Beaver in the 21st Century

Posted on 30 October, 2006 by Matthias Scheler

Last saturday my friend Markus finally found the time to update the hardware of his externally hosted server beaver.core.de. The update took place month later than initially planed because Markus has a very busy schedule and his hobby server is understandably not his highest priority.

The new hardware consists of an ASUS P4B266-SE motherboard, a Pentium 4 2.0A CPU and 1GB of DDR memory. While this would be step backward for mankind it was giant leap for that system. The previous hardware was built in the last century: an ASUS T2P4 motherboard, a AMD K6 III 400MHz CPU and 192MB of PS/2 EDO memory.I was looking forward to the update because beaver is also the backup DNS and mail server for my domains. I help Markus with the system administration and if you are used to the speed of a machine driven by a Pentium M CPU it is not much fun doing similar things on such old hardware. Besides the slow CPU the lack of main memory really hurt the overall performance. The machine spent a lot of time paging out memory especially while SpamAssassin was processing e-mails. The high disk throughput caused by this was probably the reason that one IDE harddisks died earlier this year. And the other harddisk has hung once recently which indicates a forthcoming failure. Fortunately beaver uses NetBSD’s software RAID driver RAIDframe which prevented a catastrophe in both cases.

The new hardware seemed to work very well at first. The machine came up fine and felt really fast. Yesterday I had another quick look and sent an e-mail to Markus that everything is allright. That was of course a bad idea because the universe doesn’t tolerate such open display of optimism. Five minutes later the machine froze for reasons which we haven’t figured out yet. It came back after being resetted manually this morning. But I guess that it wasn’t the last time that this has happened. 🙁

Posted in Computing, NetBSD | 1 Comment

Things you can do when you have a fews day off

Posted on 1 October, 2006 by Matthias Scheler

Having a few days off is great. You can relax and have some fun.

So what could we do today? What about getting the Lego model railway out of the box and play with it? Yes, great idea! Let’s put up the tracks first:

The first track layout

That are definitely not enough tracks. Let’s go to the garage and search for the box with the extra tracks that haven’t even been unpacked so far:

More Tracks

That’s more like it. Now let’s improve the layout so the tracks go all the way from the dining room to the living room:

The second track layout

Now let’s make a movie of the train. Chasing the train with the camera is not only difficult the result is also unconvincing. We need a better plan!

What about putting the camera on the train? Yes, that will work. But we need a waggon to hold the camera. Wait, this is Lego. So let’s simply built the waggon:

The Camera Waggon

Not very spectacluar but it does the job. Now we can record our train movie (please click on the picture to watch it):

The Train Move

Things we need for the future:

  1. More tracks.
  2. A better camera
  3. More Internet bandwidth for publishing movies

Anyway, that was definitely fun. 🙂

Posted in Free Time | 2 Comments

(Not) downloading Solaris 10

Posted on 28 September, 2006 by Matthias Scheler

The most advanced operating system ever built is according to Sun Microsystems Solaris 10. Last Sunday I decided to try out the latest update release Solaris 10 6/06 on my ULTRA60. Because I have frequently problems with NFS and NIS on my Powermac (running Mac OS X) I wanted to try out whether another operating system on the server makes a difference.

I went to Sun’s websites and followed the download links until it asked me to login using my Sun Online Account. I entered the username and password that I registered years ago (if I remember correctly for downloading Java) and selected the Solaris for SPARC DVD link. But instead of the requested download I got a form which asked me to update my personal information. That was actually a valid request because the data was out of date. I therefore updated it and submitted it. The result was something which looked like an empty web page. It took a moment to realize that it was the bottom of a mostly emtpy web page. I scrolled up and found this error message:

Fatal Error: We’re sorry, an unexpected error occurred, so your transaction cannot be completed at this time. Please help us resolve this error as soon as possible by e-mailing our support department at ( Download Center Customer Service ) the name and/or URL of the page you were on and a copy of the following error message:

And the real error message was missing. Neither entering my personal data again nor creating a new account helped. I finally followed the advise above and submit a support request. Here is the information I put it (as quoted in the reply I got from Sun):

Name: my account name
Email: my e-mail address
Feedback Type: Download
Browser: Firefox
Version (if known): 1.5.0.7
Operating System: Mac
Product Name: Solaris 10 6/06
Comments:
I’m trying to download Solaris 10 6/06. After login in and clicking on the link for the SPARC DVD image I’m asked to enter my account data. If I do that and press on the “Update” button I get a page with a message about a “FATAL ERROR” on it. If I press reload I’m back to the SDLC page and after clicking on the link for the SPARC DVD image the problem repeats itself.

Note that I made the mistake to specify acurate information for the platform I was using to download Solaris. And here is the reply I got from Sun:

Dear Sun customer,

We do not currently provide software that supports the Mac environment. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. For possible suggestions or workarounds, please visit the Java Forum at the following URL:

http://forum.java.sun.com/index.jspa

Please feel free to contact us with any further questions.

Sincerely,
name removed

Sun Customer Service Specialist

Now I know that I cannot update my Sun Online Account because Solaris is not available for my Mac. Thanks a lot, I’m glad you told me that. I guess I have to ask Apple whether I can get Mac OS X for my ULTRA60 instead. 🙂

Posted in Computing | 1 Comment