Within the Linux category we have the following:

January 1st, 2010 ··· andarius

For Christmas I was given a board I had on my wish list to replace my current firewall hardware. The board is the Intel BOXD945GCLF2, an Atom 330 powered board with a single PCI slot and onboard gigabit NIC. An ample replacement for the aging Via board.

I use Endian Firewall Community Edition on my firewall. I loaded things up and all seemed fine until the first reboot. I plugged my cable up to the ethernet port to configure things via the web interface and was unable to connect. After trying different cables and all the other normal means of troubleshooting I figured it was time to diagnose the board itself. I pulled out a Slackware 13.0 install CD and loaded it. After reboot the interface worked like a champ. I transferred a few large files and even rebooted a few times to make sure. Not a problem one showed up on the Slackware install so I went back to installing Endian.
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October 30th, 2009 ··· andarius

On my home network I use NFS to access shares on my server. What right minded fella wouldn’t right? Well recently for some reason on boot up my desktop system would spew an error about the NFS start up. dmesg showed nothing so I turned to /var/log/messages for more detail and found the following:

Oct 29 23:25:57 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: carrier acquired
Oct 29 23:25:57 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: rebinding lease of 10.2.2.49
Oct 29 23:25:58 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: acknowledged 10.2.2.49 from 10.2.2.7
Oct 29 23:25:58 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: checking for 10.2.2.49
Oct 29 23:25:58 ion slim: slim: Stale lockfile found, removing it
Oct 29 23:25:59 ion rpc.statd[961]: Version 1.1.6 Starting
Oct 29 23:25:59 ion sm-notify[962]: Already notifying clients; Exiting!
Oct 29 23:25:59 ion rpc.statd[961]: Unable to read state from '/var/lib/nfs/state': errno 0 (Success)
Oct 29 23:25:59 ion nfs: mount.nfs: DNS resolution failed for 10.2.2.4: Name or service not known
Oct 29 23:26:00 ion nfs: mount.nfs: DNS resolution failed for 10.2.2.4: Name or service not known

It looks like the network comes up and then it tries to start up NFS and mount the network shares, failing due to DNS resolution. Why on earth would it do this with the network up? Got me. Running the NFS script with restart yielded properly mounted NFS shares so something just wasn’t meshing well. This got me thinking along the lines of timing, but this was not occurring before a few days back.

A bit of googling turned up an important detail, by default dhcpcd would fork to the background and let the boot process drive on. Well, looking closely at the log data shows that while it had started the DHCP negotiations it was not done. The complete process looks like this:

Oct 29 23:45:14 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: carrier acquired
Oct 29 23:45:14 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: rebinding lease of 10.2.2.49
Oct 29 23:45:15 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: acknowledged 10.2.2.49 from 10.2.2.7
Oct 29 23:45:15 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: checking for 10.2.2.49
Oct 29 23:45:20 ion dhcpcd: wlan0: leased 10.2.2.49 for 86400 seconds
Oct 29 23:45:20 ion dhcpcd: forking to background

The key line containing “leased 10.2.2.49″. from the above you can see it took 5 second to complete. The first log snipping showed NFS starting up and trying to mount at 2 second after it checks for the IP. Talk about small margins of error…

For me the solution was simple. Crux uses very simple scripts for its start up. In fact the network script is pretty much what one would use to start it via cli manually. Since this is the case I simply added the “-w” option to the dhcpcd line which tells it to wait for the address to be assigned before forking to the background. Now it all works like a champ once more. It slowed my boot to login times by about one to two seconds, which puts me at a whopping 13 seconds or so. I think I can live with that…

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October 9th, 2009 ··· andarius

Not too long ago Comcast decided to play the DNS game with along with a bunch of other ISPs and DNS service providers. What do I mean and why would they do this? I will explain what that means in a moment, why is simple. It allows them to push and/or control your traffic in many ways.
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September 12th, 2009 ··· andarius

Since I built photon with new parts after the break-in here it has been running slamd64 12.2. This was a given since I prefer Slackware for my servers and it is basically 64bit Slackware. I needed 64 bit since I had 4 gigs of RAM and wanted to have it all. Who doesn’t right? Well Slackware 13.0 was recently released and part of that release was an official 64 bit port. Time to upgrade of course

The upgrade went off without a hitch with one exception. One the reboot to put my custom kernel in place all was fine and dandy, for a bit at least. After about a half hour I tried to su to root and was rejected. After about 4 tries I said screw it and rooted the box which is very easy if you have access to the machine physically. What happened, I have no clue. All seems fine now.

I say upgrade but I should note I never do upgrades. I always do a clean install and move backup data over as needed and/or configure things. It leaves behind a cleaner system in my opinion. The kernel it is running is a custom build which is what I prefer to run. For those who have a clue and care “uname -a” data is below:

Linux photon 2.6.31 #1 SMP Sat Sep 12 02:19:05 EDT 2009 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7400 @ 2.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

All of the hardware is up and running. I had a small issue with lm_sensors before that seems to be resolved now. For monitoring I have two modules in use which are “coretemp” and “asus_atk0110″, with the asus_atk0110 module doing most of the heavy lifting and coretemp of course giving me a per-core temp reading. I should have compiled those in and likely will should i have need to rebuild the kernel. Those two being the only static hardware modules I did not do so with, mainly because I was simply unaware.

Now that things are up to speed once more I plan to get my Q3 and even a Teeworlds server up and running. Fun fun!!

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August 27th, 2009 ··· andarius

I am so motivated to get my projects done… I found this game, I mean application to help me out. Not played it yet but it is installed and I hope to try it out soon. Warzone 2100 looks to be arather enjoyable game with low system requirements so all can have fun.

Another application one may wish to check out to help with productivity is Teeworlds. Another one I have installed but yet to play. This one requires a server, be it your machine or an online server. Again not massive requirements so all can have fun.

Now that I have the right “applications” to help me be productive I need to get to work with them!

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