A post for the geeks in the audience.

[reddragdiva]

• NotN: Famous person's son stays in jail, thank Christ. Photo: hi wanna update my feed.

1. Recent Sun Xxx00 x86 servers are really nice boxes, and actually quite cost-effective for what you buy (a decently-built x86 server with good service, at least in our experience on gold and silver contracts). However, the firmware is so awful and buggy that it simulates hardware failures when there are none. If you call Sun, the first thing they will ask is that you upgrade the iLOM and BIOS firmware to the latest version. They are quite correct in this. (The engineer who looked over our X4600M2 that wouldn't boot claiming defective CPUs and was perfectly fine after a firmware afterward was quite scathing in his characterisation of the base firmware.) The nuisance is that you have to hook up both the iLOM serial (to configure the web version) and Ethernet ports, and upgrade the firmware through the browser interface to achieve, ooh, basic functionality. But it works quite well, the iLOM is really nice and we're still big fans of the boxes in question.

2. OpenBSD doesn't do X11 on VirtualBox because VirtualBox is officially crappy and Sun don't care (and Theo is sick of dmesg logs from known-defective virtual hardware). Guess I'll be sticking to running Windows 2000 on it (and that only to play MP3s over SMB without undue annoyance).

I'm trying to help with problems with current Wine on OpenBSD — the ports version is from 1999! And current versions do work quite well on FreeBSD — and have resorted to qemu, which works perfectly in full emulation (kqemu doesn't work; see above) despite being really slow. Use -std-vga not to need an xorg.conf, though that will give you a 1280×1024 screen every time — for something else, use driver "vesa" in xorg.conf. Good Lord, the yakshaving — including setting up vsftpd on the laptop to serve install tarballs via FTP to its hosted virtual machines, so I don't have to keep re-downloading 221MB.

3. Tomorrow (today, Tuesday) I will be down t' pub with sweh and syringavulgaris and the BOFHs. Must get home at a sensible time afterwards, unfortunately. Feh!

Comments

[pir.livejournal.com]

You can upgrade the X2100M2 I have via tftp, you still need the ilom interface hooked up to do so but at least you can do it over ssh.

[reddragdiva]

ooh cool. I expect the X4600M2 can do the same. Just that the Sun-sanctioned method involves the droolproof Web interface. Which is, admittedly, really pretty fantastic.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I thought iLOM used DHCP or at least had a sensible default IP so you can hook up a crossover cable when racking the boxes and set the IP properly? In any event you should have iLOM configured when you rack the boxes. Remote console is far too useful.

But yeah, buggy. Not as buggy as the old SAN management software used to be though. At least they seem to have made that better: CAM is actually pretty decent, at least for the couple of low-end arrays I'm managing with it.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Heh. I use OpenBSD all over the house, for every machine that's not needing any more "user interface" than an ssh session. But I've never succeeded in getting anything graphicky and more complicated than xclock functional with it. Your paragraph is a reminder of exactly why I gave up trying.

[reddragdiva]

It uses DHCP to pull an IP out of its arse. Rotsa ruck guessing which one it's picked. Default IP is 0.0.0.0.

But yes, iLOM is fundamentally a great idea. Just annoying finding two Ethernet patches (often on different subnets) and the right proprietary serial dongle before you can upgrade the firmware to, ooh, basic functionality and a machine you can actually trust to tell you when it's unwell.

[reddragdiva]

And when you get it working, it's fvwm2. I haven't used that since my first Unix job in 2001. 100% in tune with the OpenBSD philosophy: party like it's 1994! \m/ With ssh.

[reddragdiva]

Most of the reason graphicky stuff more complicated than xclock doesn't work is because it's crapware. OpenBSD is not in the least tolerant of the BS games programmers play given half a chance, so Mozilla didn't work for ages and Wine doesn't work and ...

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The point is that upgrading the firmware isn't dependent on serial dongles or anything else like them: if you're doing things right then you'll be hooking them up to the network anyway. And finding two (or more) switch ports is only a problem if you haven't planned.

(We had that problem in our old datacentre. Not any more.)

The need to patch the firmware is annoying but far less troublesome to actually do than, oh, a Niagra box. If you think an X4600 is a pain, hope to never deal with a T5140... It looks like it uses iLOM but it's really more a bastard cousin that works completely differently and requires all sorts of buggering about to patch.

In any event the current generation of iLOM seems fairly stable so far. The X4600 problems I'd seen were more to do with the BIOS. Having a BIOS on a server, now that is ludicrous.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Mind, that job involved using SPARCstation 5s as desktop machines. fvwm2 was a godsend...

[reddragdiva]

Mine was an Ultra 5!

(There's a reason I got a 12" laptop in as absolutely soon as ordering them was my job.)

[reddragdiva]

They're PCs. Great big very expensive PCs, but PCs. And Sun sell them to fools using something that big to run Windows as well. I'm sure Vista's just fine on an X4600.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Mine stayed an SS5 until we got second-gen U5s and the OK to do a special install of Solaris 8. Those first-round U5s plus Solaris 2.6... grind grind grind. Couldn't get them to reliably play an MP3 while also running FrameMaker. Or a mere web browser. The SS5 could do all three.

fvwm2 with all the pretty turned off was still about the best option, even on the U5s.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Where's the annoyance in mp3 over smb?

[reddragdiva]

I went to KDE at home in fairly short order after getting a machine with enough memory to run it comfortably.

[reddragdiva]

Finding a Unix client that (a) parses smb:// paths in whatever format (b) actually streaming the file, not copying the entire file before starting playing it. Amarok 2 doesn't appear to be in Kubuntu 8.10, annoyingly enough.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I'm using twm right now, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

[gths.livejournal.com]

Kickin' it old-skool. Ahh the days of DECstations.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I might actually use OpenBSD if the updates were a little easier.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

Use VMWare or VirtualPC (if running Windows) instead - OpenBSD is fine on those. It's possible that VirtualBox 2.1 is better - a March post is really rather old, but the last time I tried VB it really was pretty shit.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

It's not /that/ difficult. Boot install, select upgrade, extract etc.tgz, run sysmerge.

[reddragdiva]

It's annoying because VirtualBox is right there on Ubuntu and actually updates properly with the kernel now. And Windows works very well and I understand Linux does too. But as a general virtual machine ... ah ... fail. At least I haven't had to resort to Bochs.

[vatine]

You should handcraft a virtual machine, using the finest Tasmanian bits (they've gone through a drop-bear, making them excellent for virtualising purposes), lovingly placed in the right spot using unicon-whisker tweezers. That'd do it. Probably see you tonight, then.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

It's a) quickly applying security updates and b) getting security updates at all for ports where I feel OpenBSD is weak.

Compare debian and "aptitude update && aptitude upgrade".

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm currently trying to work out why upgrading VirtualBox means X in my debian VM is now cocked up.

[reddragdiva]

I must admit - apart from Linux's superior hardware support, a major factor I like about Ubuntu is the apt repository mechanism. And that Debian's repository is superlatively well-maintained, which is IME more important than the actual underlying software (apt, yum or whatever).

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

FreeBSD seems to come closest in the BSD world (which is one reason why I like it).

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Aha, there seems to be a known bug with guest display resizing in 2.1 that's affecting most linux people.

[reddragdiva]

Ubuntu apt really brought me from FreeBSD to Ubuntu. I emailed the freebsd-questions list saying "LOOK GUYS! THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT!" I'd had enough nightmares with the FreeBSD ports tree kthx.

That said, I'm now compiling ports in the OpenBSD VM and it's very nice (if very slow). Seems to integrate better with its own binary package system than FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x did. Presumably because a given ports tree is release-specific, rather than allegedly coping across all major and minor versions as the FreeBSD one claims to try to.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

tried the kvm-based virtual machine manager stuff in ubuntu?
Seems to work well for us.. Supports fully-virtualised OSs, hardware accelerated, faster than kqemu by a good margin..

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

apt is excellent.

The thing that annoys me with the OpenBSD ports tree is that (as I understand it), there's no way to get timely security updates without following CVS, which also requires to track CVS OpenBSD.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

I really like the RDP remote client management of VirtualBox. That's nice when you are trying to manage remote VM's with a Mac since Cord is such a nice RDP client. With VMware, you have to use VNC which 1) has to be manually/text edited enabled in VMware server, 2) has a broken mouse when there's no VMware tools installed, and 3) forces you into Mac VNC clients with various amounts of suckage.

Of course, remote VM client viewing options are important when managing from a Mac since VMware has NOT seen fit to provide an OSX Remote Console Firefox Plug-in (just a Windows and Linux one).