High Tech Sorcery » specialj

Installing Windows GPLPV Drivers in Xen

specialj — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:02:21 +0000

I’ve done this enough times to know it by heart but I remember when I tried to find documentation on this step I ran into countless inaccurate and outdated examples. So here’s what I do to get the Windows GPL PV drivers installed under Xen.

Download the drivers from meadowcourt.org. As of 1/18/2012 the latest version is 0.11.0.308. You’ll need to get the appropriate drivers for your OS.
turn testsigning off on Windows

bcedit

I like to check out the config first

bcdedit /set {current} testsigning on

this turns testsigning on

bcdedit

I usually run this again to make sure “testsigning Yes” appears

restart windows. upon restart the system should indicate it is in “Test Mode”
install the drivers msi file that was downloaded. I always choose “Typical” installation. I choose not to restart at this point.
create new default boot option

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “GPLPV

this will copy the current boot setup into a new one called GPLPV
pay attention to the id returned here

bcdedit /default ID

replace ID with the id from the copy command
this sets the new menu to be the default

bcdedit /set {default} loadoptions GPLPV

this makaes this option use GPLPV drivers

bcdedit

double check everything

restart windows

Researching Redis on Rails

specialj — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 09:34:38 +0000

I’ve been researching how good a fit Redis might be for a project or 2. One project needs a memory based key-value store generally without persistence, which would seem to suggest memcached. However, there may be times where persistence across reboots may be desirable and Redis’ atomic operations and data types may also be useful. Here’s some links I’ve been checking out:

Software

redis – obviously
redis-rb – gem for accessing redis from ruby
redis-objects – gem for mapping Redis types to Ruby objects
ohm – gem for creating Redis based object models
supermodel – gem for ActiveModel descendant that can store to Redis

Information

Evaluating open source web control panels again

specialj — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 09:22:08 +0000

Here is what I’m looking at:

ISPConfig – been around a long time, seems quite mature
Froxlor – an active fork of SysCP which has a decent reputation
I-MSCP – a fork of ispCP which was a fork of VHCS which I know several people who supported

The sad state of linux desktop environments

specialj — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:51:17 +0000

I run Ubuntu on my desktop and have since Ubuntu’s first release (4.10) and the current release, 11.10, is the first that I am going to skip over entirely. The reason is that the choice of desktop environments is poor. I upgraded my HTPC to 11.10 and tried every desktop environment available: Gnome Shell, Unity, KDE 4, XFCE, LXDE. Not 1 of them seemed like it would fit my desktop needs. I have a nice Gnome 2 desktop with plenty of customizations to fit how I work but upgrading to from 11.04 to 11.10 would cause me to lose all of that and force me to learn how to be as productive in a new desktop environment. I really cannot afford to take that time when I have so many projects going.

It’s easy, and common, to pick on Ubuntu but the truth is there is many distributions are making the same errors of not providing a path forward for the existing desktop environment. My advice to all distros regarding Gnome 3 is the same as I would have given for KDE 4: don’t switch to the latest DE until it has matured. Any distro shipping Gnome 3 right now has made a mistake in my opinion. Right now Gnome 2 is mature, stable, polished, and most importantly has a large existing user base. Ubuntu in particular should have shipped Gnome 2 through it’s 12.04 release. There are a lot of business users on 10.04 and if 12.04 breaks their desktops they will not be happy, or they may choose to simply not upgrade and you end up with a situation similar to Windows XP.

I understand that the Gnome developers wanted to work on something new and exciting, just like the KDE developers. I think the Gnome 3 work is good and useful as is the KDE 4 work. However, without the resources of a Microsoft or an Apple to do user testing a linux distribution should not switch quickly to a new, relatively untested and immature desktop environment. I’ve used all of the desktop alternatives out there and my choice for my desktop is to continue using Gnome 2. When Apple rolled out OS X it was after a ton of user testing that no one who used it wanted to go back. Gnome 3 has not yet reached that level, and until it does it should not be shipped in any distro catering to a large user base with a goal of stability and productivity. There is, of course, a place for distros who want to be more cutting edge to include such software for people to experiment with.

So Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, are all making a mistake shipping Gnome 3 in their latest release. If it were up to me to set the direction for their next releases I would include Gnome 2 or MATE and make that the default desktop for people upgrading from releases prior to their latest. In the case of Ubuntu that means 12.04 would give a seamless upgrade to everyone running 11.04 and earlier. I would also recommend including Unity and Gnome Shell as options for people to try out so that they can make the switch on their time and terms. I think that would be a policy of mine: continue to support how users are working now but give them options to change how they work if they so choose.

Would that be a lot of work, asking that every distro maintain every desktop environment that has ever been released. Not so much effort I think, and largely what has happened with window managers in the past. With forks of Gnome 2 and KDE 3 being maintained by developers including them as an option in a distro is certainly a benefit to the end user. The DE landscape might become more fragmented but that is still preferable to forced upgrades for people who are satisfied with their current DE.

On December 1st, 2011 the Gnome Shell Extensions website went live for version 3.2. So distros that shipped Gnome 3.0 are out of luck, like Ubuntu 11.10. But to me this is the sort of thing that should have been in place long before anyone was shipping this software, particularly as the default desktop. By mid-2012 Gnome 3 will probably be in a place where it could be shipped in a distro, but shipping it before then is just asking for user complaints as they struggle with the forced upgrade, bugs, and inconsistencies common in early releases of new software.

As for Unity, I think it’s too early to know if that development effort was a mistake. The Canonical folks tried Gnome 3 Shell and didn’t like it. So they decided to build Unity. Well, first of all, this should have been a clue that Gnome 3 wasn’t ready to be shipped. They could have shipped Gnome 2 and Unity as an option for people to try. And I do think that people have raised a good point that the Unity development may have sapped development from other parts of Ubuntu 11.10, leaving Ubuntu 11.10 unpolished compared to previous releases. I do not care for Unity and I would not use it on my desktop or laptop or HTPC but it may be a good effort if it proves to be a good DE choice for netbooks, tablets, and similarly sized devices. In the long run that could be a big win for Ubuntu, but enough to offset the short-term loss of users upset by being forced to switch to Unity, that remains to be seen.

SSD Recomendation

specialj — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:26:24 +0000

I’ve bought a number of solid state drives and I’ve had to return most of them due to problems. I’ve taken from that experience that a lot of the manufacturers don’t quite know what they are doing yet. There are plenty of places on the internet you can read about the bugs in many of the released drives. I’m hoping the acquisition of Indilinx by OCZ and SandForce by LSI will improve the reliability of drives based on those controllers. However, my SSD purchases have been narrowing to Crucial who’s RealSSD C300 and M4 have been far more reliable than average and extremely well performing. A recent review of the OCZ Octane drive shows the Crucial M4 as one of the better drives in server performance:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22078/8

Fixing ALSA sound issues

specialj — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:09:24 +0000

Ony my desktop I’ve removed pulseaudio because I found it to be more trouble than it was worth. So I use ALSA, which works pretty well. However, sometimes my audio dies and produces chirps and squeaks only. I found the easiest way to fix this is the following command:

sudo alsa force-reload

how to disable Rack::Cache in Rails 3.1

specialj — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 23:46:47 +0000

Couldn’t find this anywhere but what I found worked was to put this in config/application.rb:

    require 'rack/cache'
    config.middleware.delete Rack::Cache

This did fix the issue that sent me to this, as many people are likely to run into. The issue was that since Rack::Cache uses the default Rails FileStore that lots and lots of small files were being created in lots and lots of directories. I don’t think Rack::Cache offers me much for this application, but if it did I would look into switching from a file store to a memory or memcached store.

Playing with LXC

specialj — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:04:45 +0000

I’ve been wanting to explore the OS-level virtualization space again. For a long time I was running linux-verser on a number of servers. I switched to Xen because I really like the aesthetic of being able to run each virtual machine with it’s own kernel. But I wonder if this is not too heavy a solution when all you really want is a super-chroot. LXC has a lot of support since it’s in the kernel but it’s difficult to tell how big a community there is. Thus far I’ve been pretty disappointed with LXC and I’ve had trouble getting information. For example there is very little information as to whether capabilities are changed in different kernel versions. Here are some of the major difficulties I’ve found so far:

Isolation – The LXC home page mentions isolation repeatedly, as does the README. I was disappointed to find running dmesg on my container displayed the messages from the host system. That’s not isolated enough for me.
Networking – While you can assign multiple ip addresses you can only have 1 interface which is on 1 bridge. With Xen I have several virtual machines with multiple devices, usually one on a public bridge and another on a vpn. Also on Ubuntu guests since udev does not work the network/interfaces file is not run and there is not routing until ifup -a is run from the guest.
No udev – This could be ok except for ubuntu guests which, as noted above, use upstart which depends on udev notifications to start networking and other services. Basically it’s safe to assume that with an ubuntu guest many services will not be started. This will not be the case for guests using sysvinit or systemd as far as I know.

Resources:

Patriot Torqx 2 vs Patriot Warp

specialj — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 02:18:44 +0000

I’m replacing a Patriot Torqx drive which failed and Patriot has given me the options of replacing it with a Torqx 2 or a Warp drive.

Drives and Controllers:

Torqx – Indilinx Barefoot controller – not stuttering like with the older jmicron controllers but not very reliable in my experience
Torqx 2 - phison controller – relatively new
Warp – jmicron JMF602 – known for random pauses

From the reviews I’ve read it seems like the Torqx 2 is faster but it’s difficult to discern as the Warp reviews are very favorable because it came out 3 years ago while the Torqx 2 reviews are unfavorable because it was released recently but cannot compete with other recent drives. Both drives show poor performance in iometer, even worse than the Torqx which is a big problem.

Torqx 2

Warp

various ways of escaping content in ruby

specialj — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:08:39 +0000

It’s difficult to keep these all straight: