SUNWfrk’s Blog

Upgrading an XSCF on a restricted network

SUNWfrk — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:16:56 +0000

I found myself in a situation today where I wasn’t able to upgrade the XSCF firmware on our new Oracle Enterprise M5000 unless I drove to the datacenter with a USB key. The network on our XSCF is very restricted, we can only SSH to it and the XSCF itself can not initiate any connection over that network. To upgrade an XSCF you can use HTTPS (ports blocked by firewall) or the XSCF can download the firmware over ftp, http or https but as I mentioned, the XSCF itself cannot access anything. so I tried to ftp over the DSCP network but there I ran against the same issue -> only traffic allowed from the domains to the XSCF and not the other way arround. So it was getting me mad and I figured a way around it:

1) upload your firmware to a domain into let’s say /var/tmp/xscf-firmware

2) go to /var/tmp/xscf-firmware and type:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

3) open another terminal and login to the XSCF over the DSCP network:

ssh -l xscfuser -R 8080:localhost:8080 `/usr/platform/SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise/sbin/prtdscp -s`

4) now just download your firmware:

XSCF> getflashimage http://localhost:8080/FFXCP1101.tar.gz

You should see the following in your terminal where you started the python webserver:

localhost – - [31/Mar/2011 11:50:03] “GET /FFXCP1101.tar.gz HTTP/1.1″ 200 -

PS: now you just downloaded the firmware, please read the documentation how to apply it.

Self made home NAS power measurements

SUNWfrk — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 07:04:48 +0000

I promised to publish some power measurements of my self made home NAS, so… here they are!

The CPU cores only seems to support the C1 state (loved to use C3 or C6..) for the rest I’m using powerd to throttle the frequency and ‘atacontrol spindown’ for the disks.

When the system is idle and the data disk are spun down:

When all 4 threads (it’s a dual core ATOM with HT) on the system are in use:

When all 4 threads are in use and a benchmarks is running on the data disks:

If you are wondering which components I used then take a look at my first NAS post

Disk performance benchmarks can be found here

Solaris 11 Introduction Video

SUNWfrk — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:05:46 +0000

Hi,

Milek posted a nice introduction video about Solaris 11.
check it out at his site!

Self made home NAS I/O benchmarks

SUNWfrk — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:15:57 +0000

As requested by some, these are some graphs of the benchmarks I’ve run on my home NAS. Bear in mind that I didn’t made this NAS for screaming performance. It just had to stream movies, pictures but also keep them save and this with ‘green’ in the back of my mind.

for the setup of the machine, check my previous blog post.

Bonnie benchmark on a ZFS mirror with compression disabled

Bonnie benchmark on a ZFS mirror with compression enabled (LZJB)

Conclusion: I think this is a fair performance for home use, even if you think that the drives I use are optimized for reduced power (‘green’) usage and are running at 5200rpm. Also compression seems to improve disk I/O as it needs less data to be send/read to the disks but will use more CPU and thus.. also more power..

Next UP: power measurements.

Self made home NAS with ZFS

SUNWfrk — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:44:40 +0000

Yes, this is yet another self-made NAS post.. But when I was searching for information I had the feeling it was either with OpenSolaris/Solaris Express and ZFS or with Linux and some LVM. Some even dare to use btrfs which in my opinion is still in heavy development and not near stable. I’m not such a big fan of Solaris Express or btrfs for home use. I do like Linux or FreeBSD and ZFS. So it was clear for me, it would be FreeBSD with ZFS because of the native support for this FS.

Before I had this NAS I had 2 USB disk with ZFS in mirror attached to an OpenSolaris laptop but believe me, this is not an ideal setup, it worked but after one year of non stop operation scrubs constantly found data inconsistencies. Even after opening the USB cases and attaching the drives directly with a SATA cable ZFS was reporting errors. So, buy some new drives! (they’re really not so expensive)

So I ordered the following things.

1x SuperMicro X7SPA-H Atom D510 Mainboard, Retail
1x Lian Li PC-Q08 Black, No power supply
2x Kingston KTH-ZD8000B/2G 2 GB, PC5300, 667 MHz
1x Seasonic M12II-520 Modular, Bronze 520 Watt, 20+24 Pins
1x Lite-On LiteOn IHAS324 Serial ATA, Retail, Black
2x Western Digital Caviar 1,5TB WD15EARS-22Z5B1

Since it’s a home NAS I didn’t needed Enterprise grade performance but a low powered multifunctional device where I had the freedom to install what I want on it (that rules out Qnap, Synology..)

Some downsides of my configuration:

no graphic support in FreeBSD because of lacking GEM support (seems they’re working on it.)
no ECC memory, ECC memory is not supported on current ATOM boards. (this is also not offered by qnap or other home NAS builders)

Who does sudo report these “incidents” to?

SUNWfrk — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 13:54:19 +0000

Another nice one from xkcd which a colleague of mine brought to my attention:

iTunes; accept incoming connections?

SUNWfrk — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:27:20 +0000

Every time I started iTunes I got the question window if I wanted to allow iTunes to accept incoming connections..
I searched a while and stumbled upon this post where I saw that it was not an isolated case.
At the end of the page I found the solution.

Type this in Terminal to verify that iTunes is installed correctly:

Legolas:~ sunwfrk$ codesign -v /Applications/iTunes.app

/Applications/iTunes.app: a sealed resource is missing or invalid

That response says enough so after downloading and reinstalling iTunes the message was gone.

Oracle starts with video blog

SUNWfrk — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 10:44:51 +0000

Oracle started with a video blog, showing a lot of new features of the new Solaris 11 express OS

check it out here: http://blogs.sun.com/video/

Thanks to Henkis blog “It’s a UNIX system“

yum update problems on a vps

SUNWfrk — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:19:54 +0000

I had a slight problem when upgrading my RPM’s on my VPS (which I got from belGOnet and I can fully recommend!!) Most of the time ‘yum update’ failed to work and exits with this error

[root@rogue ~]# yum update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 309, in user_main
errcode = main(args)
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 178, in main
result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 345, in doCommands
self._getTs(needTsRemove)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 101, in _getTs
self._getTsInfo(remove_only)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 112, in _getTsInfo
pkgSack = self.pkgSack
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 661, in
pkgSack = property(fget=lambda self: self._getSacks(),
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 501, in _getSacks
self.repos.populateSack(which=repos)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 232, in populateSack
self.doSetup()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 79, in doSetup
self.ayum.plugins.run(‘postreposetup’)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/plugins.py”, line 179, in run
func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/fastestmirror.py”, line 181, in postreposetup_hook
all_urls = FastestMirror(all_urls).get_mirrorlist()
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/fastestmirror.py”, line 333, in get_mirrorlist
self._poll_mirrors()
File “/usr/lib/yum-plugins/fastestmirror.py”, line 376, in _poll_mirrors
pollThread.start()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/threading.py”, line 416, in start
_start_new_thread(self.__bootstrap, ())
thread.error: can’t start new thread

The answer is (again) more simple then you might expect. Thus, before you start reinstalling python or start rebuilding your yum database try this and modify this file as following: /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf

[main]
enabled=1
verbose=0
socket_timeout=3
hostfilepath=/var/cache/yum/timedhosts.txt
maxhostfileage=10
#this was set to 15 and causes problems on a VPS which is mostly limited in the number of concurrent threads
maxthreads=5
#exclude=.gov, facebook

After this ‘yum update’ should be working again. if you are still running out of threads you can put the enabled flag to zero and this will disable the fastestmirror plugin.

Adding custom rpm’s to your autoyast installation

SUNWfrk — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:11:08 +0000

This is a follow up of my previous blogpost where I created a custom initrd for an autoyast installation. The module I added to the initrd was made out of a source rpm, this source rpm also generated rpm files with this module in so you can use it in your installation. I found a lot of info from this site. What we will do is adding an ‘updates’ directory which can be used for rpm’s who will update existing rpm’s or we can add new or custom rpm’s.

some background info: my installation is located in /install/sles10sp2/CD1, my install server ip is 10.8.0.1 and I installed inst-source-utils.rpm

/usr/bin/create_update_source.sh /install/sles10sp2/CD1

this will create an ‘updates’ directory in /install/sles10sp2/CD1. Now you can add your custom rpm’s into that directory. I’m using an x86_64 installation so for me it will be:

cp /usr/src/packages/RPMS/x86_64/hp-igb-kmp-smp-2.3.4_2.6.16.60_0.21-1.x86_64.rpm /install/sles10sp2/CD1/updates/suse/x86_64/
cd /install/sles10sp2/CD1/updates/suse
create_package_descr -x setup/descr/EXTRA_PROV
cd setup/descr
ls > directory.yast

We’re almost there; now we only have to edit your autoyast profile and add the following:

nfs://10.8.0.1/install/sles10sp2/updates
SuSE-Linux-Updates
/

That’s it!