Lenz Grimmer's blog

The German Unix User Group (GUUG) will hold their annual conference "Frühjahrsfachgespräch" on September 23-26 this year (I know, not really "Frühjahr" anymore, but this is how it is).

The Call for Presentations is still open until May 31st. Talks can be proposed in German and English, and there are slots for longer tutorials as well.

The range of possible topics is broad, so if you think you have anything interesting to share with a very passionate and technical audience of sysadmins and developers, here are some suggestions:

• Operating Systems/Applications: architectures, privilege concepts, new developments, administration, mobile systems
• Relevant new OS Kernel features: new developments in Linux-, BSD- or other Spen Source OS kernels
• Networking: protocols, technologies
• Virtualisation/High Availability: OS, networks, cluster, SAN, file services (high-) avialability, OS/storage virtualisation and cloud
• File systems: distributed file systems, cluster file systems, special purpose file systems
• Middleware: databases, application servers, etc.
• IT Security: organisational and technical aspects
• Data Center Infrastructure: climate control, energy efficiency and monitoring
• Operations: monitoring, backup/recovery
• Non-technical Topics: work organisation, legal aspects, licensing and patents, education and training

This year, I'm honoured to be part of the reviewing committee and we've received a number of interesting proposals already. But we'd like to see more!

So please don't hesitate and submit your proposal now!

Thank you.

 

Sorry for the downtime of this site - until around a week ago I hosted my home page on a trusty Genesi Pegasos II system (powered by a PowerPC G4 Processor clocked at 1GHz, using Debian 4.0 PPC with 512 MB of RAM), serving these pages from my home DSL connection. Unfortunately this system provided no means of redundancy - the hard disk drive died.

Luckily I perform frequent backups, so I moved most parts of the site to a shared hosting space now - the picture gallery is unfortunately too big to fit into the space that I have there. I'll try to move the pictures into my Flickr account instead, but this will take some time.

Note that the primary domain name of this site is now lenzg.net - lenzg.org, (the domain that I tried to promote as the official domain for my site) used to redirect to the home machine at lenz.homelinux.org. Both now redirect to the new address instead. I've initiated the move of the lenzg.org domain to the other provider as well, so soon this site will be available from both the .org and .net domain. Please don't link to lenz.homelinux.org anymore, as that site will eventually go out of service. Until then, a small openSUSE Linux box (Intel PIII, 500 MHz, 192 MB of RAM) running lighttpd will perform the URL redirection.

As noted in my previous blog posting, I manged to revive my old Logitech TrackMan Marble FX on Linux (openSuSE 11.1b4), using a Serial-to-USB dongle with a Prolific PL2303 chip. But I also use OpenSolaris on my Laptop quite frequently (currently testing the upcoming 2008.11 release), so I investigated if it would be possible to enable the trackball there as well.

Luckily, the Driver Manager listed the plugged in adapter and the correct driver (usbsprl) was loaded already. Now the real challenge was finding out which device node to use. Some research revealed that the driver actually comes with a manual page , which indicated that /dev/term/0 was the correct device name.

Lo and behold, I copied the InputDevice section from my Linux xorg.conf file into the OpenSolaris one, replaced the Device parameter with the appropriate one and restarted the X server. Immediate success! Now I can enjoy using my most favourite input device on OpenSolaris as well.

I am probably different than most users, but I am a a fan of unusual input devices. I prefer Laptops with trackpoints - I immediately disabled the touchpads on my Lenovo laptops (a T61 and T42) in the BIOS when I received them. My first Laptop (a Toshiba Portege 3440CT) didn't even have a touchpad to begin with. It's a pity that trackpoints seem to a dying breed.

And I don't like using regular mice on my desktop, either! Actually, my most favourite input device is a trackball - I purchased a Logitech TrackMan Marble FX a long time ago, and used it for years. Then computers stopped having serial or PS/2 connectors, and I replaced the trackball with an USB mouse. I never really got the hang of using mice, but Logitech (or other vendors) somehow never came up with a suitable replacement model for the Marble FX with a USB port. I recently looked at the Logitech Trackman Optical, but was not convinced by the reviews I read, and the fact that it requires batteries (a trackball is a stationary device, so a cable does not really interfere here!). The Microsoft Trackball Explorer might have been an option, but it seems to be impossible to get nowadays.

After experimenting with several mouse models (Cherry, Microsoft), I decided to revive the TrackMan Marble again. It comes with a PS/2-connector by default, so I first tried to connect it to my PC using a PS/2-to-USB converter dongle. This actually worked without any tweaking, but had two limitations: the fourth mouse button was not detected anymore (I could have lived with that) and the Trackball stopped responding after it had been idle for a while, requiring me to restart the X server to get it working again.

So using the PS/2-to-USB dongle was ruled out and I tried an Serial-to-USB dongle instead:

lenz@thebe:~> lsusb|grep Serial
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port

When plugged in, udev creates a new serial device /dev/ttyUSB0 which I needed to inform the X server about. Fortunately it's possible to define multiple input devices in the xorg.conf configuration file. Using the serial port actually had another advantage - I was able to add some trackball-specific tweaks that would have collided with the settings of the "regular" PS/2 mouse section that I needed for the builtin trackpoint of my Thinkpad. It required some tweaking and testing, but this is what I added to xorg.conf to be able to use the TrackMan Marble FX in addition to the builtin pointing device:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Trackball" "SendCoreEvents"
    Option         "Clone" "off"
    Option         "Xinerama" "off"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver       "mouse"
    Identifier   "Trackball"
    Option       "Device" "/dev/ttyUSB0"
    Option       "Name" "TrackMan Marble FX"
    Option       "Protocol" "Intellimouse"
    Option       "Vendor" "Logitech"
    Option       "AngleOffset" "10"
    Option       "Buttons" "8"
    Option       "Emulate3Buttons" "off"
    Option       "EmulateWheel" "true"
    Option       "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
    Option       "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option       "EmulateWheelInertia" "8"
EndSection

You may wonder about the 8 mouse buttons, as the device only has four physical buttons. Interestingly, the fourth button on the TrackMan reported itself as "button 8" when I probed it with "xev", so I needed to make sure the server is aware of it. When pressed, the trackball now acts like a mouse wheel and allows me to quickly scroll across long documents - very handy! Now I just hope that the button switches in the TrackMan last for another while - until some vendor eventually comes up with a suitable replacement...

I recently installed the last  release candidate version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 (ISO image available from here) and I am happy to note that the audiohd driver now supports the Intel soundchip (82891H) in my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 out of the box! This was one of the glitches I observed with 2008.05. In general, I am very impressed by the OpenSolaris driver support for this particular laptop - everything except for bluetooth is supported now. On the downside, suspending to RAM still fails for me, but I have not looked into this very deeply yet.

But what good is a working sound driver, if you don't have apps that produce sounds? Be default, the media players included in the distribution lack support for most codecs, e.g. MP3 or video formats. This is not much different from most Linux distributions, as these codecs are usually protected by patents or proprietary licenses which require the user to install these separately. Here are some hints on how to enable better multimedia support on OpenSolaris.

The Observatory has a detailed article on how to add the free MP3 gstreamer codec from Fluendo, so all applications that use the gstreamer API (e.g. Songbird) will be able to play back MP3 files.

If you want full multimedia support and an choice of video players/codecs, you should add the Life With Solaris (LWS) package repository to the package manager:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp
$ pfexec packagemanager

You will now be able to choose a new package repository from the dropdown list, which allows you to select players and codecs for download/installation. The packages will be installed in /opt/LWS, so you need to add /opt/LWS/bin to your $PATH, if you want to start the applications from the command line. But the packages will create menu entries for the GNOME desktop as well.

Enjoy!

While Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

• BitBucket (Mercurial)
• Collab.net (Subversion)
• github (Git)
• GoogleCode (Subversion)
• Launchpad (Bazaar)
• Sourceforge.net (CVS, Subversion)

As disclosed by Tim Bray some days ago, there now is another option - Kenai is open for project hosting (currently by invitation only)! In his blog post, he interviews Nick Sieger, one of the developers behind this project about their motivation and intentions:

We need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications.

In a nutshell, Kenai is a platform for:

• Developer collaboration
• Communities of connected developers
• Integrated collaboration services stack

Some of the features that are currently available include:

• SCM services using Subversion and Mercurial
• Bug Tracking (Bugzilla)
• Forums
• Wikis
• Mailing Lists (using Sympa)

Reading the interview with Nick and looking at some presentations slides for RailsConf from Fernando Castano (a jRuby and Database performance engineer at Sun and another member of the project team),  I was able to gather a list of the tools and technologies they used to build Kenai:

• Apache2, mod_proxy_balancer
• Ruby on Rails (running on jRuby)
• Glassfish Java application server
• MySQL 5.0
• Apache Solr for search
• memcached

I found it interesting that they decided to deploy and run the Rails application as a war file within the Glassfish application server (using Warbler). By the way, the fabolous OpenSUSE Build Service is a Rails application, too! So far, the entire site is powered by a single MySQL instance with query cache enabled.

The project is hosted on the following infrastructure:

• Sun Fire T2000 for (for web and application serving)
• Sun Fire X4500 for Storage
• OpenSolaris Nevada (Zones/Containers, SMF)
• ZFS (9.7 TB RAIDz, Snapshots, NFS)
• Coolstack & Blastwave packages

You should check out Fernando's presentation for more technical details, tuning info and how they benchmarked the setup - it contains a number of useful tuning hints and performance graphs.

Last time I checked, 27 Projects have joined so far (e.g. jRuby, xVM Server). Kenai itself is developed on Kenai. It's going to be interesting what other projects will find their home there.

Nick also talked a bit about their future near term plans: to improve the usability and feature set, incrementally improve the site navigation and layout and adding support for hosting files/release downloads. They also consider offering Jira as an option to Bugzilla for bug tracking and Git as another SCM option.

There is an IRC channel #projectkenai on freenode.net, to get in touch with the developers directly. The mailing list for the Project Kenai site itself, is users@help.kenai.com - you can subscribe to this list here.

While browsing the fabolous ThinkWiki pages I stumbled over this little gem: the lt_hotswap kernel module finally allows me to eject the CD-ROM drive in my Thinkpad T42's UltraBay without having to shut down Linux first. This module makes sure that the device is properly unregistered from the kernel's device list. Now I can replace it with e.g. a second battery on the fly and don't have to shutdown the OS completely! The installation on my SUSE Linux 10.1 system was quite easy: after downloading the source tarball from the SourceForge.net download page I performed the following commands:

tar zxvf lt_hotswap-0.3.6.tar.gz
cd lt_hotswap-0.3.6
make
sudo make install
sudo rcacpid restart
modprobe lt_hotswap

You need to have the kernel-source package installed, as well as the gcc compiler, of course. Now when I eject the little lever that allows me to pull out the CD-ROM drive from the UltraBay, the following message appears in /var/log/messages:

lt_hotswap: Requesting IDE eject!
lt_hotswap: Attempting to eject

Now the CD-ROM drive can be safely pulled from the UltraBay and e.g. exchanged with an additional battery. Inserting the battery yields the following kernel message:

kernel: ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)

The battery info also appears in /proc/acpi/battery and is fully operational. Unfortunately battery monitoring tools like KPowersave or gkrellm don't display the second battery, but at least the kernel is happily using it. I can remove the battery again, but this event does not seem to get registered properly - the second battery remains visible in /proc/acpi/battery, but shows zero capacity and the "present" state does not change. But at least replacing the CD-ROM drive with the battery now workes fine, which was my major concern. And it is still possible to re-insert the CD-ROM drive again:

kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1868-0x186f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
kernel: Probing IDE interface ide1...
kernel: hdc: HL-DT-STCD-RW/DVD DRIVE GCC-4242N, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
kernel: hdc: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

If you want to enable the lt_hotswap module at bootup, you need to add its name to the MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT variable in the /etc/sysconfig/kernel configuration file.

If your Laptop uses an external docking station to host a CD-ROM drive, there are some good news for you: according to Andreas Jaeger's blog, the upcoming openSUSE 10.2 will actually provide a generic Dockutils framework that will support docking/undocking functionality for different laptops and vendors. It will be interesting to find out if this covers UltraBay devices as well.

Long time no post! Last Sunday I spotted the following email in my junk mailfolder:

Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:08:39 +0200
From: root <root@metis.lenznet>
To:  <lenz@localhost.metis.lenznet>
Subject: SMART error (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: metis

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

   host name: metis
  DNS domain: lenznet
  NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

Which did not sound too good. In addition to that, the system had failed to resume from a suspend to disk earlier that day - the kernel experienced disk read errors while trying to load the suspended image from the swap partition. Fortunately a fresh reboot still worked and I ran a more thorough analysis of the disk drive by using smartctl -t long /dev/hda. Using various Open Source tools from a SUSE Linux 10.1 rescue system (which boots off the first installation CD) helped me to backup and restore my data without losing anything (except for some time, of course).

A few days ago I received a neat little gadget: a Yakumo QuickStick DVB-T, which allows me to watch TV via the USB-2 port on my Thinkpad. Amazon sold it for 52 EUR, so I could not resist, after making sure that it was listed in the list of supported devices on the very informative LinuxTV Wiki pages. All what was left to be done for me was to download the firmware and putting it into /lib/firmware. The driver and firmware were loaded automatically when I plugged in the device:

Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 8
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-01.fw' to the 'Cypress FX2'
Mar 20 19:44:05 metis kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones) successfully initialized and connected.
Mar 20 19:44:07 metis kernel: usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 8
Mar 20 19:44:07 metis kernel: dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)' in warm state.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones)).
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 300 msecs.
Mar 20 19:44:08 metis kernel: dvb-usb: WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (and clones) successfully initialized and connected.

Now I fired up the KDE video player Kaffeine 0.7.1 and configured it to scan for available channels. That's all there was to it! I am positively surprised.

This is too funny. I decided to do some housekeeping on my Thinkpad T42 Laptop and checked the installed driver and firmware versions against the latest updates available from the Thinkpad web pages.

Currently, my Laptop's BIOS version is 3.12 (latest version available: 3.19), the Embedded Controller is at version 3.03 (latest version available: 3.04).

The BIOS README tells me:

- This BIOS version will only work with Embedded Controller Program
  Version 3.04 (or higher). Please obtain the additional package,
  Embedded Controller Program Version 3.04 (or higher),
  and update Embedded Controller Program in the system with it.
- If you need to update Embedded Controller Program as well as the BIOS,
  update the BIOS first.

OK, so I guess I need to update the Embedded Controller Firmware first. However, the README for the Controller Update tells me:

- This version of Embedded Controller Program will only work with BIOS
  Version 3.13 (or higher). Please obtain the additional package, BIOS
  Version 3.13 (or higher), and update the BIOS in the system with it.
- If you need to update the BIOS as well as the Embedded Controller
  Program, update Embedded Controller Program first.

I think it's time to make use of my extended service contract and call their hotline. Or do I really have to update the BIOS from 3.12 to 3.13 first, then update the embedded controller to 3.04 before I can apply the latest BIOS update to 3.19? This is insane.