So, I installed my first 10GigE card the other week… for a high throughput NAS head for a digital printing company I contract for. For the last couple months I’ve been planning and preparing to swap out their entire network core with new Juniper equipment… I’ve installed a couple stacks of the Juniper EX4200 switches, and we even purchased a 10GigE module for a 300 meter fiber link on both ends of the building. As part of this… we thought we could improve their through put to the NAS server (CentOS 5.4 x86_64 with Samba and SAN disk, and RedHat Cluster Server) by trunking ports. As soon as I had two 1Gbit copper links trunked to these… the speed seemed to be cut in half with samba… SSH seemed to be very fast… some googling and I’m seeing reports that in a bonded nic senario, samba drops to half speed… but NFS and other protocols seem to be able to take advantage of it… Now… I’m sure an upgrade to samba would fix this… but I don’t want to introduce new variables going into their busy season… So, we purchased a 10GbE card for the server so we wouldn’t need to trunk it.
Moved over to this server with the NetXen 10GbE card… pluged it into the Juniper Switch… the link works fine… we move the digital presses over to it and it works fine for a while… after a couple hours running, I start getting errors in the log:
Nov 17 20:34:54 gondor kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth4: transmit timed out
Nov 17 20:34:54 gondor kernel: netxen_nic eth4: transmit timeout, resetting.
Nov 17 20:34:58 gondor kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth4: transmit timed out
Nov 17 20:34:58 gondor kernel: netxen_nic eth4: transmit timeout, resetting.
Did some googling, and I’ve found an article to turn off the tcp segmentation offload
so I run: ethtool -K eth4 tso off
and you can check it with: ethtool -k eth4
I will update this post if it makes any difference
—- UPDATE —- Nov 30, 2009 3:55 PM MST —-
After looking around… HP wants to use a nx_nic driver instead of the netxen_nic driver that comes with CentOS/RedHat Enterprise by default. So, I’ve compiled the SRPM with my build box, and Installed it on the new server. Version 4.0.516. I then upgraded the firmware on the NIC to the same. I will do some more testing to see if this is the fix I require….
So, I was reading my daily dose of digg and I came across a story about a guy with one very upset windows support “tech” yelling at him in a gas station. And, I have to say, its ridiculous. I mean… its been the case for many years that Microsoft has created a whole ecosystem around fixing their Broken OS(tm). But to say that Open Source is the reason these people are loosing their jobs? Pfft, if they couldn’t see that this Open Source(tm) thing wasn’t a fad, then they deserve to loose their job. The Technology Field isn’t about just one Technology (Broken OS spoken of previously), its about many different ones, that all work together (some better than others… see previous comments) and form what’s commonly just referred to as “technology”. Which also has a saying, which even those asshats would know, is that its constantly changing, as soon as something makes it to market… its outdated within a month. Just the nature of the beast, and you learn to roll with it. I would also say that being able to roll with it, and not locking myself down to any one particular technology is the reason I’ve gotten as far as I have in my own career. I definitely have my preferences(see my blog…), but that guy just needs to find his cheese.
I’m a computer systems consultant by profession… and I’ve come across the need to setup a backup system. I’ve used Bacula before, and I rather like it. I’ve used various different libraries with it, an MSL from HP and a StorVault from Dell, but this is my first time using a Storstation from Sony. I started setting it up, and I almost had it setup and a tried to start labeling the media… and I got this:
Sending label command for Volume “A0BJ3B” Slot 1 …
3307 Issuing autochanger “unload slot 7, drive 0″ command.
3304 Issuing autochanger “load slot 1, drive 0″ command.
3992 Bad autochanger “load slot 1, drive 0″: ERR=Child died from signal 15: Termination.
I was setting this up on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server and it all had gone well until this.
Turns out the library is to slow and I had to make some modifications with the config. In the bacula-sd.conf and make the drive config look like this: (its counter intuitive I would think it should have been in the AutoChanger config… but its part of the Drive config.
Device {
Name = Drive-1
Drive Index = 0
Media Type = AIT-4
Archive Device = /dev/nst0
AutomaticMount = yes;
AlwaysOpen = yes;
RemovableMedia = yes;
RandomAccess = no;
AutoChanger = yes
Maximum Changer Wait = 600
}
The key is the Maximum Changer Wait. Default is 120 seconds… I tried 300 and that didn’t work… but 600 is working for me.
I thought I’d post it tho, because I didn’t find anyone talking(in english) about this library with bacula…
It would appear the financial types still don’t get open source… after all these years. After reading a post about the UK’s Financial Times predicting Android will fizzle after initial release seems a bit off. No one ever saw Linux coming and look where it is today?
Being a linux user and having an iPhone, I would say that iTunes was not the appeal of the iPhone. Its user interface, web browser and email abilities were the draw. Infact… I’m really wanting an Android phone simply because it won’t be tied to iTunes. I’m hoping for atleast the same functionality in the web browser, email is going to be a bit worse because I won’t be able to use the Active Sync for my work email anymore… but maybe someone will get the rights and write an app that would allow me to access it again… for a fee i’m sure, but i’d be willing to pay it. And txt’ing could only get better with it. as the iPhones txt interface and abilities are definitely lacking.
Anyway… with a standard OS with many built-in features and google backing it… I see good things to come of Android… and I can’t wait.
I’m So sick and tired of this idea that this country was founded on some Christian establishment or ideal. Its so far from wrong it astounds me. Up until the 1950’s, the national moto was E Pluribus Unum, (“from many, one”) , and In God We Trust was not added until an Act of Congress in 1956. I know our school systems are bad, but since I wasn’t there THAT long ago, I know they are not teaching this. So where does this non-sense come from? The Media? ie: Fox News? or what? It’s absurd and I can’t take it anymore. I will call anyone out on this anytime I hear it… and this reason alone, I will NOT vote for McCain.
At my current place of employement, gigabit is deployed everywhere. I’d rather not get into the details as to why it is, but it goes without saying that its not really needed *everywhere*. None the less, I had cacti up and graphing for a couple months, before I thought I’d really like to see cacti graph a fully utilized gigabit port. Well, it turns out that the default configuration of the ucd/net snmp network interface ports on cacti will not graph a gigabit port. It will appear to work, but seems to wrap around at about 120Mbit. The reason is, cacti by default uses 32bit counters for this setting. It has a drop down under the network interfaces when creating graphs on a device, to use 64-bit counters. This is required for gigabit ports (if you want to get a true representation for the graph). I will see if I can grab some screen shots of this when I get back to work.
But overall, I love cacti and even after looking at similar tools, I much prefer cacti over anything else.
My wifes Uncle stopped by the other day to look at my PS3 and decided if he wanted to get one or not… He was asking questions which I’d rather not go into… But the topic of his questions is a common theme I feel among Windows users. Paying for things. I do not nor will I ever condone pirating software/content. (I do however download TopGear which is only shown on the BBC in the UK…. but, thats because I can’t buy it here.) And his questions, some of which I completely agree with, others not so much.
Like, I would love to be able to copy a game to a hard drive and run it completely from that and not from the actual disk. When its just me handling the disks or only a few adults… Thats not a big concern for me. However, He has kids and I believe I’ve even said on this blog, that I would not want kids handling disks if I can help it. Digital copies(iso’s) of them would be the much preferred method for them to access the content in my opinion. Something they can’t scratch or otherwise ruin. Failing having the storage space required for doing that, I would want to make use of my Fair Use(tm) Rights, and make a backup copy of the disks, and only let them use those. So when they ruin that one, I can throw it away and make another copy for them to slowly destroy. This I believe is a completely legitimate and legal reason to want to perform these actions. But with the idea of being able to do all of these things the illegal ones also exist. Being able to copy dvd’s also allows people to rent them for a dollar or so, and make their copy and return the original, then they didn’t really “pay” for the copy they now have. To those that do this, I say you are the reason for the copy protection and DRM measures the movie industry (and music) have been trying to put in place. Yes, technology is always going to obsolete their measures, but none the less… features in my PS3 have been crippled simply because people like you exist. I have no problem paying for content, assuming the price is right and its not overly burdensome with DRM. DRM is the reason I’ve been still buying normal CD’s instead of digital forms, because I can always take the CD and rip it to digital forms without DRM. I applaud Apple for bringing DRM free music to iTunes, and if I didn’t dislike the interface so much I might actually use it. I also however dislike the price tag of certain things. Game prices on the PS3 are actually quite expensive in my mind… being only a casual gamer myself (more on that later…) I love the demo downloads for the PS3 that let me try the games before I actually buy them. It was because of that, I bought Resistance.
Anyway, I guess I’m just not one of those people… I understand the benefits of Free Software, and the importance of paying people for their work. If you don’t like paying for software, its time to use the stuff your allowed to use without paying for it. Otherwise, cough up the money.
Why is it these hardware manufacturers have such a hard time letting go of this idea that they’ll loose something if they were to let the linux community distribute their drivers, or even more… if they’d just release the specs for their wireless hardware and let the open source community develop the drivers independantly. Anyway, I’m documenting my setup on my Lenovo N100 page. Check it out for my final how-to on getting wireless to work in hopefully an easily maintainable way.
Finally! I’ve completed my first phase MythTV install. Currently the case I have it in is fairly loud so I don’t really want to move it into the living room. So its sitting on the floor next to my desk, and currently I connect to it with a mythtv frontend install on my local box. So far it all works flawlessly. I must say I’m quite impressed with its simplicity. At first its somewhat daunting, but once you get your head around it it’s not so bad. Now I need to figure out what all the settings mean, and how they’ll affect me. Currently I’ve got it setup using about 2.4GB per hour of recorded video. Which should give me roughly 87 hours worth of recorded video not bad I’ll be expanding it probably in 6 months or so with another 250GB drive which should be fun Anyway, I need to get ready to head off to school.
I liked his letter so much, I thought I’d link it up from GrokLaw. I must say I agree with his statements 100%. I loved the how simple he made the explination. Makes the reasoning straight and to the point, why people don’t understand this is beyond me. Why the commonwealth is still debating over it is even more beyond me. Microsofts always made promises… who knows if and when they’ll actually come through with it. The best way to keep them honest is to make them use ODF too. (Not through laws/restrictions) Simply, market presures will be fine. After all, if you let them win with their ‘Open’ XML format standard, he who makes the rules can always change them. Pardon the skepticism, but they’ve done it in the past (even recent past), whats to stop them from doing it again? It needs to stop, Mass. has a chance to make a stand and really show Redmond that we’re serious, that we want them to abid by rules of the industry not whatever they feel like. To actually do whats in their *customers* best interests. It really shouldn’t be this hard to fathom.
I also however dislike the price tag of certain things. Game prices on the PS3 are actually quite expensive in my mind… being only a casual gamer myself (more on that later…) I love the demo downloads for the PS3 that let me try the games before I actually buy them. It was because of that, I bought Resistance.
