Jimmy's weblog

Using IBM Bootable Media Creator on Debian

jimmy — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:03:25 +0000

IBM provides a tool called “Bootable Media Creator” (bomc) which creates bootable media - like an usb key - that allows you to easily install all firmware updates even if there is no OS installed on the server. You just select your server model, e.g. x3650, and the tool downloads all available updates. This saves a lot of time.
Formerly I used bomc on a SLES server but now I wanted to try if it would work on my Debian notebook, since the tool is available as a single binary and not as a rpm package as usual.
It started up and seemed to work but unfortunately after downloading some packages it stopped with an error. Long story short: I just copied the SuSE-release file to my /etc on my Debian notebook and all errors were gone
My /etc/SuSE-release looks like this:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (i586)
VERSION = 10

Bomc can be downloaded at the IBM site

Dirty dirvish hack to use “localhost” as client option

jimmy — Sun, 16 May 2010 09:03:46 +0000

When using dirvish you usually have to use the local hostname for the client option in default.conf. In other words, the output of the command “hostname”. If it’s different than the client option than dirvish assumes that it’s a remote transfer and uses ssh to connect. So you can not use “localhost” which would be rather straightforward ;-(
Lately I needed dirvish on a sytem with heartbeat where two systems share one configuration but have different hostnames. Because I was so angry about this IMO stupid check with “hostname” I made a dirty hack…
Line 258 in /usr/sbin/dirvish looks like this:

chomp($$Options{Server} = `hostname`);

I changed it to:

chomp($$Options{Server} = localhost);

This way dirvish assumes localhost as local tranfer and everything else as remote. The check itself can be found in line 520.
Remember, this hack is really evil. There are several better ways to solve the problem.

Linuxtage 2010

jimmy — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:18:55 +0000

Only one day left. I’ll be there at the grml-booth, which is a must see, again. See you there

Linuxtage Graz 2009

jimmy — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:05:47 +0000

See you there

OpenOffice and Freefonts

jimmy — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:55:40 +0000

Today I tried an upgrade of my debian unstable machine. Didn’t do this for several months, so I expected some problems, but this one was really hard to solve. I already had openoffice 2.4 installed, so there weren’t many changes, but after the complete upgrade the free fonts disappeared (FreeSans, FreeMono, …). The font drop-down menu showed three blank lines and I was also able to type in the word “FreeSans” into the box, but all I got were blank spaces. I googled around for two hours and finally I found a hint about the ttf-freefont package: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=472830. I don’t understand exactly what’s wrong, but installing version 20060501cvs-12 from snapshot.debian.net solved the problem and the fonts get now rendered correctly.

IBM Server x3350

jimmy — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:35:00 +0000

A few months ago I bought the new x3350 Server. Previously the x3250 was my standard model for small solutions. But I was always missing some important features which are now available with the x3350. These are:

Hot-swap redundant power supplies
Dual Gigabit Ethernet for bonding
Light path diagnostics

Thank you IBM for exactly implementing my wishlist

When I installed Debian etch on the machine everything worked fine except the broadcom NICs. They were not detected so I had to use a newer kernel.
The problem was solved when “Etch and a half” was released because the 2.6.24 kernel includes a newer tg3 module.

grml 1.1 and IBM Server x206m

jimmy — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:06:50 +0000

Remember the x206m and its “problematic” SAS/SATA Controller? Last night I tested the aic94xx driver again, which is also shipped with grml. Former releases of the driver worked with SAS but not with SATA. grml 1.1 comes with kernel 2.6.23, so worth a try. Unfortunately it’s still not clear if the firmware for the driver is licensed under GPL or Adaptec’s license. So it’s currently not included in the grml release but you can download it from here. Copy the file to /lib/firmware, unload and load the aic94xx module again. Watch the syslog and you will see, that the harddisks will be detected. Also tested it with a 500 GB IBM SATA disk. Works, too!

So the next step is to upgrade my x206m to etch and find out if it will work with the standard etch kernel, too.

The forgotten posting: Debian etch on IBM x3200 and x3250

jimmy — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:28:29 +0000

Yes, this posting is called “forgotten posting” because I just realized that I never posted it, although i should had been done a long time ago

A lot of people had problems with the Adaptec Controller in the x206m model. Fortunately, the successor x3200 has a LSI controller on board which works perfectly when running Debian etch on it. It uses the Fusion MPT drivers and best of all: It’s not a fakeraid controller, it’s real HW-RAID (thx to mika for pointing me in the right direction, because I never thought about it ).

Notes for using HW-RAID: There’s a small cmdline utility on the IBM CDs called “cfggen”. With this tool you can manage your RAID volumes. The userland utility (daemon) mpt-statusd monitors your RAID volumes (it’s included in Debian etch).

Notes about Debian woody: My x3200 was running a long time with Debian woody. You just need to install a newer kernel so that the controller gets recognized.

All of the information above applies to the x3250, too. It’s the rack version of the x3200.

Lenovo X60s and Dualhead configuration

jimmy — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 22:54:54 +0000

The last days I tested the dualhead capabilities of the Lenovo X60s notebook. I had some problems to find a configuration that works without cloning the screen. But in the meantime a newer version of X and the i810 module was released which supports the Xrandr 1.2 extension. Thus it’s possible to change the settings while X is running with the user space tool “xrandr”.
I downloaded the latest version of grml-x to get a fresh xorg.conf:

root@subzero ~ % grml-x -nostart -f fluxbox

Since I wanted to run the internal display @1024×768 and the external CRT @1600×1200 I had to add one line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

SubSection \"Display\"
  Depth     16
  # Modes \"1024x768\" \"800x600\" \"640x480\"  \"1600x1200\" \"1280x1024\" \"1280x960\"
   Virtual 2624 1968
EndSubSection

Otherwise xrandr would complain that the screen is too small when setting up the layout of the two combined screens (e.g.: xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1440×1440 (desired size 2048×768)).

After starting X you can begin to play with xrandr. When executing xrandr without any arguments it lists all available screens and displays.
To switch the external display off execute:

jimmy@subzero ~ % xrandr --output VGA --off

To change the resolution of the externalt CRT execute:

jimmy@subzero ~ % xrandr --output VGA --mode 1600x1200

To setup the CRT to be right of the LCD:

jimmy@subzero ~ % xrandr --output VGA --right-of LVDS

If you didn’t add the “Virtual 2624 1968″ Line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as described above, xrandr would now complain that the screen is too small for the desired size (1024+1600=2624 and 768+1200=1968).
xrandr has an excellent man page to lookup all the features.

My tests showed that window managers behave differently when setting up the screen layout. My preferred setup is to have the CRT right of the LCD with a higher resolution. With KDE it worked as expected but with fluxbox I couldn’t use fullscreen on the CRT only. So when switching to fullscreen or when maximizing windows, fluxbox used both screens (CRT and LCD).

You can download my xorg.conf here

IBM USB floppy and persistent name with udev

jimmy — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:47:45 +0000

Today I tested my new IBM usb floppy. When I plugged it in, the kernel loaded the usb-storage module and assigned device node /dev/sdc to it. Mounting a floppy-disk worked as exptected. Then I decided that it would be nice if the floppy would always use the same device node, not the first one available. This can be easily achieved with udev. I created a new file /etc/udev/ibm_floppy.rules and made a symbolic link to /etc/udev/rules.d/z81_ibm_floppy.rules. There’s only one line needed in the file:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="TEAC FD-05PUB   " , SYMLINK="ibm-floppy"

When I now plugin my floppy udev creates /dev/ibm-floppy, which is a link to the assigned device node.