News items for tag work - Koos van den Hout

Dear Sun: Seeing 'no keyboard attached' as the last console message when I attach a Logitech usb keyboard to a blade is not the right answer.

Moving at work to a new office with all the associated network reconnection problems, things getting lost and other issues. And a new view for my webcam.

While transplanting the Coffeecam to new hardware I made a copy of the entire system to a different (more silent) harddisk. The next problem was getting grub to install itself on that second harddisk. Which was easy, given the hints on a Software RAID Howto. Grub does not complain when I tell it /dev/hdc will be the future (hd0). This is something that would be a lot more trouble to get right in lilo.

Using wpa_supplicant it should also be possible to log in to 802.1x secured (wireless) networks. The library network at work uses this but only documents usage with windows and macos X. I decided to give it a try and after some fiddling I had a working setup: Solis-air access under Linux.

Pictures in and around the building I work. Comments are in Dutch, but most are about the former use of the room.

Wrote a bit on how I configured FreeBSD as a PPS slave.

Configuring the NetApp continues. Basic configuration has been done yesterday and now I'm playing with it myself. Trying to understand everything, hoping to make it do what I want. So far I got ldap userlookups working after several tries (for multiple ldap server names, put a comma and(!) a space between the names.

Today at work was 'My First NetApp' day. A NetApp engineer came over in the afternoon to help with the rackmount and the initial installation. Since the initialization of the disks was going to take longer than planned, the rest of the installation will be done tomorrow. I am eager to work with the NetApp, hoping it will improve the response time of the home directories (main reason we started looking for new storage). That is the first bit we hope to be able to bring on-line. Later we will look at other storage that we can move to the NetApp.

Speaking of FreeBSD and ntp: yesterday at work I set up a Dell Poweredge 2550 as ntp server. FreeBSD 5.4, a kernel with PPS support (the PPS bits will arrive when I have time to make a cable). It now runs over the weekend to see how stable ntpd will get.

It took a bit of hacking, but now I have mon monitoring squid for availability. So now we know (at work) when our proxy goes amiss.

Learned today: To see if write caching is active on a Sun A1000 raid array, use the command raidutil -c unit -V lun. In the answer is WCE for write cache enabled.

And Netgear support comes with the bright suggestion of using one of the Windows based tftp servers they suggest. A few days delay there..

Finally got the Netgear FSM726s working better with multiple vlans when the firmware upgrade succeeded (now running 2.6.2). The (windows based) tftpd they suggest works better with the switch (guess the tftp client in there is not too brilliant). Now our vlans work without packets ending up on the wrong vlan interface of our router. And I can select a management vlan, and not have the default selection of 'all' (brrrr). It's still not perfect, an interface to a linux box in dot1q mode isn't functioning yet for all vlans (but it does work with one vlan native and one 'tagged'.. which isn't too great a setup).

The continuing story of the Netgear switch... No luck on updating the firmware on the Netgear FSM726s. Boot from tftp hangs. Aaargh. Logged a support call with Netgear.

First day back at work. Some stuff broke in my absence, so I started submitting Sun service requests. After that I started debugging a weird problem with a Netgear FSM726S managed switch. Some packets seem to end up on the wrong vlan (probably due to the router having the same ethernet address on all vlans). Newer firmware should fix this (why they deliver them with ancient firmware is another question), but the only way to upload firmware is via tftp, via the network, at boot-time, which clashed with the current config (since we do use vlans a lot). Lots of short network outages, and a real broadcast storm, but no success upgrading the firmware.

The Coffeecam at work is back on-line. The harddisk in the machine died (a 1995 harddisk that had been in use most of the years) last Friday. Re-installing the OS and getting stuff running again (especially the philips webcam driver) was a bit of work as the stock debian is compiled with gcc3 (tsk! the README says to use 2.95), the debian kernel source seemed to be inflicted with some gcc3-isms (tsk! again) and the philips webcam driver is discontinued (I understand his reasons, but the other choice in webcam is 'no webcam at all'). But, I dug up a somewhat compatible kernel, gcc-2.95, waited for the kernel to actually compile (takes quite a while on hardware this old), a binary of the webcam decompressor and now it's back. The one and only Original coffeecam (The Trojan Room Coffee Machine) is now rackmounted at Spiegel online.

Had another go at finding the ideal combination of drivers and patches for my laptop and wireless network scanning, and got it fixed. Documented it right away, getting the orinoco 0.13e drivers to work on the dell latitude c640 laptop.

A teacher asked for a directory on https://wwwsec.cs.uu.nl/ to be limited to a specific client certificate. Configuring this exact limitation turned out to be quite some searching as I couldn't find it in the modssl documentation (the site being down a lot of the time this week didn't help either). The correct way to write that you want to limit to a certain subject DN turns out to be: %{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN} eq "/C=NL/ST=Utrecht/L=Utrecht/O=Universiteit Utrecht/... "

Quote I heard at Sane 2004 in the talk The Changing Face of System Administration by Geoff Halprin:

A system admin's life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards!

from Michael O'Brein.

A new job! Starting next Tuesday I will be a senior sysadmin at the computer science department of Utrecht University. Yes, that is right across the street from where I left a year ago...