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Dream flight (Schempp-Hirth day @ Albatros)
edited by on September 29th 2007, at 13:59
Last weekend was another edition of Schempp-Hirth day. Schempp-Hirth is a German builder of gliders, and for several years now, they lend us some of their machines to get a feeling of the latest innovations and a bit of the future in the gliding world...

This year's machines were most interesting, to say the least:

The DuoDiscus XL is the bigger successor of the DuoDiscus X, a flyer for two, with a wing span of a dazzling 20 meters. The XL has all the aspects of the X, but its cockpit has grown significantly in size, allowing for larger persons to fly in it as well. Several other improvements have been made for a better flying comfort.
The XL we had is currently the only glider of its type  ...
 
Installing Realtek RTL8111/RTL8168 series for linux
edited by on September 16th 2007, at 17:38
Realtek has a new gigabit chipset which is appearing on various motherboards, including the Asus M2A-VM board. At the time of writing (with kernel 2.6.22 being the default), this driver is not yet included in the default kernel tree.

Thanks to Realtek's wonderful support for linux, they have the driver source for various Unix/Linux flavours available for download on their website.

Download the driver from the official download site.

First, have your dependencies in order by having the following:

A sane build environment (contains gcc, make, etc.)

The kernel tree and/or headers of your current kernel.

Root access for installing and using the driver (of course).

Once all that is in orde  ...
 
Solaris ZFS vs. Red Hat ext3, the sequel
edited by on September 11th 2007, at 17:48

As follow up on the post of a few weeks back, this little benchmark result:

http://tastic.brillig.org/~jwb/zfs-xfs-ext4.html

It clearly states what everybody is thinking: ZFS is definitely not the better one... Now that that's been said, we can get on with our lives again... ;-)

 
Client-only MythTV
edited by on September 9th 2007, at 20:59
In light of my media guide (which is still under heavy development), I did a bit of experimenting with MythTV.
The result of my experiment is pretty nifty: I now have the ability to watch TV on my laptop (without a TV tuner), as long as I have a connection to my media PC (where the tuner is). Want to know more? Read on then...

As you know (or perhaps not yet), MythTV consists of two parts: a backend server (which does all the work: managing records, accessing hardware and so on), and a frontend client (basically controls the backend server, look up recordings, watch actual TV, etc.).
These two parts communicates with each other using the IP stack. While (according to the Gentoo ebuild main  ...
 
Oui, Monsieur, je parle bien le francais
edited by on September 3rd 2007, at 22:48

Enlisted myself for a evening course of French. Since the latter is horrible, it is a very good idea, no?

Anyway, for those that are interested, can check out the website of the organizing party:

http://www.tio-cvo.be/

The website is in Dutch, but they also teach that, so it should not be a problem at all.

 
My new media pc has arrived
edited by on September 3rd 2007, at 22:37
Finally, it's ready: my very new, special-ordered media pc. I mainly bought it to replace my (rather noisy) old pc with it, and to have a real looking PVR thingy.
Want to see pictures? Of course you do...

Half-front-side view, along with the big, silent fans.



The rear of the case, displaying HDMI, Audigy and TV tuner, among other things.



The internals of the case, displaying the various system components, like in any other system, really.



The line up: from bottoms up, the media pc, the radio tuner and amp, the cd player, and my MP3 player's at the top.



The system will be running Gentoo Linux, with MythTV, of course. Aside of the media thingy, it will host various files and stuff  ...
 
More libexpat-2 woes (Gentoo)
edited by on August 28th 2007, at 12:10
Gentoo users that do regular updates, probably already ran into this issue before: Gentoo has pushed libexpat-2 to stable, effectively breaking all applications that depend upon it because of a missing library. While this is quite normal behaviour (the two versions of libexpat are not entirely compatible), it is mostly a very annoying thing, as it is not easy to find out which packages depend on it. Lucky, the Gentoo Forums provided me with a good solution.

Normally, in such a scenario, one would use revdep-rebuild to solve these issues, but, as seen on the forums, it more than occassionally results in havok on user's systems. Since I did not want to risk reinstalling my system altogether,   ...
 
Some in-flight recordings
edited by on August 27th 2007, at 18:00

Some in-flight recordings, taken when I was passenger on my orientation flight.

The footage was take with my PDA cam, so it's not very high resolution. Format is MPEG-4 with 3GPP subformat, but normally any decent media player will be able to play it back (I know that at least mplayer with AMR audio codec can).

 
Open house at my glider club
edited by on August 25th 2007, at 23:31

Next weekend - sat 25th and sun 26th Aug - you will be able to visit the airport of Kiewit, Hasselt for the open house of my glider club Albatros. You will be able to see what gliding is actually all about: visit the airport, see the gliders, and even fly with one of our skilled pilots: an event well worth visiting...

For more information, visit their site http://www.zweefvliegen-hasselt.be/ (website in Dutch).

 
Problems with app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 (Gentoo)
edited by on August 23rd 2007, at 21:09
Had a bit of a problem with re-emerging app-arch/rpm-4.4.6-r3 after an update of libexpat: the emerge failed with a whole bunch of compiler messages.
After a quick search on Gentoo Forums, I found a post about someone who has had the same problem, and was able to solve it.

About halfway the merge, the compile failed. At the beginning of a long list, I found these error messages:

Quote
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I. -I.. -I/usr/include/beecrypt -I../lua/include -I../lua/local -I../misc -march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -DPIC -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_REENTRANT -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wno-char-subscripts -MT rpmdav.lo -MD   ...
 
nVIDIA in Gentoo
edited by on August 23rd 2007, at 20:58
Information about nvidia in Gentoo can be found here.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml

It goes more in detail about which driver versions are suitable for which nvidia cards; quite handy, since they kicked out nvidia-legacy-drivers.

If you don't want to read the article, here's the short story about the driver version:

Geforce FX, 6, 7 and 8: use the newest driver (100.xx and up)

Geforce 3 and 4: max 96.xx

TNT, TNT2, Geforce and Geforce 2: max 71.xx

In order to properly install the correct version, it is recommended to mask the packages like so:

Add the following to /etc/portage/package.mask:

>=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9700

Add the following to /etc/portage/pa  ...
 
Solaris ZFS vs. Red Hat ext3
edited by on August 20th 2007, at 22:12
Sun has released benchmark reports about Solaris' ZFS vs. Red Hat ext3:

Download the benchmark report here.

Sun claims for ZFS to be a revolutionary file system, and proves it by their well-documented, and objective (but not really) benchmark report, found at the link above.

ZFS has pretty much overall gain, when compared to ext3, which was to be expected.Of course, what Sun conveniently did not mention, was the alternative of filesystems on RH (or any other linux for that matter).
Are we really impressed about ZFS outperforming ext3? I for one am not, and most sysadmins know that ext3 is not the most performant filesystem in existence. If Sun really wants to show off, they would've taken  ...
 
Tips and tricks using TAR
edited by on August 17th 2007, at 15:20
This little article contains some useful tips and tricks about using tar.

When your starting point for the tar is situated at /, you may already have noticed the warning output from it:

Quote
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

In case of an automated backup, where the tar is executed using cron, this warning quickly becomes annoying: most systems mail the output of a cron job to a specified email address (and in any normal scenario, this is configured properly to know whether a backup succeeds or fails). If each time you get a mail with only this warning (the rest of the backup was succesfully completed), one might actually lean towards suffering from a nervous breakdown (if only  ...
 
The Aviator
edited by on August 15th 2007, at 18:13

Time for a new experience, and a new hobby in my life.
Thanks to Bart (aka: my boss), who took me and a collegue of mine for a figurative spin around the block: in the form of gliding...

Next thing I know, I was signing myself up at Albatros Zweefvliegclub (note: website in dutch) at Hasselt (Kiewit), and already have had two lessons.

Those that care may keep their fingers crossed each time I'm in the air (usually on saturdays), and pray that I don't drill the glider down into the ground... ;-)

 
DSPAM Performance Tuning
edited by on August 8th 2007, at 13:15

In absence of a decent article, here's a good resource page for performance tuning of DSPAM:

http://dspamwiki.expass.de/Performance_Tuning

 
Automatic system reboot
edited by on August 2nd 2007, at 15:55
If you ever had the need to automatically reboot your system (whether it's a workstation or a server), knows that this is not a very simple thing to do. The shutdown command of Windows is often limited (e.g. it can't be used when nobody is logged on, or when the system is locked), and other applications are often too complex, or not free, or may even contain spyware and other ill-made wares. Windows Sysinternals has a solution.

The application is called PsShutdown, and is downloadable for free:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/psshutdown.mspx

PsShutdown is quite similar to "regular" shutdown - the former accepts the same parameters as the latter, but has various add  ...
 
HP Insight Manager Agents for VMware ESX Server
edited by on August 2nd 2007, at 11:55

The HP Agents for VMware ESX can be downloaded here:

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/24882.html

 
VMware, IBM Director, and ServeRAID Manager
edited by on August 1st 2007, at 14:07

A document about the installation of the IBM Director and ServeRAID manager in VMware ESX 3 can be found here:

http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP101047.

Should be useful to anyone who cares... If I ever get the chance to try it out myself (which should be fairly soon), it would probably be added (after rewriting, of course).

 
Manual configuration of LVM
edited by on July 29th 2007, at 15:18
An LVM structure is build as follows:At the bottom is the PV (Physical Volume), which is basically just a partition (logical or not). LVM markers need to be placed on it for LVM to see it as a usable PV.

Before actual volumes can be created, a VG (Volume Group) has to be created. A group is the second lowest structure. Only one VGs can be created on per PV, but a single VG can span multiple PVs, which makes VG a very neat thing.

The final step (before the filesystem) is the LV (Logical Volume). This is the thing that will actual hold the filesystem and data. So when mkfs-ing, it will be done on this. Several LVs can occupy one VG, but unlike VG, an LV can not span VGs (so if you were to me  ...
 
About linux filesystems
edited by on July 28th 2007, at 23:02


Has no journalling, so preferrably only used for CF and USB sticks, or for very small file systems where journalling makes things worse than better.

No indexing, so don't use for many files.

Preferred choice for external storage, because virtually all systems can read ext2/ext3 (including Windows with proper software).

Has journalling. Is perfect for all-round (server) systems, in particular root file systems and such. If there are many small files, and many files in one directory, this one is not the preferred choice because there's no specific indexing method (or none that I know of).

Has full resize support, so can be used for LVMs.

Is robust: has proven its worth.

Disaster recove  ...
 
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