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NetXen Incorporated NX3031 Multifunction 1/10-Gigabit Server Adapter

mitch @ 9:07 am on November 18, 2009

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….

Linux· Open Source· RedHat· Work — No Comments

Yum and locking a package from being updated

mitch @ 8:44 pm on April 5, 2009

I have a special need for my mail server. Whatever the reason is that you can’t get postfix compiled with mysql support in even the one off repo’s for CentOS is I’m not sure. However, I still have a need for postfix with mysql support. Anyway, I don’t feel like maintaining my own version for CentOS at the moment for lack of time… and with the latest release of CentOS5.3 or Update 3 for RHEL 5, I didn’t want to upgrade, and have it break my postfix until I removed the newly installed version with the older release with mysql and postgres support. In the effort of avoiding that, I found a very nice yum module called “yum-versionlock”. So I installed it with:

yum install yum-versionlock

And Then I was able to add my postfix release I found from doing

rpm -qa | grep postfix

Then I added the output of the above line to: /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.list

After that, I was able to run yum upgrade without issue. I believe I’m liking yum more every day over apt…. just wish debian could do some updates to apt and make it a bit more user friendly… As I much prefer more things about debian systems more than I do Redhat ones anymore. Mostly the flexibility that’s put into the packages and the modularity of the default configs.

Debian· Fedora· RedHat — No Comments

Samba fileserver and Mac OS X Clients

mitch @ 3:14 pm on February 19, 2009

I ran into a slight issue today with OS X (Leopard), where it would ignore the file permissions forced by my samba file server… In order to maintain users and groups with the correct permissions, I have shares setup like:

[share]
comment = share Volume
path = /srv/SHARE
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
Valid Users =@DOMAIN+"Domain Users"
create mask = 0660
force create mode = 0660
directory mask = 0770
force directory mode = 0770
force group =@DOMAIN+Domain Users
hide files = /__TMP__/.DS_Store/lost+found/


so, I should get files that look like:

-rw-rw---- 1 root root 0 Feb 19 15:07 test1

But the default umask on OS X is 022, so I would get files showing up like:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 19 15:07 test2

On the above share… This would prevent other users from changing the files….
Turns out, Apple started pushing for more POSIX compliance and as a result their files would turn up with the permissions assigned to the file on the local system or with their default umask as its created. In a shared world… not always ideal, but I don’t want to have to change the umask on all of the OSX clients…. found an option in samba that I added under the [global] section as follows:

[global]
.....
# Make OS X Leopard play nice with others
unix extensions = off

This fixed my problem.

Apple· Linux· RedHat· Work — No Comments

Enterprise Linux Releases and software versions

mitch @ 3:57 pm on November 23, 2008

I’m getting tired of Enterprise Linux Releases… I’m tired of how difficult it makes things. I fully understand why they are locked into specific versions of software, and that maybe I just need to upgrade… but business in my experience doesn’t like not using the “Enterprise” versions of software and that the open source tools I need to use seem to want the latest versions. (Lilac requires PHP 5.2 for instance, so a PHP 5.1.6 release on CentoOS 5 isn’t going to work) I’ve also run into some compile options lately that get quite annoying… like no mysql support for pam, or mysql support in postfix. It does cause me quite a bit more work, and I’m honestly seeing it all built into Ubuntu and Debian (I use both on my personal systems) and I’m thinking of starting to switch other people systems as well.

Linux· RedHat· Ubuntu — No Comments

RHCE Update

mitch @ 8:52 am on October 1, 2005

Well, I’ve been in Las Vegas all week preparing for the RHCE exam, which I took on Friday. I was stressing the exam all week because last time I took it (This was my second attempt), I barely passed the troubleshooting (well, I finnished 5 minuted before the time ran out), and I took long enough to get through the Installation and Configuration section that I didn’t have enough time to test anything, which was my downfall last time, only earning me the RHCT. However, this time… I took 35-40 minutes to complete the whole troubleshooting section, and was able to complete, with testing, the Install and Configuration section with an hour to spare. Typically RedHat promises by the following Wednesday’s end of business you’ll have your results. However, it seams the grading people at RedHat like to work late on friday, and I recieved my results yesterday around 5pm MST. The verdict is….. I PASSED! I’m now, offically, an RHCE. As a reward for myself, I rode the roller coaster here at New York New York, and went to the “Tournament Of Kings” at Excalibur. Both were really fun, the Tournament of Kings is dinner and a show. Dinner was somewhat true to the times for the middle ages. No forks/knives/spoons were provided. You have to use your hands. The menu consisted of a small chicken, broccli, couple potato wedges, a roll, and some tomato soup. Also after the test to kill time before we went to the tournament of kings, we went and visited the Aquarium at Mandalay Bay. It was very interesting and I rather enjoyed it. A great way to end a couple weeks full of stress (with school finals last week and this this week… I’d about had enough). Anyway, I need to finnish packing things up so I’m ready to leave sometime in the next half hour.

Life· News· RedHat — No Comments

Done with finals

mitch @ 7:55 am on September 24, 2005

I’ve been extremely busy with finals over the last week and a half so I haven’t really been thinking about blogging anything. There’s been alot of news happening and I wanted to write about it, however, I’m also leaving for Las Vegas tomarrow for a RHCE course and I will be comming back with my RHCE! We’ll see how everything goes, and I will probably have some time over the next week to blog some things atleast.

RedHat· School — No Comments

Back from training

mitch @ 9:37 pm on September 19, 2004

I’m back from training and from Vegas. The training was really good. I loved it. Probably the first training I liked. I think every other training I ever went to was a waiste of time except the Windows 2000 training I got just before it was released (It was from Microsoft employee’s). Anyway, I highly recommend the training (RedHats RH300 fast track cource) to anyone who wants a good fast paced linux training. However the slower counter parts for this class would probably be just as good. As for the certification? I don’t actually know yet… I completed the first portion of the test, with 100%, however the second is graded by RedHat and I should be getting an email from them soon hopefully…. I will post when I know. However, how did I think I did? Well there was only two problems I had questions on. I belive I had them configured correctly however, the instructions for testing them on a remote machine wasn’t working. So, I can’t tell you for sure as I’m not sure of how things are weighted and a total count of the actual amount of problems. So, I feel good about what I finished I just hope its enough to get me atleast 70% on the second part of the exam.

RedHat· Technology — No Comments

RHCE Training

mitch @ 8:46 pm on September 13, 2004

I’m down here in Las Vegas, for my RHCE training/test which hopefully will lead me to being RHCE certified. Anyway, I’m liking the training however, I’m not feeling so worried about the test much anymore. Just being here and going through our study book, has me feeling pretty comfortable… however, i’m trying not to get my hopes up and still going to work my butt off. So, I need to get a start on mimicking the class room setup with my own little network here in my hotel room.

RedHat· Technology — No Comments

RHCE Update…

mitch @ 2:13 pm on September 2, 2004

Well, far as I know I’m still schedualed to take the RHCE exam/training the week of the 13th. I’ve been testing different installs on my test box at home, which I plan on taking with me. However, I still hope I know enough to pass.

News· RedHat — No Comments

Linux: Global File System

mitch @ 9:10 am on June 27, 2004

Linux: Global File System
RedHat can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. They bought a company a couple of months ago for several million who were the original inventors of the GFS file system for Linux clusters. And now they are releasing it under the GPL. They are asking for the community to help them get the patches needed to the kernel source to be added to the main kernel. Allowing everyone to be able to use GFS easily. Very cool stuff. Way to go RedHat!

Open Source· RedHat· Technology — No Comments