Crossed Wires

Vic’s Blog

Archive for category Soapbox

SLES, you make it so hard to like you

Mar 15

Posted by Vic in Linux, Soapbox | No Comments

Just wended my way through another SLES 10 install on s390x. It’s b0rked though, and I’ll probably have to redo it. I had some kind of I/O error during the install which seems to have resulted in a couple of the filesystems being remounted read-only. Not too much trouble you’d think…

Some things aren’t starting because of missing binaries in /usr, frustrating but probably recoverable. The network startup is totally clagged though, and I can’t even begin to work out how what happened… happened.

During bootup, at the time it tries to configure the network interface, I get streams of error messages about problems running the “ip” command. The error text is full of garbage that the init script is trying to parse as text configuration–it looks like a corrupted filesystem or a binary file.

I manually configured the network (not a trivial task in s390x, it must be said), and started to poke around. I got this when I logged in as root:

Last login: Sat Mar 15 12:48:36 2008
/usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: error while loading shared libraries: libXau.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
-bash: read: read error: 0: Is a directory
lxs0za01:~ #

Okay, so I won’t get funky X-based YaST.  No problem, I’ve spent more time in the ncurses-mode YaST anyway…

lxs0za01:~ # yast
warning: the ncurses frontend is installed but does not work
You need to install yast2-ncurses to use the YaST2 text mode interface
lxs0za01:~ #

WHAT!!! What the @#!$ happened there?!?!?

Okay, so I’ve calmed down about that, so I go looking for the problem with the network initialisation…

lxs0za01:~ # cd /etc/sysconfig/network
lxs0za01:/etc/sysconfig/network # ls -go ifcfg*
-rw-r–r– 1   141 2006-06-17 07:30 ifcfg-lo
lrwxrwxrwx 1    16 2008-03-15 02:23 ifcfg-qeth-bus-ccw-0.0.0f00 -> /lib64/ld-2.4.so
-rw-r–r– 1 27470 2006-06-17 07:30 ifcfg.template
lxs0za01:/etc/sysconfig/network #

Priceless. You can’t make this stuff up. I cannot for the life of me work out how this could possibly have happened. I guess I just blame it on a whacked-out filesystem and move along.

Okay, so both of these issues probably have extenuating circumstances unrelated to SLES or YaST… but it’s nice to have a vent now and then. I’ll write up something a bit fairer once I fix this b0rkedness. :)

Are we letting Microsoft define our industry?

Mar 10

Posted by Vic in Operating Systems, Soapbox | No Comments

I’ve been trying to solve a problem at work for a few weeks now — one of those tricky “it’s only software so it shouldn’t be this hard” sort-of problems for which you know the solution is just a matter of putting the right bits and pieces together. At work, I’m more-or-less forced into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the distro formerly known as RHEL), and one of the pieces I’m looking at is OpenLDAP.

My first stage in the process was to get OpenLDAP set up with the right config — but when I started it, slapd complained about an error in slapd.conf. The overlay I was trying to use, it claimed, was not found. I spent the next couple of hours trying to find additional packages, trying different things, reading doco, searching Google, to no avail. The overlay I want is missing from Red Hat’s build of OpenLDAP.

So “boo hoo”, you say, “just build from source”. Well, remember how I said I was forced into RHEL? The corollary to that is that I am only allowed to use exactly what the Shadowman ships on the DVD. No build-from-source, no other OSS, is allowed.

But what does any of this have to do with Microsoft?

In my research, I found the release notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. In it was the following text (highlighting mine):

OpenLDAP Server and Red Hat Directory Server
Red Hat Directory Server is an LDAP-based server that centralizes enterprise and network data into an OS-independent, network-based registry. It is set to replace OpenLDAP server components, which will be deprecated after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. For more information about Red Hat Directory Server, refer to http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/directory/.

You guessed it: Red Hat Directory Server is a pay-for product. So Red Hat’s setting a direction here: server platforms comprising only the base OS, and additional function provided through extra-cost modules — now where have we seen this before?

Does this now mean that on RHEL-next, in order to run a Samba server with an LDAP IDMAP backend, companies will have to pay for RDS? That won’t fly at my work: “we already have a corporate directory, we’re not paying for another” will the customer sayeth.

“Okay”, you say, “so don’t use Red Hat”. As far as I’m allowed (this is at my employer remember) the only other choice is SLES… from Novell… that organisation that felt the need to cross-licence with Microsoft to “protect” against undisclosed and unproven patent infringement.

(Note that this post is not about Novell-Microsoft, nor is their deal a reason not to use SLES in my opinion. The thought only popped into my head because I was already thinking about Microsoft as a result of the Red Hat thing with RDS.)

So it seems like the two biggest names in corporate Linux are marching to Microsoft’s drum. Have I misread something? Am I overreacting?

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Telstra service

Feb 1

Posted by Vic in Soapbox | No Comments

I have to say that over the last couple of years I have only had good dealings with Telstra. Ironically though, the most recent example is about the only service I have with them, and they want to take it away. You see ISDN is outdated technology that is holding Telstra back from delivering new services, and they want me to replace my ISDN line with shiny new analogue phone lines. So says a letter I received late last year…

I have a service that Telstra calls “ISDN Home Highway”. Its original purpose was to give “broadband” Internet connectivity to places that were unable to get ADSL, but it was still a normal ISDN basic-rate phone service with a special NTU that included a modem (serial and USB attached) for data connectivity. Data calls to Bigpond (Telstra’s ISP division) were subsidised, and local phone calls were cheaper as well (AU$0.175 instead of the “normal” AU$0.25). The best bit though was actually the price: by the time you option up a normal PSTN line from Telstra with caller-id and other stuff you’re looking at something like AU$40 per month — Home Highway was AU$45 per month which includes both B-channels and two DIDs (so basically the equivalent of two phone lines, ISDN standard, for only a fraction more than one analogue line).

Like I said though, Telstra sent a letter last year advising that they were removing the ISDN Home Highway service. There’s this thing called “BigPond Broadband ADSL” that I could use instead of my ISDN service, apparently. It seems that they believe that the only reason people got ISDN Home was for Internet access, and now that ADSL is available in more places that ISDN shouldn’t be necessary any more.

There are a number of flaws in their reasoning, however, not the least of which is the fact that I had ISDN Home because it’s an ISDN voice service! If they had done a bit more homework, they’d know that we already have ADSL — there’s another service coming into the house, an analogue line that is there for the sole purpose of ADSL provision.

My alternatives were looking like replacing the ISDN Home service with an ISDN Business service. From Telstra’s point of view, it’s non-productive, as it defeats the purpose of them trying to get people off this “legacy” ISDN equipment — I just switch to a different type of service, forcing them to keep the ISDN gear. It just doesn’t make sense. Of course I could also switch to VoIP, but without number portability (yet) it’s a pain that I wasn’t looking forward to (not only that but my employer currently has a prohibition on work calls going over VoIP).

So why is this a positive dealing with Telstra? Because I got a phone call from a lass from Telstra this morning to ask me about whether I got the letter and how I felt about it. As I described my displeasure, she made attentive noises at me and took notes (well, she said she was taking notes). She said that they’ve only just started ringing people about it, and that there was a possibility that enough people making comments like mine might force a change.

It’s a positive thing right now because it’s the first time I’ve been given the impression that Telstra gives a stuff about a customer. It can’t be cheap to have people sitting, calling people, and potentially wearing abuse from people who they intend to displace. I never thought I’d say this, especially after the abhorrent BACk campaign (in which they tried to gain public support to fight against Optus in their bid to change a broadband access environment thet Telstra themselves created), but kudos to Telstra for at least asking the little guy what he thinks.

Let’s see if it ends positively though. :)

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Internet-grade

Jan 31

Posted by Vic in Soapbox | No Comments

It’s probably been coined already, and I’m sure it’s not a new realisation. Something happened at my employer recently that’s made me wonder whether the old benchmark of “enterprise-grade” is really relevant any more.

Our internal IM system was closed down for a while this week, and when it was restarted a number of us could not reconnect. It turns out that the IM servers had been set up to lock this particular client out. Nothing unusual about that really, as it has happened in the past with unsupported clients that stress the servers in unexpected ways.

What was different this time is that the client in question is part of a new “integrated communications” offering — a version of our e-mail client that has the IM client built-in. This product, which will be sent to-market quite soon (and therefore we will be expecting our customers to buy), has been locked out of our IM infrastructure. The further irony is that the part of the business that markets this software runs a “use what we make” initiative to get people to use development versions of their software in their day-to-day work.

The IM system in question is marketed as enterprise-grade — and in general it lives up to that, having to support a couple of hundred-thousand users at peak. What got me thinking though is that systems like MSN Messenger (or whatever it’s called now) and Yahoo! IM and AOL IM must be supporting millions of connections at a time with nary a blink.

So (if it wasn’t already) I’m knocking “enterprise-grade” off the top-spot of reliability rankings. Nowadays, the top spot surely goes to “Internet-grade”. I mean, just imagine the amount of traffic that must pour through Google Talk and Skype — these are systems that not only do text chat but voice and video as well — while our IM is still struggling with smilies and changing fonts. The trouble, in the case of my employer, is that the name of this IM service is synonymous with the concept of IM there. It doesn’t matter that even an open system like Jabber could scale better.

In my opinion, our software people need to take a look at what Google has done in taking XMPP/Jabber and creating Google Talk. Either that or the company needs to do what another prominent software company did and actually use one of the public IM systems (I cant remember which one they use, either YIM or AIM) as the corporate IM platform.

I feel for the developers of the new client, who I’m sure would love to have a stable environment to do a large-scale test on. Oh well.

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I did it again: damn you ATI!

Nov 25

Posted by Vic in Hardware, Soapbox | No Comments

In this post only about six months ago I berated myself for buying an ATI-chipset graphics card for use in a Linux system.  I titled that post “Why I probably will never buy ATI again…”, as if I knew that I’d make the same mistake again.  Sure enough…

I had problems with my MythTV frontend playing particular recordings; I eventually worked out that it was HD recordings it couldn’t manage (this helped me discover the switch to HD of a previously SD stream coming out of Ten).  I figured that a swap of hardware under the frontend would be nice, to get a better CPU platform and better output capability under it.  I went shopping at my local friendly poota-shop’s website, and came up with a couple of contenders.

Looking at their site (and at the ASUS site), most of the integrated-video boards I saw seemed to be using nVidia chips.  Confident I was going to be making a sound decision, I set off to the store and ended up leaving with an Asus M2A-VM HDMI under my arm.  The clincher was my need for a real S/PDIF output, which the M2A-VM board has on the little riser-card it uses to provide HDMI, S-Video and Component video out.

Some of you will already have seen my error.  :)

The nVidia board with HDMI I had seen on the ASUS site was the M2N-VM HDMI.  The M2A-VM HDMI is obviously an ATI chipset board.  In my quest for S/PDIF, to save myself a few bucks for a header adapter, I again shot myself in the foot with the ATI bullet.

Sure enough, I had huge problems getting the thing to work.  Frame rates in MythTV, no matter what I did, were abysmal.  I tried installing Mythbuntu again to see if later drivers would help (compared to those on the existing Knoppmyth R5F1 build I am running), to no avail[1].

I was considering lumping it, and sitting on it until things catch up and I can make it work, but I think I’ll just go back to the store and try and switch it for either the M2N-VM DVI (no S/PDIF) or M2N-VM DH (this has onboard S/PDIF but also costs an extra AU$40 thanks to all the WiFi and other guff it comes with).  Unfortunately the store doesn’t have the M2N-VM HDMI, which would let me keep the future capability for  a HDMI-capable display, but by the time I look at needing HDMI I’m likely to be needing to replace the thing again anyway.

To add insult to injury, when I put the old MythTV frontend box back I used a low profile case which meant I had to leave out the old nVidia FX5200 it was running off and go with the onboard Via graphics.  I had heard that some of the Via chips had MPEG2 smarts, and it seems to be true: this old box with what I thought was the crappy cheapo onboard graphics chip now seems to have no trouble with HD output to VGA.

Sigh.

[1] Apparently some victimsowners of the M2A-VM HDMI have had success downloading the very latest drivers directly from ATI rather than sticking with those provided by their distro.  If I get time to give that a run I’ll report.

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The “Technology With The Worst Name Ever” Award

Jul 8

Posted by Vic in Linux, Soapbox | No Comments

…and the winner is: KVM!  Why?  Because as you read this, some of you will be thinking I’m talking about a keyboard-video-mouse switch, while some of you will be thinking I’m talking about Linux kernel-based virtualisation (still others are probably thinking of something else… what I don’t know, but I reckon I can be sure that the letters KVM have not been put together only twice in human history).

For the record, I’m talking about Linux kernel-based virtualisation.  It wins my award for the Technology With The Worst Name Ever because if, like me, you go looking on your favourite search engine for issues with Linux kernel-based virtualisation, all you find is issues about keyboard-video-mouse switches.  This is because for the last fifteen years (at least), in the computer industry KVM has stood for keyboard-video-mouse (switch).

This is not your common-or-garden-variety case of acronym overloading, either, because many folk (myself included) still use a KVM.  Usually acronym overloading occurs when the acronym being overloaded has fallen from use and a new technology takes its place, or when an acronym is used to reference a little-known technology and a new usage of the acronym is unaware of the previous usage[1].

Here, KVM was already in heavy use, and I’m sure that none of the Linux kernel hackers could claim to being unaware of the term.  Yet they used it anyway.  And nothing in /usr/src/linux/Documentation explains why.

I’m sure there’ll be something out there about why they chose the name…  but in the meantime I’m left to find other reasons why KVM doesn’t seem to work on my system.  Which KVM do I mean?  Ah, that’s for me to know…  ;)

[1] RTP is an excellent example of this — it was already in use as Rapid Transit Protocol (a part of the APPN-HPR suite), but the VoIP folk never heard of APPN and used RTP for their Realtime Transfer Protocol.

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Rebooting my belief system

Mar 7

Posted by Vic in Linux, Operating Systems, Soapbox | No Comments

I’ve been away from SHARE for far too long.  It’s really great to hear positive things about Linux on zSeries again, rather than the crap I have to put up with at home.

In Australia, there is no evangelism of zSeries.  There’s an attitude bordering on arrogance that seems to say “we’re not going to explain zSeries to you; if you don’t know you want it already then you’re not worth it”.  At least that’s what it looks like to me.

I’m surrounded by people who think that all problems can be solved by installing an xSeries or pSeries machine.  Maybe some can be, but IMHO they’ll be replacing one set of problems with another (possibly greater) set.

Anyway, it’s nice to hear different stories — like a company whose IT costs went from 1.7% to 0.9% of sales by migrating their ENTIRE server farm (including about a dozen p690s) to a z990 running Linux.  Like a company that has placed 250 Linux server guests onto z/VM inside a year, freezing acquisition of new discrete servers.

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