Rebuilding my VirtualBox Server

My Tyan Tiger K8WE expired a little while ago so my home server environment was being hosted on an MSI K8N Master2 - which is OK but it doesn't support 2GB DIMMS very well so I was running with 6GB RAM rather than 12.

Tigers are a bit thin on the ground on UK eBay but I did score an Asus K8N-DL that allows me to use my 2GB DIMMS again. So I go to install OpenSUSE 11.4 and VirtualBox 4.1 which proves to be a slightly interesting experience. When running hosted virtaul machine environments I like window managers like compiz or the KDE wm which give have a desktop grid view. Then I can have one VM per desktop and zoom out to get a view of the whole VM constellation. Here are my findings:

• The K8N-DL boots into OpenSUSE without any problem from a cold, power-on state. However, warm boots and even cold boots without power cycling lock up hard during kernel startup. This is with BIOS 1010 which is the latest.
• If you only have one CPU present then the booting problem disappears.
• While swapping out CPU's, I tried mixing single and dual-core E-stepping Opterons. This works completely fine (provide you cold boot) if CPU 0 is the dual-core. Linux seems happy and the NUMA tables look sensible. There is even a certain logic since the board only has 2 DIMM slots for the second CPU.
• I use Conky as a system monitor and had problems with it stopping updates after a while. I discovered that if, I have apcupsd monitoring entries and the daemon isn't running because I haven't plugged the UPS serial cable in, then it works for a bit displaying "N/A" but then seizes up after a while. Commenting out the entries fixed this.
• Linux orders the drives on the NV sata controller in the opposite order to the BIOS just to mess with your mind while configuring things. OpenSUSE's installer gets GRUB and the MBR in the right places though.

DSL to SliTaz

Having got my Omnibook firewall up and running rather sweetly it was time to return to my Omnibook NAS project...

Returning to my DSL install on another OB800, I fired up Samba for a few tests and discovered that the venerable code that is DSL has a 2GB file limit. Since I store a collection of Linux install DVD images this is rather a limitation. As DSL seems to have stalled I went looking for a successor and found one of its offspring, SliTaz.

I started up DSL and pulled down the SliTaz ISO file. With great presence of mind I had configured DSL with root and swap partitions the same size (at 512MB). This gave me somewhere to put SliTaz without blowing away DSL. I could thus shut down the swap partition, replacing it with a swapfile, and then mark it as Linux and format with ext2.

There is a manual install for SliTaz here. One problem...there is no lzma or xz for DSL so I can't unpack the root filesystem (which has a .gz extension but won't, of course, unpack with gzip). No matter, I ftp'ed the file to another machine, uncompressed the rootfs cpio archive and then pulled it back. Finally, I mount the DSL partition and add Slitaz to the Grub menu there since DSL installed Grub already.

Reboot...and Grub hangs trying to load the SliTaz kernel. Hmmmm. Grub 0.91 from DSL is rather ancient and does have a few known problems - maybe I need a newer one. The obvious thing to do is to boot SliTaz from floppies and then use the SliTaz version of Grub. Kernel loads fine from floppies and starts to boot and then panics.That might be a duff floppy image so try a new set but get the same results. Might be lack of RAM, try the low ram images but get the same results.

Ok, scratch SliTaz for this project. Pity.

IPCop Tweaking

Doing a few throughput tests on IPCop on the OB800 I noticed it was working very hard. A bit of poking around revealed that tweaking could the hard drive settings made a lot of difference. Switching on 32-bit access and unmasking interrupts during operation improved network throughput and dropped CPU load at the same time. I guess logging onto CF was taking long enough to affect the network.

Anyway, the net result is to add the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

/sbin/hdparm -u1 -c1 /dev/hda

This also works for DSL, though the file to modify is /opt/bootlocal.sh

IPCop on the Omnibook 800CT

I had planned to convert a couple of my Omnibook 800's into a firewall and a NAS respectively since they are low power and built like brick-privys.  Herewith are my firewall experiences...

I've been using IPCop for a while although activity and progress towards V2.0 has kind of dropped off, it still works for me though the loss of Snort support is a little annoying.  It is the rear facing side of a dual-bastion configuration so the forward 'wall takes most of the crud.

In any case, something a little more elderly might help since it only has 32MB RAM and a P133 to run on.

First off, unlike Damn Small Linux the IPCop boot floppy can't see my PCMCIA CDROM drive so it's back to my Omnibook CDROM drive. Unfortunately I don't have a power cable so I have to feed it AA batteries which it consumes at a prodigious rate - hooray for rechargeables.

I have scored a couple of Xircom 10/100 Ethernet/56K modem PCMCIA (not Cardbus) cards off eBay which seem to supported by IPCop so we are good to go. In order to fit both cards in, I need dongled ethernet cards rather than the fat cards that seem prevalent today. 

Boot from floppy (get an image from the IPCop CD) proceeds until it tries to load the additional drivers from floppy. It appears that the IPCop 1.4.20 CD has a corrupt drivers floppy image so I backtrack to 1.4.10 for no particular reason.

Boot from floppy and loading the drivers floppy then works...until it discovers the 128MB CF (in a CF/2.5-inch hdd adapter) for /dev/harddisk1 which is apparently too small. A quick raid on my digital camera scores a Kingston 1GB CF which solves the problem. Other than that the install goes smoothly.

...Until I bring IPCop up - when I discover that the GREEN network is fine but the RED does not function. The dongle lights up to indicate a 100MB connection and flashes to show traffic but I can't ping the front firewall or, indeed, reach it in any way. Hmmm.

After a bit of digging around gets me to /proc/interrupts which indicates that the RED PCMCIA card is sharing an interrupt , IRQ 9, with something else whereas the GREEN is not. It all comes back now, back in the days before ACPI and all that fancy stuff when we had to worry about IRQ's.

A reboot and F2 press later, I have disabled the serial port on the Omnibook thereby freeing up IRQ 4. This now needs to be pressed into service for the RED Xircom instead of IRQ 9. A quick visit to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts allows me to disable IRQ 9 and enable IRQ 4 for PCMCIA and a further reboot later (this is getting like a Windows install!) all is well and I have an operational firewall. A flurry of patches later, I now have a reasonably up-to-date firewall.

One other thing, I note that the screen blanker on IPCop does not power down the backlight. Fortunately, pressing the on/off button on the Omnibook with the power plugged in powers down the screen, keyboard and mouse but leaves everything else running...perfect!

Toshiba NB100 upgrade from OpenSuSE 11.2 to 11.4

Ok, I have a bit of spare time in between DMSTech and LibDevConX^2 so I decided to upgrade my NB100 to OpenSuSE 11.4 using the downloaded iso image on my Zalman ZM-VE200. Having copied the important data onto the Zalman, I select the OpenSuSE image and reboot.

The laptop boots from the image perfectly, possibly slight faster than from actual DVD drive and I select the Update option when it is presented. The I go with defaults except that I don't let it delete all my added package repositories like Packman and VideoLAN since it's easier to go in afterwards and simply change 11.2 in the path to 11.4 instead of adding them anew. There is one dependency issue which I resolve by not installing the offending item and then it's time to go and get a coffee while installation proceeds.

And that's pretty much it - the install went through without a hitch and it seems pretty much all my settings etc. have transferred correctly.

Omnibook 300 revisited

After a little while gathering dust, I managed to score a 1.1 BIOS card for the Omnibook 300 off eBay. This means that the beast can finally use Compact Flash cards, and provides great resting place for some of the pile of CF cards under 1G that I have accumulated. The machine actually pre-dated the PCMCIA ATA specification so, on release, it could only use linear flash cards or one specific WD drive with a somewhat home-grown ATA-over-PCMCIA spec.

If you insert a blank (FAT, not FAT 32) formatted CF and boot up, the ROM DOS will ask you if you want to format it. This puts Doublespace on the drive which just takes up processing power and RAM. This made sense when all you could get was a 10MB flash card or a little 40MB WD hard drive but not with 256MB of CF goodness. So, politely decline and all the necessary boot-up files will be copied to the uncompressed drive.

I have been experimenting with alternative shells to Win 3.1 Program Manager since it's a bit painful. Back in the day I was fond of the IBM Workplace Shell for Windows which gave Win 3.1 an OS2 like look-and-feel with things like right-click context menus. However, it doesn't perform very well on the Omnibook and the OS/2 grey dialogues don't render very nicely on the unlit mono display. The next thing to try was Calmira II which attempts to replicate the Win95 shell and performs rather better.

I also rediscovered and joined the Omnibook mailing list - targetted at the classic OB's it hasn't got a lot of traffic now but  if you post it lights up with activity as OB fans come out of the woodwork. The archives are a mine of information.

 

Zalman ZM-VE200

Just got hold of a Zalman ZM-VE200 hard drive USB enclsoure which is pretty standard except for one thing - it can emulate an optical drive. As someone who  builds and upgrades systems on a regular basis at work and home this is phenomenally useful.

I ordered the drive from LinItx in the UK - it comes in black or silver, along with a Samsung M7 320GB laptop drive (since the enclosure takes 2.5-inch drives). The drive is nicely packaged and even includes a tiny screwdriver to fit the drive. Unfortunately, the device comes with practically no documentation so herewith are my discoveries.

• The drive can be partitioned but the first partition must be NTFS for optical emulation to work (you can use FAT32 but then you are limited to 4GB files which means you can't do many DVD images). I tried ext2 but it didn't work.
• The NTFS partition should have a folder called _iso - case is important. This is where you put the .iso images of the disks you want emulated.
• Image files must be unfragmented, so best to copy one-at-time or defrag after loading up. This is not documented but if you select a fragemented image the message DEFRAG appears on the LCD.
• Image filenames should only have a single dot in them - otherwise they are not recognised, since filenames are parsed to the first dot to determine extension. As I know Windows sometimes have this stupidity I can't compain,   
• You use the jog-wheel on the side to scroll through the images (which are displayed on a small LCD on the drive) and press it to select which one you want to mount. Subfolders are supported, selecting one opens it. There is a ".." entry to go up again.
• There is only a single USB connector on the drive cable - this means that some USB ports have trouble powering up the drive (the display flashes or you experience read-errors during optical drive emulation). However, I've not had a problem with laptop ports or ones on motherboard backplates.
• The drive is write-protectable, useful for using it for virus removal.
• Optical drive emulation works perfectly - it can be booted from to install machines from CD or DVD images. Allegedly, it can even emulate Blueray BD-ROM drives but I don't have such an image to hand.

All-in-all a very useful device and it means I can dispense with optical drives in my servers and (mostly) my laptops. It's smaller then the smallest slimline external optical drive too.