Intel PRO/1000 PT

Posted on 8 December, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

After experiencing a lot of trouble with the onboard Broadcom BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet interface of my new server I decided to get a network card that would be suitable to replace it. As Intel PRO/1000 MT PCI cards worked very well for me in the past I bought an Intel PRO/1000 PT PCI Express card.

The Intel PRO/1000 PT is supported by NetBSD 4.0 and newer and works like a charm for me. According to TTCP its Intel i82572EI chip provides a 13% higher transmit rate than the Broadcom chip. It also supports hardware-assisted checksums and TCP segmentation for both IPv4 and IPv6. Above all the card performed flawlessly in my server for over a week now with all the hardware features enabled.

So if you are looking for a fast and reliable Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express card the Intel PRO/1000 PT is a good option.

Posted in Hardware, IPv6, NetBSD | Comments Off on Intel PRO/1000 PT

Goodbye i386 … Hello amd64!

Posted on 30 November, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

Last Sunday I retired my NetBSD/i386 server installation after over 12 years of service. Back in 1996 I installed NetBSD 1.1 on a PC with a Cyrix 66MHz 486 CPU, 16MB main memory, a 1GB IDE hard disk and a 10Mb/s ISA ethernet card. The system’s job was to drive my analogue leased line and provide some Internet services like a web server and mailing lists.

Over the years both sofware and hardware got changed several times. I’ve updated the machine to all major NetBSD releases from 1.1 to 4.0, frequently even to beta versions of the next release. The hardware usually got upgraded when I bought a new PC for running NetBSD/current and playing games under Windows. In that case the server inherited the old CPU and motherboard. Whenever an upgrade happened the server would either keep its hard disks or its NetBSD installation was copied from the old to the new hard disks. But in all those years I never re-installed NetBSD. By the year 2000 the server was driven by an AMD K6-III 400MHz, had 128MB main memory, several gigabytes of disk space and a 100Mb/s PCI ethernet card.

In 2001 the server’s Internet bandwidth received a serious boost when the Deutsche Telekom AG finally provided Silke and me with an A-DSL broadband connection. But without a fixed IP address for the machine I had to rely my friend Markus’s server beaver to handle our e-mail. In 2002 that fortunately changed when KAMP started offering broadband including a fixed IP address. In all that time the server has been down or offline only very rarely, usually when Silke and I moved house.

In December last year I had bought hardware for a new server, an HP Proliant ML110 G4. As the machine has a 64Bit capable Intel Xeon CPU and upgrading it to 5GB of main memory was affordable I decided to switch to NetBSD/amd64. As I also wanted to try out all the exciting improvements in NetBSD/current I decided to try it on the new machine. I therefore postponed the server upgrade until the NetBSD 5.0 release cycle had begun. In the meantime I tested NetBSD/xen, fitted the machine with a pair of fast server grade SATA hard disks, optimized the RAID performance and benchmarked NetBSD’s new journaling file system.

Last Sunday the time had come: the new server was ready with all the necessary software installed and most of the data copied to its RAID array. After a final batch of rsync passes to get the missing data to the new machine I powered down the NetBSD/i386 system for good. There were a few problems with e-mail delivery and the network card at first. But in general things have worked reasonably well after a few configuration tweaks. I’ve made sure to keep at least one last backup of the NetBSD/i386 installation. But so far it doesn’t look like it is coming back.

Posted in NetBSD | Comments Off on Goodbye i386 … Hello amd64!

Thank you DHL

Posted on 27 November, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

In the past I was quite pleased with the delivery services offered by DHL. Packages usually arrived quickly and if I wasn’t home when DHL attempted to deliver a package I could use e-mail to arrange for a delivery to another address on the following day.

However things have changed. DHL tried to deliver a package this week when Silke and I were both at work. Dealing with them afterwards turned out to be really frustrating:

  1. There was no useful information on the card: no tracking number, no sender address, not even the recipient.
  2. Instead of an e-mail address the card only listed a phone number. When I tried to call the phone number an automatic operator connected me to the local service centre which was already closed.
  3. When I called again on the next morning they still couldn’t tell me the recipient. As the package originated from another country they weren’t able to access the details.
  4. They could not arrange for a delivery attempt on the same day which meant I had to wait at least another day.
  5. When they insisted that I need to authorise the delivery to my work address via Fax I finally gave up. I decided to collect the package at the DHL service centre instead.
  6. DHL do of course not have a service centre in Cambridge. I will therefore have to drive to Bar Hill.
  7. When Silke and I finally arrived in Bar Hill we found out that the driving directions on the card had led us to the wrong DHL building.

It goes without saying that I’m really happy about all the improvements that DHL made to their customer service.

Posted in Real Life | 1 Comment