Fred’s Notes

If you just installed a brand new Ubuntu 8.10 server and tried to run daemontools the Debian Way (apt-get install daemontools daemontools-run), you, just like me, realized that there is no more /etc/inittab. Since Edgy Eft that someone decided that inittab should be deprecated in favor of a thing called Upstart. So, the best you can do is to remove the daemontools-run package:

# apt-get remove daemontools-run

Create a new file on /etc/event.d/svscanboot with:

# svscanboot
#

start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

stop on runlevel 0                                                              

stop on runlevel 1                                                              

stop on runlevel 6

respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot

Create /etc/service directory and start the service with:

# mkdir /etc/service ; initctl start svscanboot

That’s it. You should have svscanboot started, together with svscan and readproctitle.

My day was saved by this piece of software: pen (tcp load balancer). My kudos to the author. Long live good software (and opensource, too). It’s simple and it works.

Remember ZFS for Fuse? It was a Summer of Code Project, done by Ricardo Correia (he’s now working for Sun). This guy has done a great job porting it from Solaris to Linux/Fuse. Since we will not see any kernel driver version for Linux anytime soon due to license problems, and for those that want to test it, there is good news. I’ve checked his page today, and oh boy, the project is not dead and we even have new release, 0.5.0! Yay. Checking from the CHANGES file, the new release is up-to-date with ZFS Pool 13, lot’s of bugfixes and new features like gzip compression, async i/o, send/recv and much more. I’m going to test it very soon. Almost missed this.

Pedro twittered about the Spykee Wifi Robot. Seems cool. But this one runs Linux with the help of a Linksys WRT54GL. Awesome.

After dropping the support of Xen for RHEL (well, not really, they will still support it, but not as passionate as it was in the past), RedHat buys Qumranet (KVM) and becomes a new player on the virtualization market, specially with Virtual Desktops (watch SPICE). As a sidenote, I’m a very big fan of KVM. And RedHat also. KVM is also part of the stock kernel since 2.6.20 (as a module). If there were some doubts about the future of KVM, well, think again.

Today after installing CentOS 5.1 x86_64 (kernel 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5xen) on a server with a Tyan motherboard and when I’ve tried to do a yum update, got this nasty error on the console:

e1000: eth1: e1000_clean_tx_irq: Detected Tx Unit Hang
  Tx Queue             <0>
  TDH                  <31>
  TDT                  <31>
  next_to_use          <31>
  next_to_clean        <af>
buffer_info[next_to_clean]
  time_stamp           <1014b175c>
  next_to_watch        <af>
  jiffies              <1014b1875>
  next_to_watch.status <1>

The server has 3 Intel NIC’s. One 100M and two 1000M. The faulty NIC is connected to a Gigabit Switch and I don’t have this problem forcing the port to 100M. With a little bit of research, I’ve found out that actually, it’s a known bug, specially on Supermicro hardware. In case you have the luck of having the same problem, you’ll need to download a fixeep.txt to fix some naughty bit on the eeprom. It will detect and fix the 82573-series eeprom using ethtool (sh fixip.txt ethX). Worked for me after running the script and doing a reboot.