Linux console

So I've finally upgraded Corey. By "upgrade", I mean "replaced every last component except the PSU." So basically it's a replacement.

This means I'm now running CentOS 6 on my desktop ("So soon!?" shut up). It also means I have to fix all the little annoying things about CentOS 6. One of which is that modern kernels us a framebuffer, which switches the console to illegibly small text. The solution is to put video=640x480 or video=800x600 on your kernel command line. Ideally in grub.conf.

Breaking news

The new CPU means that Corey is now fast enough to play CBC.ca/sports HD hockey stream full screen, at 27 inches. This is a huge change from the postage stamps I had when I first started watching streaming hockey.

To bad Ottawa is being blown away by Pittsburg.

I need more power!

I upgraded Corey again. This time with a brand-new used CPU. I require Corey to be fanless. This means I can't use the most advanced CPU out there. High end CPUs get far to hot, even for my massive heat sink. The advantage of this, though, is that I got the CPU off eBay for a fraction of the cost of something new. The previous CPU was an LE-1100 and had a thermal design of 45W. I could have gotten a 2 core CPU with a thermal design of 65W but I was afraid of overheating. I got an LE-1660, still 45W but 47% faster then the previous CPU.

Anyway, it arrived today. And instead of working, I installed it. This was a bit of an adventure. This CPU didn't exist when my motherboard was built, so while it booted, Linux was showing the CPU ID as "unidentified" which was disconcerting. I decided to upgrade the BIOS. Which is where our adventure begins.

ASUS provides a BIOS flashing utility for DOS. When was the last time you booted DOS? I have some DOS floppies... but that way lies pain. How about booting DOS from a USB key? With a little farting around, here is what I discovered.

First off, my USB key is already formatted with one partition, FAT32. It is /dev/sdb on my system.

yum upgrade syslinux # just in case
sudo syslinux -f /dev/sdb1
# This next command is so non-obvious the developers should be shot!
# Why isn't this integrated into syslinux?
sudo dd conv=notrunc bs=440 count=1 if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
wget http://goebelmeier.de/bootstick/bootstick.zip
unzip bootstick.zip 
cd BootStick/
sudo rsync -av usb-root/ /mnt/ # ignore the permission warnings
cd ..
unzip AFUDOS236.zip
sudo cp AFU236U.exe /mnt/flash/afu.exe
unzip M2NSE501.zip
sudo cp M2NSE501.ROM /mnt/flash/

Now reboot from the USB key. For me, this involves hitting F8 inside a 5 second window. Type ENTER twice when DOS asks for time and date. Then

CD FLASH
AFU /O0308.ROM 
AFU /IM2NSE501.ROM

The first AFU command saves the current ROM. The second one flashes with the new ROM. It takes a tense 2 minutes for it to complete. Tense because I realized to late the computer wasn't plugged into a UPS. A black out during ROM flashing means a bricked motherboard.

Of course, flashing a new ROM means all BIOS config is reset to annoying factory defaults.

What's more, this new BIOS will not boot Linux without noapic. But with only one core, I don't really care. I turned the APIC off in the BIOS.

So, was it worth it? Subjectively Corey feels a lot faster. And hotter; when Corey was lying flat on the test bench, the heat sink was almost to hot to touch. CPU temp was 59C! Now with Corey upright, CPU temp is 51C. Given that the max operating temp is 65C, I wonder if it can survive the next heatwave. What's more, the new CPU has virtualization instructions, so I can run KVM on my desktop!

Total silence

I bought myself a fanless PSU for my birthday. I'd been eying one for a while now. Corey now has no fan on the CPU, a SSD and a fanless PSU; total, deafening silence. I had to move Corey into a different case because the PSU wants to be vented from the top. So now I've changed corey's CPU, motherboard, heatsink, hard drive, RAM, case and PSU. But it's still the same ax!

Of note: when you switch on a computer you've just assembled, one of the first bits of feedback you get is the fans going WUURRRwuuurrrrr. But not if your computer has no fans! It took me at least one panicky minute to figure this our.

I need more RAM, Scotty!

Lookit this:

~ (root@corey:)# free

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached

Mem:       3913752     821824    3091928          0      38376     439640

-/+ buffers/cache:     343808    3569944

Swap:            0          0          0

4GB of RAM on Corey, boyee!

RAM is really cheap. I've been saying this for years. USD is also cheap these days. And I was finding Firefox really annoying at times. So I poked around Asus's site, discovered that Kingston claims that a M2N-MX SE can take 4GB of RAM. Out came the credit card. Thank you Newegg, thank you Purolator.

And yes, Firefox is subjectively much faster. Even though, as you can see above, I'm still using less then the 1 GB I had previously.

Or maybe it just stutters less. Or maybe it's the fresh reboot.

IPv6 right now.

Reading slashdot I saw an article about the coming IPv4 Apocalypse. So I figured I should spend some time getting up to speed. And when I say "getting up to speed" I think I really mean "hack at it a little."

First I need some routable addresses. My ISP at home is Bell, which is probably going to be the last ISP in the universe to hand out IPv6 addresses. So I need a 6to4 tunnel. I found handy guide for Linode which basically said "get a free tunnel from HE." Which I did.

The following was added to /etc/sysconfig/network on the VM I wanted to be my IPv6 router

IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=sit1

IPV6FORWARDING=yes

IPV6_ROUTER=yes

Next I added he following to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-sit1

DEVICE=sit1

BOOTPROTO=none

ONBOOT=yes

IPV6INIT=yes

IPV6TUNNELIPV4=IPv4

IPV6ADDR=A1:B1:C1::2

Where IPv4 is the IP Bell gave me and A1:B1:C1::2 the client IPv6 address from HE.

ifup sit1

ping6 -n ipv6.chat.freenode.net

yay! It works.

Next, I want other computers to be able to access this tunnel. This took some messing around, but by blindly stabbing at it I got it going.

Then I asked for a /48, and added this to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

IPV6INIT="yes"

IPV6ADDR=A2:B2:C2::2

Where A2:B2:C2::2 is part of my Routed /48 from HE.

Then service network restart.

Next, on my desktop computer, I added the following to /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING_IPV6=yes

Then to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

IPV6INIT=yes

IPV6ADDR=A2:B2:C2::6

Then:

ifdown eth0 ; ifup eth0

ping6 A2:B2:C2::2

YAY! That works.

But... what about routing and forwarding and so on? This is where I stabbed around blindly. The solution was to use radvd.

/etc/radvd.conf:

interface eth0

{

    AdvSendAdvert on;

    MinRtrAdvInterval 30;

    MaxRtrAdvInterval 100;

    prefix A2:B2:C2::/64

    {

        AdvOnLink on;

        AdvAutonomous on;

        AdvRouterAddr on;

    };

};

Start the service, then restart eth0 on corey, and bingo! I can surf to ipv6.google.com.

Todo : Setup reverse DNS for my /48. Setup ipv6 for all my computers. Figure out how to tell HE when Bell changes my IP. They have a tool to do this but my first attempt didn't work.

And of course understand what it is I'm doing. For instance, if IPv6 uses 128bit IPs, surely the /64 would be enough

Silence!

Newegg.ca sent me email yesterday with a tracking number. Click on it and BUH "we have no information about this package." Yes, you are idiots.

But this morning, I try again at 8h00. And BUH PACKAGE ON TRUCK IN SHERBROOKE!

So I don't go back to bed, wait impatiently for the truck to show up. Three cheers for eCommerce!

I give up

So concluded on how to get partitions aligned on 4k boundaries (WDC WD15EARS-00Z), for ~60 MB/s. But if I add a ext3 FS on top, speed drops to 20 MB/s. With LVM or without.

This makes no sense

The great big huge 1.5 TB drive I bought for Corey is a WD15EARS. One thing all those letters mean is that it's an Advanced Format drive. Which is Western Digital Marketing Speak for "we use the new, modern 4k sector size." But of course the drive reports its block as 512 bytes, because otherwise it would fail under Windows. So hoops must be jumped through.

And some of them make no sense.

The parable of the ax.

You know the old parable : I've got this great ax. Had it for years. I've changed the handle 5-6 times. Only changed the head twice though. Still works great!

This also applies to computers. Corey (my desktop computer WAKE UP WAKE UP! DARLING COREY! HOW CAN YOU SLEEP SO SOUND?) started life as a Compaq Presario running WinXP. I never used the original mouse or keyboard. The heatsink clips broke, so I had to replacethe mobo, CPU and RAM. I've replaced the CD-R drive with a DVD-R. And now I've replaced the hard drive with one 100 times bigger and upgraded the OS from Fedora 5 to CentOS 5.5.

Basically all that's left of the original computer is the case and power supply.

So, do I change the computer's name? My feeling is "yes." Mainly because an OS upgrade is a large change in a computer's personality. But on the other hand, changing the might mean going through a bunch of forgotten config files and changing it here and there too. Mind you, the important ones prolly just use the IP.

But on the gripping hand, I'm lazy. And I'll get to tell the Ax Parable during cocktail parties or other inapropriate moments.

SSDs are not ready

The drive on Corey is/was in the process of dieing. It is going on 7 years old, has been spinning at 7200rpm every hour of most days for those 7 years. I don't begrudge it failing. It did mean I had to spend 2-3 days reconfiguring my daily use computer. Annoying. More details later.

I bought a Western Digital Green 1.5TB drive. 100 CAD! Cheap! It's only 5400rpm in the hopes it will make less noise. But it's still to noisy. Not so much rotation whine but an annoying click every 4-5 seconds. Something I had back in the day with SCSI drives, but I don't think the old IDE drive had this problem. So either I get an SSD or a fit-pc2 to put it in. Or boot LTSP from the basement.

Also, Jean-Phillipp brought up that maybe we should look into moving our clients' MySQL DBs to SSD. Even at the high prices of SSD, it would cost less then what we are currently doing, which is throwing RAM at the problem. Also, there's only so much RAM that a server can hold. And with datasets getting larger then 33 GB, that approach has reached its limit. However, it turns out that SSD, along with being expensive aren't quite ready for prime-time.