Been messing with the Zipit Z2. The ubuntu release by http://www.mozzwald.com/node/50. With some opitmization you can get a really useable thingy.

Started porting gentoo to the zipit. I have it booting now, just have to finish the touches on crosscompiler, then compile the packages I want. The first thing I've noticed is gentoo is only using about 13 megs of ram after boot though it takes twice as long to boot as ubuntu. Ubuntu was using about 25 megs at boot so its a significant difference. More to come on this, will probably be working on getting suspend, hybernate, xorg, sound, etc, in the next week. But it is booting which is promising.

If you want to try it, you can loosely follow http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-arm.xml. Your need linux running on a machine connected to the net to set it up and your want to use armv5tel. Recommend using uboot.

Sites been up for over two years it seems. searched for my site on the web archives and found an entry for 2008. Enjoy

http://web.archive.org/web/20080228172650/http://ronaldprettyman.com/

After several different iterations finally settled on Ubuntu Server. Tried FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, CentOS, but just didn't find all the features I wanted. The bsd's had the easiest setup as far as routing/firewall/nat(network address translation) but I ran into problems with the NAT(network attached storage) the UPnP, the printer drivers and the LDAP. I wanted to consolidate all my servers into one small and energy efficent machine for under 100 bucks. I ended up going with an  Intel Atom 230, dual core with hyper threading for 4 threads. 1 gig of memory. Ubuntu Server 9.10 (will switch to 10.04 when it comes out next month, has a longer support path and will inevitably be more stable), 750g of storage, and dual intel gigabit nics. It does a great job. I was surprised to see a noticable performance boost moving from sparcs, then again when moving from bsd to linux.

The Machine is able to juggle all the task I have it running (won't list them all here today maybe later) but it does great.

The only thing is I have a bridge and it takes a couple second to come up which cause some network services to fail, I had to delay their start by 60 seconds and that took care of the issue.

Been working on a new server still working some stuff. But I'll post more details when its appropriate.

Been using windows at the new job. I know I know, I sold my soul. But honestly I like the change of pace and to Windows credit it is doing a damn fine job of trying to act more like unix. Now if they could just disable the gui completely (not like the guiless install crap you get with server 2008) but a true headless server, take away the resource hogging graphics and their just as annoying inputs, stick to whats required. A network input, a console out and possibly a keyboard and very basic video out. The keyboard and video out being very, VERY optional. They should be reserved for the WORKSTATION server crowd. I'd rather have a console switch then a damn kvm. One more layer of hardware, one more layer of failure, one more thing to have to consider when diagnosing problems. 

Save the gui controls for the workstations where they belong, if I really need a gui, i'll install a tool to graphically manage the server through a web interface or a remote application client. But enough about my opinions on operating systems and why the complexity of modern operating systems such as osx and windows has no place in a serious business enviroment.

I promised to share this little trinket so I will.

windows key+r

cmd

before you know it, cisco switch's will come with VGA and usb ports

Its going to be one year this week since I started this site, and one year as of Next Monday since I started this blog. I can't say, well you can see for yourself that I haven't put a whole hell of a lot of entries in here. But one thing I need to get working on is organizing my paper work.

Had to find a document for a job and spend a good hour looking through misc folders on shelves. I found countless crap I should of thrown away years ago. I even found a receipt for a 20oz Pepsi dated 2007. Not even sure how that got in the keep pile. Sad thing is I have that receipt but don't have the xbox receipt from the same year. Good thing I don't actually need either one.

But not much to say. Got a new job today suppose to start Monday. Its a Windows job, but I've been meaning to brush up and become more efficient at it any ways. Need to read up on exchange server and active directory and the windows cli. I'm not actually sure how much exchange server I'll be dealing with as their doesn't seem to be much need for it in small business, but I've seen stranger things. Did some testing for the position and was surprised at how much I retained. They even threw some 98 at me, your have to note I did have an advatage at that, if you go back 6 months your see an entry about playing with networking Windows 98 against Solaris so I had a slight edge on that one.

In order to use hplip (hp printers) your need Cups Hplip etc etc just add your repository and run

pkg_add cups hplip

your need to follow all the instructions for editing rc.local and your also need to add

chown _cups /dev/{usb,ugen}*

Next your need to setup ugen by disabling ulpt in the kernel

# sudo config -e -o ~/bsd.new /bsd
OpenBSD 4.5 (GENERIC) : Sat Feb 28 14:51:18 MST 2009

Enter 'help' for information                                      
ukc> disable ulpt                                                 
381 ulpt* disabled                                                
ukc> quit   

# sudo cp /bsd /bsd.old

# sudo cp ~/bsd.new /bsd

# sudo reboot

Open up cups, go to administrator and you should see your printer staring you in the face waiting to be installed.

After the last post I decided that the work around wasn't worth it and tried running FreeBSD.

Well I went to start compiling and a dependency for apache, dhcp, php was broken, I did some searching and apparently its been broken since may for sparc.  So I kinda just said fuck it with freebsd.(should of written it down)

I started to install linux, but I needed a proprietary driver for the disk controller (fiber-channel) I got it up and running but the drives won't format, showed up fine but when I went to partition them they go from 76GB to 12gb and crash.

So I ended up install openbsd.

Its working fine so far, have to compile a good bit of the software I need (less then required for freebsd). Only come across a couple things that won't compile from the ports. But I am running it on a sparc and can't imagine their too much of a following, (though openbsd seems to have the best support next to netbsd outside of solaris, but solaris is sloopy, convoluted and huge. netbsd and openbsd are a little more transparent).

DHCP Server with DHCP Client NAT on Solaris 10

So you have at least two interfaces and their setup for dhcp client (the modem or wan) and dhcp server static ip (internal network).
So for this example I'll use the following
eri0 dhcp client wan
eri1 dhcp server lan

now the eri0 requires dhcp
so were need
/etc/dhcp.eri0
/etc/hostname.eri0
leave them empty

next set your system hostname in
/etc/nodename
now for some reason solaris 10 want to make the dhcp client the
primary NIC and set the system name to the primary hostname
so nodename will be assigned to your hostname
hostname.example.com

now set the hostname for the static eri1

/etc/hostname.eri1
for this example it will be
hostname.example.com

so now we setup the /etc/inet/hosts (ipnodes /etc/hosts)

192.168.1.1 eri1
(replace with your ip)

setup your netmask
/etc/inet/netmasks

192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0

replace with your network and netmask

edit your host file for your ipaddresss

192.168.1.1 hostname.example.com

Now to keep it from editing the /etc/inet/host file every time it boots
destroying your settings (and the fact that you probably don't want a hostname
associated with your external connection) edit the following line
vi /lib/svc/method/net-svc
filename=host
and change it to
filename=host.bad

now your good to go.
Your system will have the right hostname and all your other services should work
as well. This probably isn't the best way but I spend several days trying to by pass this
one little line and ended up just changing it
you can write a script to check it easyier then you can write one to by pass it
just check it, fix it if it gets changed, best to run this check in rc1.d as to make sure its fixed
before its run.

Good luck
#!/usr/bin/bash
#Not tested good luck
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
VAR1=`grep "filename=host" /lib/svc/method/net-svc`
if [ $VAR1 == "filename=host" ]
cp /lib/svc/method/net-svc /lib/svc/method/net-svc.back
cp /lib/svc/method/net-svc /temp/net-svc
cat /temp/net-svc|sed s/"filename=host"/"filename=host.bad"/ > /lib/svc/method/net-svc
fi

I couldn't find them else where so I took some of my own. I've seen several pictures in books, but those were just sketches. I also couldn't find any pictures on the Interweb of absolute crap. I mean google images. So I've taken the liberty of adding some my self. In the past my entries have found their way on to google images and helped people to find pictures of things they couldn't find else where.

ST373307FCV	ST336607FC

Ok I'm trying to install UT2004. So I just created a new 50g disk and mounted it at c:\games. Now when I run installation I point it to install in C:\Games and it starts complaining about a lack of disk space. God damn, whats up with Microsoft not sending out the memo about mount points to the guys at Epic. Edios got it. WTF

Same frame rate, same source, same audio rate. different bit rate.
One is 1500megs one is 700megs
Can you tell the difference?

Answers in the comments

I keep getting sucked into KDE 4. It just doesn't seem to want to run stable on any of my hardware. I'm sure some people out their having it running great. But I haven't had much luck. I haven't tried to or even looked up how to optimize it cause I usually don't care that much about the gui. I just find it interesting that distributions are incorporating it so early.  But as a gui interface, an alternative gui interface and considering how hard Nokia is trying to push the latest QT I can understand the logic.

But imagine if Samba 4 was released today, because they wanted to adopt it. That would quickly become very frustrating. I have been eagerly waiting for a production ready release for quiete awhile. Just for the oppurtunity to even considering eliminating all those active directory servers or at least cutting them down. I honestly believe Samba 4 could be whats needed to finally bring Linux onto the mainstream desktop. I can't say its entirely a good thing. But I could see it happening and its exciting considering how long I've spent convencing friends and family to switch. Or at least considering their opions. At least it give microsoft a run for their money. But if Samba 4 took off and began mass adoption and migration. The implication would be massive. Once the server end was moved to linux in the domain controller sector, it wouldn't be longer before organization considered moving their workstations too.

Now when you think about it, this could be what Oracle has in mind. Sun's offerings make up a good chunk of the average linux distribution. If Oracle controlled them and linux took off on the desktop, Oracle would be in a very similar situation to where Microsoft is today. And knowing what I know about their history I think their is a very good chance, they may be planning to try and bring linux into the main stream and have their name on it. Hopefully better then Corels Walmart attempt.

Ok so you have a zfs volume in Opensolaris and you want it in Linux. So theirs no easy way to say this, but its not as easy as zfs import -a

You have to convert it to a lower version and theirs no easy way to do that.

Here is how I did it. I just don't like how slow OpenSolaris is on x86 hardware so I'm moving my fileserver back to linux but I still want ZFS. I did some test in linux and it works great, better then it does in BSD which is surprising.

The best way to do this, is to export to the volume created in linux then export it to file from linux then import it into the newly created verision in linux.

The linux version doesn't do well with internal send/receive. External send to internal receive. Or sending or receving to or from files <> seems to work well but its doesn't want to duplicate pool to pool locally. I tested it with small and large pools and the two step process seems to work best. I don't see this being fixed in the future as their doesn't seem to be development at the moment.

I believe their is a good chance that oracle might pick up zfs and make it more compatible with Linux, either by relicensing it or something along thoses lines. They seem to have a vested interested in linux and adding ZFS support to their Redhat clone might help to give them an advantage. If I was oracle I would definately be looking at ZFS closely as well as other solaris feature. Some features of solaris would be nice to have in Linux. Such as zfs, dtrace, svc(SMF). I personally belive that the linux kernel is a supperior kernel in function, but wish it had a more open licensing like bsd. Their is a great deal more compatible with bsd at least from a legal standpoint.

I'll update this tomorrow, with step by step instructions. With possible alternatives that should work according to ZFS specifications, but just didn't in my setup, probably due mostly to the stablility of the still fairly young linux port of ZFS. Also note that in my experience thus far I have not had any luck running iostat while their is any activity on a zfs partition. I am curious to see if these compatibilites transfer to FreeBSD and I have a pretty good feeling they will as I belive this the version are the same and FreeBSD might even be a later version in the current build (13 I believe). Freebsd seems to have a higher likely hood of stability and has more development going on with ZFS probably due to the fack that it is being incorporated into the kernel and Solaris and BSD have more in common then Linux and Solaris.

EDIT: ZFS is still not usable on Linux. Hopefully this will change in the future. Maybe a change of licenses...