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  • 5 min read

OpenIndiana Build 148 @ VMWare ESXi 4.1

This was originally posted on blogger here.

I have been trying to run an OpenIndiana server in a virtualized envrionment (sort of a development and test machine). And I ran into problems, actually into one huge ****ing problem at the very beginning: The OI installer CD image does not boot inside VMWare virtual server when you have more than 4 virtual CPUs set in the virtual machine profile.

Easy solution: Set only 2 CPUs and everything works fine. Well, not everything... The Open Indiana ****ing installer freezes in the end instead of restarting the system, but it worked for me after all.

My next article: Why do we virtualize? What the **** virtualization brings to our lives and what it takes? And why do we suffer so miserably with commodity servers...?:-)

  • 5 min read

Hibernation on Debian unstable (sid) sucks badly

This was originally posted on blogger here.

As the header says... It sucks completely. Basically what you need to make hibernation working on pretty decent laptop like for instance ThinkPad X301 as in my case? First you need running Debian of course, SWAP partition of sufficient size (= greater than your RAM:-)) and install packages hibernate and uswsusp. Then try it... For instance run s2disk or click on some button on your Gnome/KDE/... desktop. It should hibernate (some percentage growing, disk working and then it is off), hopefully.

When you turn it on you may see message:

Invalidating stale software suspend images

and then the systems boot from scratch like it has beeing rebooted... What the ****? Well in my case the

resume=swap:/dev/sda2

line was missing in /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

Well, you can add it there by hard. (Why it is not there by default? Well I am not a Debian guy, so I do not even know where to fill the bug actually, but I am providing a hack. Stone me.) Just add something like this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet resume=swap:/dev/sda2"

to file /etc/default/grub.

That't it. It worked for me.

  • 5 min read

gtkam: Could not initialize camera.

This was originally posted on blogger here.

I have Canon Ixus 80IS. Canon cameras have "a feature" that they are not a USB mass storage. Maybe they have some ****ing reason for this, noone knows...

Under Linux, one needs gphoto2 in order to download photos from the camera on USB. And one also needs usbfs mounted to /proc/bus/usb and of course one needs proper permissions. For example on current Debian unstable I had to add this line to /etc/fstab:

none  /proc/bus/usb  usbfs  defaults  0  0

And one also needs a user accessing the camera to be in group plugdev. Permissions on devices in /proc/bus/usb/... are set by some of beasts like udev/hal/wtf. No matter, plugdev did the trick for me.

  • 5 min read

Low throughput with www/apache22 on FreeBSD 8.1

This was originally posted on blogger here.

Few days ago I installed FreeBSD 8.1 and compiled Apache 2.2.15 from port www/apache22. I tried to transfer some files over the internet with rather good connection (100Mbps in the weakest point, but several hops resulting in RTT ~27ms). But I got only 10 – 15Mbps throughput from FreeBSD on hi-end HW. I also tried to install FTP server (ftp/proftpd) but I got the same result. It was not a network issue or a client problem, because I had full speed transfers from another machine in the same network. What the ****?

Step one… Sysctl parameters. The most ****ing evil parameter is net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable. Disable it! Actually I tuned more parameters relevant to TCP/IP stack and kernel internals:

/etc/sysctl.conf

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216
kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768
kern.ipc.somaxconn=32768
kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=32768
kern.maxvnodes=800000
net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=0
net.inet.udp.maxdgram=57344
net.inet.udp.recvspace=65536
net.local.stream.recvspace=65536
net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216

OK, transfers over FTP were then running at 100Mbps. Fine. But HTTP file transfers were still ****ing slow. Locally it was two times slower than FTP and much more slower over the internet (HTTP: 4-10 Mbps vs. FTP: 100Mbps).

Step two... Turning off sendfile(2) in Apache HTTPd.

This is also incredibly ****ing option and there is no documentation pointing at it... Even Google does not know what to do when the Apache ****s up on FreeBSD 8.1. Well, I added one single line to /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf:

EnableSendfile off

And that's it. Both FTP and HTTP are running at full speed.