adam.golebiowski.eu/blog

… or for some restriction on test accounts. Someone from Benin assigned adress space set up about thirty accounts today and started spamming

So why is there a server in our house? Because it’s fun.

Few months ago (before I saw this, honestly!) dad and I agreed that having a family file server was a good idea. What conviced us what the mess we were having with family photos – some of them were on my father’s computer, some on mine. We also wanted to get rid of duplicate data (apps, few isos, etc.) between our computers.  What was surprising to me, my mom was also enthusiastic about the idea. Before we stared, we decided that our server has to:

• be quiet (preferably fanless),
• be economic / ecologic (small power consumption),
• have a lot of space (in RAID-1 setup, if possible),
• cost no more than 1000 PLN (ca 300 €),

After doing some research, I decided to buy one of VIA’s EPIA motherboards – which are small (mini-itx), fanless (!), and consume relatively low power (ca. 15 W) comparing to their full-size competitors. From my rough calculations whole system would consume no more that 30-40W of energy, beside the already mentioned motherboard (with integrated CPU, NIC and VGA), there would be a 1TB SATA disk. With 40W of power conspution, estimated cost of running it 24/7 was:

24 (hours) * 30 (days) * 0.04 kW (power consumption) * 0.3 PLN (estimated price of 1kWh of energy) ~= 10 PLN

As low as 10 PLN (about 3 €) a month. Boy I wish I could pay that “much” on a gas station …

It took about three weeks before I bought all the required parts:

• EPIA SP-8000EG FANLESS motherboard,
• a D-153 chasis (designed for VIA’s EPIA motherboards),
• 1TB Samsung HD103UJ SATA HDD,
• 1GB DDR RAM,

Total cost: 1003 PLN (incl. VAT), which is about 300 €. Once assembled it looks like this:

Maybe it’s not beautiful, but it doesn’t have to be.
Now to the more technical part, it is powered by PLD Th:

[root@epiath ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : CentaurHauls
cpu family : 6
model : 9
model name : VIA Nehemiah
stepping : 8
cpu MHz : 800.047
cache size : 64 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr cx8 sep mtrr pge cmov pat mmx fxsr sse up rng rng_en ace ace_en
bogomips : 1602.68
clflush size : 32[root@epiath ~]#

And it was so quiet…  image a system where the most nosiest component is its hdd (about 27dB). Unfortunately, it failed as a fanless system, the hdd warmed up to more than 45°C. We decided to insert small, 8×8cm fan inside the chasis. It helped a lot – the hdd temperature dropped almost isntantly to less than 35°C, and as I am writing thist post, hddtemp reports 28°C. At the price of lower temperature, we got a bit louder system and a slightly higher power consumption.

Epiath (I probably suck at naming my systems) is a new project – it went “live” about three weeks ago, and is still not finished, there are few thins I still plan to do:

• remote access (OpenVPN), so that my brother could share his photos as well,
• track new files (with find), and announce them with mail sent on a daily basis,
• develop a search engine – search throuch file names at a minimum, perhaps we could make use of beagle to scan through contents as well (any experience with that anyone?),
• NFS access – or is it more convenient to use SMB, even for a Linux user?

So far, I am quite happy we decided to build our home server – even though it did cost a bit (you don’t spend 300 € everyday, do you?).

http://eu.blizzard.com/diablo3/ – once released, I hope this is going to be game of the year.

In order to use uvesafb in PLD AC (kernel-desktop), you will need to build a few packages:
- linux-libc-headers.spec,

- klibc.spec,

- lrmi.spec,

- v86d.spec (–with klibc),

And use geninitrd from svn trunk (at lease r776), or wait for geninitrd-9000.12 – should be released soon if noone complains.

Once you have these package built and installed, set FBMODULE=”uvesafb” in /etc/sysconfig/geninitrd and provide apropriate options in /etc/modprobe.conf. The very basic setup can be just:
options uvesafb mode=1400×1050-32
For more options, see
$ /sbin/modinfo uvesafb

After that, run geninitrd as you normally do:
# /sbin/geninitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-desktop $kernel_ver

Works for me.

ToDo:
- diskless PLD part 2 (will be a short post),
- post some photos from Pingwinaria 2008,
- be trendy and write somthing about git …

JeÅ›li (jak ja) do tej pory nie rozliczyÅ‚eÅ› siÄ™ z fiskusem i nie zdecydowaÅ‚eÅ› komu przeznaczyć 1% podatku – pomóż Dominice wrócić do zdrowia: http://www.pomocdladominiki.com.pl/1_procent.html

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

“disks are cheap”

They are, but nevertheless for some reasons – like saving few watts of energy, or just for pure fun – one may want to create a diskless workstation.

One of our customers (who deserves a separate entry) runs a medium sized grocery shop. Recently we had to replace one of the computers that for that last few years served as terminal at the cash desk. We decided to put a diskless workstation there – after all, if server goes down, we are in big trouble anyway, and a workstation that can’t boot would be the least of our problems.

Not being an experienced PXE user, I decided to write a small tutorial for those who would like to play a bit with diskless systems. I will provide you with a short howto that shows how to successfully boot PLD on a diskless computer.

In this part we will learn to boot PLD RescueCD. This has been previously described by jajcus and used by areq as a semi-official RescueCD-PXE howto (polish). I assume you have two computers – a server and a diskless client, and you know MAC address of the latter.

First we need ot install few packages:

# poldek -Qiv dhcp rlinetd tftpd-hpa syslinux

where dhcp is a DHCP server (in case you don’t have one yet), tftpd-hpa being a TFTP server and syslinux provides us with pxelinux.0 file (more on this later). If you already have an inet daemon, you may skip rlinetd. If not, you may install it, or some other inetd implementation, like xinetd.

Than we need to obtain PLD RescueCD, I downloaded 2.95 which was the most recent version as of this writing. Once you have it, either burn it and mount the cd, or just mount the iso and copy files we need :

# mkdir /mnt/iso
# mount -o loop RCDx86 _295.iso /mnt/iso
# cp /mnt/iso/rescue.cpi /var/lib/tftp
# cp /mnt/iso/boot/isolinux/vmlinuz /var/lib/tftp/rescue.vmlinuz
# chmod 644 /var/lib/tftp/rescue.{cpi,vmlinuz}
# umount /mnt/iso

Where vmlinuz is a kernel image, and rescue.cpi – an initrd – in case of RescueCD it’s more than that, but that’s ok.

From the syslinux package, we need pxelinux.0, which we also place in /var/lib/tftp:

# cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /var/lib/tftp

I believe pxelinux.0 can be best described as the network bootloader. It reads configuration from a specified TFTP server and behaves as told to. Both LILO and GRUB (or SILO in case of SPARC) need a config file to run properly. That’s no different in our case.

By default, PXELINUX looks up for several config files under the ${tftpdir}/pxelinux.cfg dir (where $tftpdir is /var/lib/tftp by default), starting from file named after the NIC GUID (shown on startup), going through file named as MAC address, through IP based configs till the file named ‘default’ and stops once it finds one. This lets you to be as flexible as you want to be – you may want to provide separate files for each workstation you have, or have one file for them all. In this tutotrial, we will try to keep things simple, and will refer to the default file.

# mkdir /var/lib/tftp/pxelinux.cfg
# touch/var/lib/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default

Syntax of pxelinux config file is pretty simple and easy to understand, let me provide you with a complete setup:

# cat /var/lib/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default
default rescuecd
label rescuecd
kernel rescue.vmlinuz
append initrd=rescue.cpi root=/dev/ram0
#

If I were to write it for GRUB, it would more or less like this:

# cat grub.test
default 0
title rescuecd
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0
initrd  /rescue.cpi
#

Great! Our TFTP server is now set up. What’s left is to tell DHCP how to use all these goodies. I assume you have DHCP configured (or know how to do it), if not, please refer to e.g. official PLD documentation (polish).  What you need to add is a group section that may look like this:

# grep -A 20 group /etc/dhcpd.conf

group {

next-server 192.168.1.2;
filename “pxelinux.0″;
host comp {

hardware ethernet 00:12:34:56:78:90;
fixed-address 192.168.1.3;

}

}

#

This should be pretty much self-explanatory, but to make things clear, next-server tells a client IP address of the server that stores a file we should load and boot. As one may assume filename tells dhcpd which file to load through TFTP. host {} declares a static entry for a given machine – you may want to have a fixed IP address for it – so that you can remotly log in.

Once you are done, you should restart the services:

# service dhcp restart
# service rc-inetd restart

After that you should be able to sucessfully boot form the diskless workstation. In the next part we will learn how to boot PLD ac on a diskless workstation.

Have fun.

Cieszę się, gdy czytam, że instytucje rządowe korzystają z Wolnego Oprogramowania, z chęcią dowiaduję sie o kolejnych wdrożeniach czy to OpenOffice, czy Linuksa (to już rzadziej). Ciekaw jestem czy gdziekolwiek w mediach pojawi się wzmianka o niedawnym spotkaniu wicepremiera Waldemara Pawlaka z autorem projektu PHPProjekt:

http://blog.thinkphp.de/comment.php?type=trackback&entry_id=307

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/307-PHProjekt-in-Poland-Meeting-with-deputy-prime-minister.html

PS: Ciekawe czy potrafiÄ™ skorzystać z mechanizmu Trackback…

Tell me, have you ever seen first episode of the first of any TV series?

After kinda hard week I decided to waste some time doing absolutely nothing productive – ended up firing up fireplace (sound of fire slowly eating pieces of wood rule), setting up projector, opening few cans of beer and watching movies . Some of them were first episodes of MacGyver, A-Team and Yattaman – remember those?

What rocks about watching 01×01s of series you watched more than a few episodes is realizing how big part of the main theme comes from the 01×01. After watching 1/3 of MacGyver’s 01×01 I can tell that at least three scenes come from this very episode. Oh, did you know that in A-Team’s 01×01, one of the team’s member (Face) was played by another actor than in all other episodes? That’s nothing – I saw MacGyver shooting a machine gun! w00t!

On contrary, Yattaman’s 01×01 doesn’t provide anything special, I still don’t know how this kids managed to build YattaDog, or any other YattaMachines. What we find out (more or less) is why the Drombos are looking for the skull.

Anyone has 01×01 of Gigi, Subasa, General Daimos or Calendar Man (speaking of anime) and is willing to share? I was also wondering if there is a person who watched first episode of “Bald and beautiful” …

What’s the point of this post? Something you wouldn’t expect. I always thought the the latter quote from this djurban’s commit sucks, but recently realized that it is beautifil. Djurban – I will never be as close to where you are now (speaking of the level of knowledge you possess), but I can tell this quote is true. Sometimes you just have to zero yourself. This is what I am doing today.

PS: I hate it I have no time to work on PLD recently. Gotta work less…

[En] Those using Xenâ„¢ may become interested in the fact of availability of a set of RPM packages (kernel and userspace) of Xenâ„¢ 3.2.0-rc4-pre (from Mercurial’s xen-unstable branch). As for now I have successfully booted dom0, run xend, but had some issues while booting dom0 (with hotplug related message) – any help appreciated.

Packages for th-i686 are available, just add the following lines to your poldek configuration:

[source]

type = pndir

name = th-xen

path = http://carme.pld-linux.org/~adamg/kxen/

You may also want to build these packages in your own environment –  in that case have a look at kernel-xen.spec and xen.spec files.

[pl] Osoby korzystajÄ…ce z technologii Xenâ„¢ może zaciekawić informacja o pojawieniu siÄ™ zestawu pakietów RPM (kernel + userspace) Xenâ„¢ 3.2.0-rc4-pre (z gaÅ‚Ä™zi xen-unstable repozytorium Mercurial). Na chwilÄ™ obecnÄ… udaÅ‚o mi siÄ™ ponieść system dom0, uruchomić xend, natomiast z uruchomieniem systemu domU sÄ… pewne problemy (komunikt dotyczÄ…cy hotpluga) – pomoc mile widziana.

Przygotowałem zestaw pakietów dla architektury th-i686, odpowiedni wpis dla poldka:

[source]

type = pndir

name = th-xen

path = http://carme.pld-linux.org/~adamg/kxen/

Możliwe jest także samodzielne zbudowanie pakietów – w takim przypadku warto zainteresować siÄ™ plikami kernel-xen.spec oraz xen.spec.