Gigabit Ethernet at last

Posted on 3 February, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

Ever since I got hold of my Ultra 60 workstation I have been trying to get a Gigabit Ethernet PCI card working in it under NetBSD. But neither a 3Com 3C996B-T nor an Intel PRO/1000 MT card worked in that machine because of problems with PCI interrupts.

But thanks to Julian Coleman and Rafal Boni the problem got fixed finally. The Intel card is now working fine under NetBSD 4.99.52:

wm0 at pci1 dev 1 function 0: Intel i82540EM 1000BASE-T Ethernet, rev. 2
wm0: interrupting at ivec 0
wm0: 32-bit 66MHz PCI bus
wm0: 64 word (6 address bits) MicroWire EEPROM
wm0: Ethernet address 00:07:e9:XX:XX:XX
makphy0 at wm0 phy 1: Marvell 88E1011 Gigabit PHY, rev. 3
makphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto

The network performance is not great yet but it is a step in the right direction. Now I wait impatiently until Martin Husemann finishes the work on SMP for NetBSD/sparc64.

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An unintended Lecture

Posted on 13 January, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

Never volunteer on a mailing list to give somebody a quick introduction into OpenLDAP! You could end up with twenty people listening to a presentation about LDAP in general which you have to come up with off the top of your head.

It happened to me yesterday and fortunately went quite well. I had a bit help from the audience and a lot of people realized soon that they already encountered LDAP as Active Directory.

Despite being somewhat unprepared I enjoyed giving that lecture. And I’m foolish enough to believe that the audience enjoyed it as well. 🙂

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The Sound Of Silence

Posted on 9 January, 2008 by Matthias Scheler

For the last twelve days we had visitors from Germany: two good friends from University and their lovely daughters. They left very early this morning to catch their ferry home in Harwich.

Now that they are gone the house feels very empty. And the sound of the boiler starting up is the only thing which interrupts the oppressive silence. 🙁

Posted in Real Life | 1 Comment