The E450 has a potential of 20 internal disks, none of them labeled in any particular order (ctd numbers) and it was a pain to configure most of them as a big stripe.

Here’s the md.tab I created, note the u02 section showing how to string 7 disks (slice 2 is the whole disk) all together. Note that the line wraps aren’t shown so don’t recklessly copy and paste.

# Root Mirror MetaDevices
# root
/dev/md/dsk/d11 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0
/dev/md/dsk/d12 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0
/dev/md/dsk/d10 -m /dev/md/dsk/d11
# swap
/dev/md/dsk/d21 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1
/dev/md/dsk/d22 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1
/dev/md/dsk/d20 -m /dev/md/dsk/d21
# u01
/dev/md/dsk/d61 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s5
/dev/md/dsk/d62 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s5
/dev/md/dsk/d60 -m /dev/md/dsk/d61
# /export/home
/dev/md/dsk/d81 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7
/dev/md/dsk/d82 1 1 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s7
/dev/md/dsk/d80 -m /dev/md/dsk/d81
# u02
/dev/md/dsk/d101 7 1 /dev/dsk/c0t2d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c2t1d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c2t2d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c2
t3d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c3t0d0s2
/dev/md/dsk/d102 7 1 /dev/dsk/c3t1d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c3t2d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c3t3d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c4t0d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c4t1d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c4
t2d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c4t3d0s2
/dev/md/dsk/d100 -m /dev/md/dsk/d101
# staging
/dev/md/dsk/d111 2 1 /dev/dsk/c5t0d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c5t1d0s2
/dev/md/dsk/d112 2 1 /dev/dsk/c5t2d0s2 1 /dev/dsk/c5t3d0s2
/dev/md/dsk/d110 -m /dev/md/dsk/d111


At work a while back, we had hundreds of K of ICMP going to our router and we couldn’t figure out why. We threw a sniiffer on our network and take a look at the enclosed and censored screenshot. Notice the part in the yellow box and the 5 second intervals. I left the “sim” of the source machine so that you can see it’s all coming from the same place.

View image

Believe it or not, we finally traced the port number and service using fport for windows to kontiki.com. They sneak their “marketing tool” in with bundled software and use your Internet connection to push out ads, files and who knows what else. Of course it’s all legal according to the license terms.

http://www.kontiki.com/client/terms.html

But just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right. It pisses me off, wastes my time and can’t possibly be good business. Check out the following for more information:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,365073,00.asp

More and more people are getting on the web. More and more people are gaining experience with computers. We have not seen yet what people with 30 years of experience with the web are like. No one has 30 years of experience with the web. There are no retired, 62 year old web designers out there. The amount of experienced web professionals is lacking compared to the amount of experienced doctors or other long-standing professions.

As people explore the web, bookmark sites, use better and more catagorized search engines; the web becomes smaller because people are surfing for official, professional and you could say ‘high quality’ content.

So people have a propensity to certain sites. Bookmarks, favorites. Since weblogs are unusually personal websites, then I say that people are most likely to read and come back to weblogs that align with their already existing personal traits.

Really people have a tendancy to flock with people like themselves. People like mirrors. People like http://localhost. Hug yourself. Talk to yourself. You’re the most interesting person you’ll know.

*sigh*

I had a flaky network problem where high loads (fast downloads from tux.org or sun.com) would cause a hang or complete drop of all network connections on the box. Originally, I had plugged in two CAT5 cables hoping that it would be one of the gbit ethernet ports but that had no effect.

When the network went down I was unable to ping or do anything network related until someone physically walked to the box and did a service network restart. It was quite annoying since this box was in a remote location.

The error message that appeared in /var/log/messages was:

Mar 17 16:45:14 {servername} kernel: tg3: tg3_stop_block timed out, ofs=3400 enable_bit=2

Eventually, I found (with help of a coworker) that the box was reachable when it was ‘down’ on the local subnet. I could ssh in from a box on the same subnet and fix the problem. Not a bad workaround but the crashing was fairly easy to produce. About 1 or 2 minutes of ~300KB (bytes, not bits) of fast downloading would cause the “Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5700 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12)” to die.

This was running Fedora Core 1. I had a similar box (a poweredge 1750) that was running RedHat9 working fine. I was very confused because the linux kernels were very close in version numbers.

I googled and found many people with the same problem. In the past I’ve fixed problems like this by using a generic driver like `tulip’ or something. I eventually tried a different network driver in this vein of thought. My /etc/modules.conf file had

alias eth0 tg3
alias eth1 tg3

At the top, so I tried depmod e1000 which spit out a bunch of IRQ errors meaning that the driver couldn’t find the appropriate hardware. I tried bcm5700 which linux didn’t have compiled in by default. I wasn’t about to do a whole kernel recompile for one stupid driver. I tried e100 and it returned no errors. This was happy.

lsmod showed that e100 was loaded although showing “0″ in the “Used By” column. That’s ok. So maybe I can use the e100 driver for eth0 or eth1 … but this still didn’t explain why I was able to get to the box (on eth1) on the same subnet.

Then I found the answer which as of now seems to be the answer. netstat -nr shows this {ips changed to protect the innocent}:

[root@server /]# netstat -nr
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
10.0.0.96 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.224 U 0 0 0 eth1
10.0.0.96 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.224 U 0 0 0 eth1
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 10.0.0.97 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

Note that 0.0.0.0 (the default route) is specifically going through eth0. Now it makes sense. So I changed alias eth0 tg3 -> alias eth0 e100, ran depmod -a, rebooted a few times and heavy downloads have been running smoothly for 27 minutes now.

I’ll update this if this solution turns evil. :} For now, the e100 is metal. \m/