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Mike Fedyk
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Mike Fedyk" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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02:50 pm
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"What version of trixbox should I use?"
Trixbox 2.0 includes asterisk 1.2.
Trixbox 2.2 uses asterisk 1.4
I'd stick with asterisk 1.2 or callweaver for now.
Tags: asterisk, trixbox
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02:47 pm
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No program "pvscan" found for your current version of LVM
That's what I get when I run pvscan right after installing the lvm2 package. It doesn't make sure the lvm kernel modules are loaded before reporting this error.
This command fixes the problem:
/etc/init.d/lvm start
I need to report a bug...
Tags: feisty, lvm, ubuntu
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11:59 pm
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Stats gathering library
I mentioned previously about using sysstat to create an unified stats gathering lib for tools to use, and it looks like someone else has already started a project to fill that gap.
Check out libstatgrab:
The libstatgrab library provides an easy-to-use interface for accessing system statistics and information. Available statistics include CPU, Load, Memory, Swap, Disk I/O, and Network I/O. It was developed to work on Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. The package also includes two tools: saidar provides a curses-based interface for viewing live system statistics, and statgrab is a sysctl-like interface to the statistics.
Tags: libstatgrab, linux, monitoring, statistics
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11:02 pm
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Linux Firewall Distributions
RedWall Firewall:
redWall is a bootable CD-ROM firewall which focuses on Web-based reporting of the firewall's status. It includes Snort, snortsam, dansguardian, and support for fwbuilder, squidguard, reporting (using BASE/sarg/ntop/webfwlog), VPN (Openswan/PoPToP/Openvpn), Spam Filtering (spamassassin, dcc, razor2, clamav, amavis-new, dspam and maia mailguard), and mail-based, alerting. Configuration data are stored on a floppy or USB disk. SmoothWall Firewall:
SmoothWall is a popular Internet Security software package (based on Linux) offering automated modem/advanced ISDN autoprobing, ethernet ADSL/cable, USB ADSL (Alcatel Speed Touch Home only in 1.x; additional support for USR, Fuji, ECI, etc in 2.x), and multiple ethernet card support within 5 minutes of install. Web managed and with full facilities normally only seen in expensive commercial offerings, it also offers SSH, DHCP, and full firewall logging and auditing functionality.
IPCop:
IPCop Linux is a complete Linux Distribution whose sole purpose is to protect the networks it is installed on. By implementing existing technology, outstanding new technology and secure programming practices IPCop is the Linux Distribution for those wanting to keep their computers/networks safe.
Devil-Linux:
Devil-Linux is a special secure Linux distribution which is used for firewalls, routers, gateways, and servers. The goal of Devil-Linux is to have a small, customizable, and secure Linux system. Configuration is saved on a floppy disk or USB stick, and it has several optional packages. Devil-Linux boots from CD, but can be stored on CF cards or USB sticks. My goal is to find one that I like and integrate bwmtools, bandwidthd and ShoreWall into their frontends.
The proprietary vendors need a bit more competition in this space IMO.
Also I think Shorewall would make a fine standard firewall framework for Linux. Either that or some standard API needs to be created for Linux Firewalls.
Tags: firewall, linux
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10:32 pm
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Database clustering with sequoia.
I've been looking for something like sequoia for a while for multi-location database replication and failover.
Current Mood:  cheerful
Tags: high availability, sequoia
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11:56 am
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Ubuntu Feisty vs Radeon R200 QM [Radeon 9100]
This is the third time in the total of three weeks this machine has been running that xorg and the console have become unresponsive while running the "flurry" screensaver. The screensaver would freeze on the screen, and unresponsive to mouse and keyboard input like ctrl+alt+f1, or sysctl commands.
The second time I logged into the machine via ssh and found xorg spinning on the cpu. Unfortunately, when I tried connecting strace to the process, the entire machine became unresponsive.
The third time, I installed oprofile with:
apt-get install oprofile linux-image-debug-`uname -r`
The system ended up spending most of its time in the native_read_tsc() kernel function which doesn't make any sense to me because that is for very fast timing. Unless it was stuck in a busyloop waiting for progress that never happens. But why wouldn't the kernel be able to kill or trace the process?
I have commandeered ubuntu bug #65620 since it closely matches this problem and has been closed because of original bug reporter neglect.
Tags: bug, radeon, ubuntu, xorg
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07:34 pm
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Middle clicking with a touch pad
In the course of typing on my laptop, the movements of my hands have found a way to either middle-click or left and right click with a touch pad without either pressing any of the buttons or touching the pad.
It's quite frustrating to be in the middle of a thought and while typing it out you get pasted text right in the middle of a word and realizing I forgot to disable the touchpad.
Now I have come across syndaemon in "Ubuntu Guide Feisty/Hardware: Disable the touchpad while typing".
Hopefully with this, I won't have that problem anymore. :)
Tags: synaptic, syndaemon
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05:10 pm
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gnome-sound-properties and ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf
"Why doesn't the audio output device change when I set it in the gnome-sound-properties (g-s-p)?"
I have been seeing this for a while, as far back as dapper, but tabled looking into it until just now. Changing the output device in g-s-p affected gnome apps, but not anything non-gnome that used alsa or oss directly like vlc.
Running strace on g-s-p revealed some files to lookup and google that brought me ubuntu bug #31893 and the two commands below to set the default sound card for alsa (non-gnome apps) to use:
asoundconf list
asoundconf set-default-card <devicename> This configures some nice settings in ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf. Looking at the strace output of g-s-p further shows that ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf is being open()ed, mmap()ed, read(), close()d and unmmap()ed, but not written to by g-s-p.
That explains why the sound settings only affected gnome applications and since these settings are read by the alsa libraries, it is only checked when each process starts up. Any changes made with asoundconf will not take affect until after a process using alsa is exited and started again to get the alsa libs to re-read the config files.
So why isn't g-s-p changing the generic alsa configs? The asoundconf man page says:
This program is under development. Its features will change without notice and without preservation of backward compatibility, except insofar as they are put to use by other components of the Debian and/or Ubuntu operating systems. (As of this writing the Ubuntu developers have plans to use asoundconf for setting the value of defaults.pcm.card from the system sound preferences menu.)
I have filed ubuntu bug #119033 to help track this issue.
In feisty (or possibly edgy, I have avoided using edgy because I haven't had much success with that release), they have made the distinction in g-s-p between "sound events", "music and movies" and "audio conferencing". The developers will be have the task of finding a way to present a way to configure which sound card regular non-gnome alsa apps will use and presenting the options in an intuitive way. This may be especially hard since to my knowledge, non-gnome apps have no way to inform alsa they will be playing music or audio conferencing.
One nice thing In feisty, there is now an asoundconf-gtk package available that adds a menu entry in (system -> preferences -> default sound card) and removes the tedium of the two asoundconf commands above (and makes the process a little bit more user friendly, but not very much).
Tags: .asoundrc.asoundconf, asoundconf, gnome-sound-preferenes, ubuntu
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02:10 pm
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Ubuntu Feisty and a Z22 Palm Pilot
I'm trying to get a Z22 Palm Pilot working with Ubuntu Feisty today.
First I found this in the kernel logs:
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 6
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 7
usb 1-1.4: device not accepting address 7, error -71
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-1.4: device not accepting address 8, error -71
Then I found ubuntu bug #54419 and it gave me three commands that were useful:
sudo modprobe -r ehci_hcd
sudo sh -c 'echo blacklist ehci_hcd > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ehci'
sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`
That takes away the error messages in the kernel log, but I was still having trouble finding the USB serial device for communications from jpilot.
That brings me to ubuntu bug #108512. Apparently the visor module doesn't get loaded when a palm gets plugged into a usb port on feisty. The two commands below take care of that problem in a "works for me" kind of way. The permanent fix would probably be in the form of udev rules.
sudo modprobe visor
sudo sh -c 'echo visor >> /etc/modules'
With that, jpilot works on Ubuntu Feisty.
Tags: ehci_hcd, feisty, jpilot, palm, palm pilot, pilot, ubuntu, z22
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07:18 am
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Servers either lost power or rebooted at PIHost
$employer has servers located in PI Host.
All of them were either rebooted or lost power over the weekend.
Should I need a UPS at a co-lo facility?
Current Mood:  aggravated
Tags: colo, pihost, ups
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06:22 am
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VMware Server 1.0.3 on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04
Following "How To Install VMware Server On Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" at howtoforge, getting VMware server installed and configured was a snap. :)
Tags: feisty, ubuntu, vmware
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05:27 am
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2.6.20-16 in Ubuntu Feisty released
Looking at the changelog for 2.6.20-16 that was just released, I see some "forward ports" done from the Ubuntu Edgy 2.6.17 kernel.
I wonder how much effort is being put into merging these changes upstream. In the best case, forward ports shouldn't be needed since all of the patches would have been merged upstream.
Hopefully the load of carrying the patches will be encouragement enough to get them merged upstream.
Tags: feisty, kernel, linux, ubuntu
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09:57 am
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Virtual Networking
"Host only networks" in VMware are cool. If you want 50 networks on your system, you don't have to worry about having the physical network hardware (or VLANs) to separate the traffic.
Now I just need to find where vmware stores their configuration so I don't have to edit it through the vmware-config.pl program and find out how to turn off dhcp service to host-only-networks.
That's the one hole I see in this setup. The dhcp service for host-only-networks is from the host, and that can be an attack vector. So far I've just been killing them since I don't need them and don't want dhcp on those networks.
Tags: dhcp, networking, virtualization, vmware
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09:42 pm
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Routing, VMware & Wireless
I spent today hacking with my friend Charles Wyble in addition to returning and borrowing some books. :)
We setup a Linux router in a VMware guest. His machine now has five ethernet ports (one built-in and four in a multi-port card), but the tulip driver in Ubuntu Dapper Server has a weird probing quirk. The ports that physically are ordered 1, 2, 3, 4 were detected as eth4, eth1, eth2, eth3. No problem. Just reorder the network interface names in /etc/iftab and we're set.
Next we configured the vmware networking so that each vmnet is associated with the correspondingly named ethX number. So eth1 -> vmnet1, etc. Then we added a "host only" interface, but it took over vmnet1 and that was fun debugging. "Why am I not seeing my public IP address on this interface?!"
After getting packets flowing, installed shorewall and setup a dmz. A cursory look at this setup shows that there is a price to pay in resource usage. What would take 2-7% cpu usage (a torrent of FC5 at 600Kbyte/s) to do on the the host system takes about 25% processor usage within the VM guest on an AMD Athlon XP 2200+. The security and flexibility of this setup is unquestionable, but it is good to know the cost.
Also Charles had a problem with Windows in a VMware guest on his Ubuntu Feisty 64bit laptop not being able to get out to the network. It turned out not being a windows problem, but a ndiswrapper problem with his bcm43xx chipset wireless card. Plugging in a wired ethernet connection worked around the problem and getting a Ralink mini-PCI card will be a more permanent solution.
I guess it was a windows problem, since a windows NDIS driver caused the problem. Heh.
Tags: linux, ralink, shorewall, vmware
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04:35 pm
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Optimizing Linux Performance by Phillip G. Ezolt
Today I finished reading Optimizing Linux Performance by Phillip G. Ezolt.
Even though I already knew a lot about the subject, it did fill in a few gaps in my knowledge of oprofile, kcachegrind, valgrind, vmstat, iostat, script, objdump, gdb and sar. It also clued me into a few tools I didn't know about like ltrace, gprof, memprof, ipcs and etherape.
One tool it didn't mention is dstat. The package description says it all:
<dstat>Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of the limitations of these programs and adds some extra features.
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Dstat allows you to view all of your network resources instantly, you can for example, compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval).
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Dstat also cleverly gives you the most detailed information in columns and clearly indicates in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed.
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Dstat is also unique in letting you aggregate block device throughput for a certain diskset or network bandwidth for a group of interfaces, i.e. you can see the throughput for all the block devices that make up a single filesystem or storage system.
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Dstat's output, in its current form, is not suited for post-processing by other tools, it's mostly meant for humans to interpret real-time data as easy as possible.
One thing about dstat is that it uses six times more memory than vmstat (but the output is prettier):
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
mfedyk 23001 0.6 0.5 5452 3824 pts/5 S+ 21:27 0:00 python /usr/bin/dstat 1
mfedyk 23027 0.0 0.0 1780 588 pts/6 S+ 21:28 0:00 vmstat 1
</dstat>
I liked the examples used to for discovering performance problems but not most of the solutions proposed. I understand the point of the book isn't detailing the way optimize your system libraries (glibc, gtk, etc.), but building menu caches in nautilus (the latency performance example) might have gone over better with me if there was at least a mention of improving the library being called. Sometimes the best course of action is to improve the library you're calling in the Open Source Way(tm) instead of just working around problems you find in your application code.
The book also shows areas where Linux and its performance tools could be improved. It got me thinking about how to change the entire Linux performance monitoring ecosystem by first griping about how things are currently and pontificating on how things would be with a few changes.
Right now, every performance monitoring system (cacti, munin, etc.) has it's own performance gathering code. sysstat's sar (System Activity Reporter) is already written in C. It needs to store more statistics and have language bindings to Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. for polling its database, and a generic stats reporting API for stats gathering agents like snmpd, etc. This would allow one project to be the focal point for system monitoring statistics gathering and remove the duplication of work.
With this work done, performance monitoring *might* be close to what windows currently offers. I don't say that lightly. This is a serious area where Linux needs to catch up.
gnome-system-monitor (g-s-m): The lines are so thick it looks like they were drawn with a crayon. Vital stats like nice, system, hard and soft irq cpu usage are not shown. So much vertical space is wasted with the child sized buttons to change the colors of the lines. At least it doesn't flicker when updating its stats anymore. This tool has improved steadily over time but still needs a lot of work. Compare this with Windows' Task Manager. While not the best, it does present more information in less screen space than g-s-m.
Also since the book was written when Fedora Core 2 was current, there have been a few things that have improved since the book was written. For instance, major and minor faults are accounted for properly now. Let's get that per process block and socket/pipe statistics gathering into the kernel.
Tags: linux, optimizing, performance, phillip g. ezolt
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05:46 pm
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Quad core CPU support in Centos 4.5
The machine I saw the error in with Vmware Server 1.0.2 (Yes, I need to upgrade...) was running on a 2xquad core xeon server (2 sockets). Now centos 4.5 has support for quad core.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the error I was seeing in the centos5 guest...
Tags: centos4, centos5, quad core, vmware
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03:55 pm
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Contacted by Vircom (Makers of ModusMail)
Here is an email I received from Vircom yesterday:
"While reading on the internet, I came across something you wrote in your blog on Vircom’s ModusMail (see below). I am interested in knowing more details so we can make sure that customers have a positive experience with Vircom’s products. For instance, did you contact Vircom support on this issue?
If you can be kind and provide me with more information, I would greatly appreciate it. As Product Manager, I am interested in improving Vircom’s products and not trying to sell you our solution. Detailed negative feedback is especially useful for me because it helps show weak areas in the product that we need to improve."
I sent him details on the service provider that is blaming them for the slow email server responsiveness. Hopefully they will be able to help them. Though I do not hold that service provider in high regard, so it will probably be difficult for Vircom to do anything about this.
We'll see. It's good to see Vircom making an effort in this area.
Tags: modusmail, vircom
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01:04 pm
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CPU errors with SMP Centos5 on VMware Server
Looks like I'm running into the "Centos beta 5 shows cpu errors on vmware" with Vmware Server 1.0.2 on a Centos4 host. Switching the VM to one CPU seems to avoid the problems. We'll see.
Tags: centos5, smp, vmware, vmware server
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12:26 pm
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Centos5 LVM disk stats bug filed upstream
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=240476
No response on the list so far, so I'm filing a bug upstream.
Tags: bug, centos, centos5, lvm, red hat, rhel5
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12:08 pm
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RHEL5 Documentation fixes
Yay, I found and fixed Red Hat's documentation typos.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=240474
Tags: documentation, patch, rhel5
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