale 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

I've rolled an Ubuntu 14.10 / Linaro 15.01 "developer" image for the Raspberry Pi 2. Key points here are that it's compiled for ARMv7 and ARMHF, so should be faster than the Raspbian image by some amount. And it'll have more recent versions of software because that version of Ubuntu is significantly newer than Debian Wheezy! I don't have anywhere good to host the image, so it's only available by bittorrent on my limited ADSL upstream, but once a few people are on that it'll speed up the download. http://vps.dryft.net/2015-02-07-raspuntu-tjc.zip.torrent -Toby

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Windows freezing
by Terry Duell 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

Hello All, I have recurring problem (not often) which started just recently. Thus far it appears random. The problem is that all my open windows freeze, can't be moved and do not respond to any input. I can open a terminal window (from icon) but cannot get input focus in this window I run gkrellm and that shows that the system is chugging along OK. If I use alt-F2 I can enter 'startx' and then all windows respond as they should. I am running an up to date Fedora 21 x86_64, and using Cinnamon. What might be the likely causes of this behaviour? Cheers, -- Regards, Terry Duell

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Re: Virtualization - network latency
by Petros Listig 08 Feb '15

08 Feb '15

From: "Mike O'Connor" <mike(a)pineview.net> > > On 5/02/2015 11:57 am, Peter Ross wrote: >> Hi, >> >> the SAGE consultant was noticing the network latency on the "internal >> switch". He did not like VirtualBox + FreeBSD for that matter (I don't >> blame him - it was the first "get something up" quickly" configuration). >> > What problem is the SAGE consultant trying to fix ? In general I see > nothing wrong with any of those numbers. The SAGE consultant had a "just works" setup (a temporay one to have something running when needed) to deal with but not a very well performing one. So he tries to point out where he sees problems. And his Windows (7?) setup + Oracle Linux in VMware workstation setup shows 0.15msec ping returns - my setup ca. 0.5 instead. Both platforms used in the test, Oracle VM and FreeBSD+VirtualBox. As more as I test, I see that both of the solutions give me similar results.. Good to know about 0.5 msec as more or less "typical" ping return values seen by others. Thanks. Peter

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Virtualization - network latency
by Peter Ross 07 Feb '15

07 Feb '15

Hi, the SAGE consultant was noticing the network latency on the "internal switch". He did not like VirtualBox + FreeBSD for that matter (I don't blame him - it was the first "get something up" quickly" configuration). Here the values: --- SageApp.vv.fda ping statistics --- 10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.308/0.635/1.364/0.319 ms It did not change much when moving to another network card (following David Lutz' recommendation: https://dlutzy.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/performance-problem-with-virtualbox/ ) However, there is a Windows box on the Oracle VM Server running, and here I have: --- SageWindows.vv.fda ping statistics --- 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9002ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.554/0.605/0.646/0.037 ms So the average is not much different but the variance higher. However, he says, he sees typical 0.15 ms values on his PC with VMware Workstation. I wonder whether someone can share thoughts and experience about it (and other performance values). I found this interesting too: https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/34900 I will take some time to play with various setups in the near future. Regards Peter

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SSD smartctl attributes for wear indicators (was: mine-is-bigger-than-yours maildir competition)
by Toby Corkindale 07 Feb '15

07 Feb '15

I'm curious to know what your SSD wear indicators look like, from long-running Linux machines, and how long it looks like they'll last based on existing usage. You can query these with smartctl (if your drive db is too old, run sudo update-smart-drivedb first) I'll go first. These are just private machines, albeit ones doing reasonable work. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll be able to report on long-term results of enterprise SSDs, but I can't right now. Machine one: Power_On_Hours 4522 (188 days) Total_NAND_Writes_GiB 18846 Maximum_Erase_Cycle 199 Avg_Write_Erase_Ct 74 Total_Bad_Block 201 Perc_Avail_Resrvd_Space 100 This machine has been running for over 188 days non-stop, has logged nearly 19 TB of writes, and is about 2.5% of the way through it's expected minimum lifespan[1]. Estimated total lifespan time: 20.6 years. Machine two: Power_On_Hours 18326 (763 days) Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0 Wear_Leveling_Count 13 Total_LBAs_Written 2066747494 (ie. about 1080 GiB [2]) This has been running for 763 days non-stop. Like the first machine, it hasn't used any of the reserved blocks yet. It's about 1.3% of the way through its min expected lifespan.[3] Estimated total lifespan time: 160 years. -Toby 1: ie. 3000 write/erase cycles for MLC; in practice you seem to get quite a bit more though, according to testers. 2: This drive doesn't report the actual NAND writes, just LBAs written, but you can roughly convert those out; call each LBA 512 bytes, and then multiply the total by a conservative 1.1 to allow for write-amplification; we come up with about 1080 gigabytes. 3: This machine is running a cheaper type of TLC-based SSD, so theoretical amount of erase/write cycles are just 1000.

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Re: Virtualization - network latency
by Peter Ross 07 Feb '15

07 Feb '15

Thanks Toby. From: "Toby Corkindale" <toby(a)dryft.net> > Here are the results of KVM and LXC based virtual machines on Ubuntu > 14.04.. > Both look a fair bit better than the results you're seeing. > > --- LXC ping from VM host --- > 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9000ms > rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.042/0.050/0.074/0.009 ms That's in the same kernel so that should be better. Here are FreeBSD jail version 1 (shared network stack): 10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.016/0.019/0.025/0.003 ms .. and jail version 2 (VIMAGE/VNET, own network stack) 10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.236/0.280/0.321/0.030 ms results. Looks as there is significant overhead in the later. > --- KVM ping from VM host --- > 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9002ms > rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.188/0.306/0.402/0.057 ms Compared to Oracle VM(Xen) >> 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9002ms >> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.554/0.605/0.646/0.037 ms It's nearly doubling the speed.. I wonder whether this is typical for KVM vs. Xen, and how VMWare ESXi is faring. I do not have a KVM or ESXi setup ready but will try. Thanks Peter

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Re: Fwd: Virtualization - network latency
by Peter Ross 05 Feb '15

05 Feb '15

From: "Avi Miller" <avi.miller(a)gmail.com> > Hi, > >> On 5 Feb 2015, at 2:14 pm, Peter Ross <Petros.Listig(a)fdrive.com.au> >> wrote: >> >> Compared to Oracle VM(Xen) >> >>>> 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9002ms >>>> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.554/0.605/0.646/0.037 ms >> >> It's nearly doubling the speed.. > > Can you provide more information about the OVM setup? What guest type? > What virtualisation model, i.e. HVM/PVM? Here a few bits from the vm.cfg for the Windows VM on Oracle VM (no Linux VM on it yet): guest_os_type = 'windows' builder = 'hvm' vcpus = 4 memory = 4096 OVM_os_type = 'Microsoft Windows Server 2012' OVM_domain_type = 'xen_hvm' Inside is Windows Server 2012 R2. Regards Peter

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