Cyconet Blog » Uncategorized

Alone at home

cyco — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 11:30:33 +0000

Sometime it happens, that there are school holidays. As my lovely girl used to be a teacher, she has some time off at that period. So she left me with our kids yesterday to visit the grandparents.
It was two hours after leaving, when I was really surprized that I was sitting around and thinking about what to do next, as normaly the weekend are family time.
So I decided to take my bike and a paper map to get of for a trip. Since some years, I usually use my bike to escort the girls or when going to work, which is just a 5 minutes ride, so I thought that would be a great opportunitiy.
I took a backpack with raining clothes, mounted the bike helmet on it, in case I needed to go cross country, some water and my music player.
It was a great ride, beside that I realized I’m not in the same condition as some years ago. Unfortunately this will likely not change in the next 12 mounth, as we have some projects in the queue we need to deal with. Hopefully we will solve that satisfactorily and have a bit more spare time afterwards.

Anyways .. 27,65km in 1h40 is not so bad, as it was hot and humid.
Ride summary:

Virtualisation on HP ProLiant hardware with squeeze

cyco — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:57:10 +0000

In case you are using HP ProLiant G6-series or G7-series with Intel-based hardware and you are thinking about virtualistion (e.g. booting the hypervisor), you should have a look into this customer advisory. To make it short, the following should work:

# grep GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN=”pci=use_crs”
# update-grub

It took me two workdays to discover this solution for a DL180G6. Anyways … I’m still having trouble on a DL160G6 when booting the hypervisor, suggestions are welcome.

package updates

cyco — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:12:42 +0000

After Debian Squeeze was released last weekend, development will speed up again.
Today I uploaded a new postfwd package which ships also the postfwd2 script, a prefork server version.
I also started to orphan packages I’m not using anymore or having dead upstream. The first candidate was policyd-weight, fortunately Chris Butler took the package over.
I’m happy to be the first uploader into squeeze-backports with …. icinga.

linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 and xen/xen-common from squeeze broken?

cyco — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:03:50 +0000

I’m experiencing since some time (out of the blue) spontaneous reboots of some of my dom0s on lenny/i386 (others don’t have this effect). As result of this, I started rolling out linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 from bpo and backported xen and xen-common from testing:

# dpkg -l | grep xen | grep bpo
ii libxenstore3.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs, Xen dom0 suppor
ii xen-hypervisor-4.0-i386 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 The Xen Hypervisor on i386
ii xen-linux-system-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Xen system with Linux 2.6.32 on modern PCs (
ii xen-tools 4.1-1~bpo50+1 Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii xen-utils-4.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools
ii xen-utils-common 4.0.0-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools – common files
ii xenstore-utils 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore utilities for Xen

This fixed the problem of spontaneous reboots for all of the systems I have migrated …. until now! Last week I tried this solution on my private system and it failed in some way.

A full dump of the syslog is also available. It looks like /etc/rcS.d/S03udev is hanging in some way .. the syslog for this looks like:

Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.728120] Code: 04 00 00 00 00 83 3c 24 10 74 32 77 0c 83 3c 24 08 0f 85 9f 00 00 00 eb 12 83 3c 24 20 74 30 83 3c 24 40 0f 85 8d 00 00 00 eb 35 <0f> b6 01 8b 54 24 20 89 02 c7 42 04 00 00 00 00 eb 79 0f b7 01
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731554] EIP: [] acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler+0×189/0×221 SS:ESP 0069:ec135d74
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731791] CR2: 00000000eda86000
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731881] —[ end trace 7b8af581772a1c55 ]—
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.116622] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.427607] Error: Driver ‘pcspkr’ is already registered, aborting…
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 232.381814] Adding 10000452k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:10000452k

The dom0 is there hanging in some way … I don’t have an exact way to get the system proceed from there … usually I need to wait some seconds and pressing ^C after a while will get the box up.
Anyways … I remember there are some problems with udev >= 150 and older kernels, which is also documented in the squeeze release notes. Maybe there is also a problem with older udev and newer kernels? But why is this combination working on other systems? Booting linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-686 works without any issue anyways, so it seems xen related. Any idea is appreciated!
UPDATE: I’ve also reported this via #602109.

new nagios-plugins (1.4.14-1), now also installable on kfreebsd and hurd

cyco — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:03:06 +0000

Last night here at BSP I released nagios-plugins (1.4.14-1), which has a couple of fixes and enhancements. For more information, see the changelog.
The main change may, that with this version, the package should be installable on non-linux archs, where iputils-ping is not available. The downside of using inetutils-ping is, that its behavior is different from iputils-ping. As result of this, check_ping will timeout much often, even if there isn’t any problem and you will have false positives. As suggested long ago, at least on this archs, you should consider to replace the use of check_ping with check_icmp.

Just after election … welcome in reality!

cyco — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:47:33 +0000

OpenWRT WDS works like charm

cyco — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:20:18 +0000

A try with OpenWRT 8.09 in April to setup a WDS with additional AP functionality and encryption, like described in the documentation, failed. So I keeped with my halfbroken solution running on DD-WRT, which is going a bit too commercial these days in my eyes.
Now I have found time to try OpenWRT again for this purpose, since the issue was fixed really fast. I just did setup a stock 8.09.1 installation and then dropped the following into /etc/config/wireless:

config ‘wifi-device’ ‘wl0′
      option ‘type’ ‘broadcom’
      option ‘channel’ ’5′
      option ‘disabled’ ’0′
config wifi-iface
      option device “wl0″
      option network lan
      option mode ap
      option ssid “OpenWrt”
      option encryption psk2
      option key “keyforclients”
config wifi-iface
      option device “wl0″
      option network lan
      option mode wds
      option bssid 00:16:B6:19:63:C8
      option ssid “OpenWrtWDS”
      option encryption psk2
      option key “pskforWDS”

And guess what? It worked like a charm! So I could replace the odd DD-WRT boxes. Anyways ... does anybody have an idea where to find the sourcecode of anything > v23 SP1?

[selfnote] Cloning/Backing up NTFS systems

cyco — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:27:34 +0000

For some reasons, you may need to clone/backup NTFS based systems. Lets say your NTFS system is located at /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 is a spare partition where you can store your image.

At first you need to boot a live system to take an image:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr
ntfsclone -s -o – /dev/sda1 | bzip2 -9 -c > \
/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2

To restore the image you just need:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd count=1 bs=446 if=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr of=/dev/sda
cat /mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2 | bunzip2 -c | \
ntfsclone -r -O /dev/sda1 -

P.S. If you are elective in germany, have a look at this!

Act now … go vote!

cyco — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:58:41 +0000

Du bist Terrorist

cyco — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:49:52 +0000

Du bist Terrorist from alexanderlehmann on Vimeo.