Goodbye to a problem indicator

We have a new Sun T5220 with the new Niagara-II chip in it. I don't know if it's 8-core/8-thread or 4-core/16-thread but it shows up in Solaris as 16 CPUs.

I'm running a cpu-intensive process (bzip) and prstat is only showing it as using 1.2% of the CPU. On another older system, the same bzip takes up 25% of the 4-proc box.

On the old system, it's clear that bzip is a single-CPU bottleneck (because it's single-threaded). On the new one, well running full-out but only taking 1% doesn't look like much.

--Joe

Forcing kernel dump on Opensolaris x86

Just in case you were caught off guard by the documentation that points to using "rip::c" in mdb, that apparently doesn't work on Opensolaris, at least on build 70 that we have installed on our x4500s.

But on the bright side, I found a mention at wikia (http://opensolaris.wikia.com/wiki/Miscellaneous_FAQ) that says I should use $<systemdump. And that works.

Firewall + IPMP + IPF + Zones = lost packets

Blarg!

There's no intelligence in IPF to know where to send packets when IPMP detects a link failure.

So, even though the zone will get all the packets destined for it, the global kernel will pick an interface based on its global route table, pass the packet down the wrong interface, ipf will bounce it to the FAILED interface (below the ipmp layer, apparently) and the packet is never delivered.

So I need something that will notice when an IPMP failure occurs, and rewrites the IPF rules to respond to the networking topology change. Look for my PF_ROUTE socket watcher program to be posted shortly.

--Joe

Media server v0.1a

To solve the automation problem, I'll use Linux. Since I don't have any spare computers laying around any more (I'll turn in my geek card), I've gotta set it up in a VMware instance. Luckily, VMware server is free, and I have disk space here.

Two disks... 8GB for OS, and a 32GB "data" disk to start with. Both sparsely-allocated, cuz I don't have that much disk space.

I know debian better than any other distro. So, a base install, no tasksel, update and upgrade, then installed ssh, apache2, subversion, subversion-tools, and sudo. So far I'm using 515MB. And it can't do anything yet.

Someday I'd like to switch it over to Solaris so I can run the data under zfs, but for now, I like the convenience of aptitude.

In the mean time, it's LVM I guess... I pvcreate'd /dev/sdb, vgcreated dataVG /dev/sdb, and lvcreated dataLV in it. Then mke2fs -j /dev/mapper/dataVG/dataLV and tuned it to want a fsck every 365 mounts or 730d. Mounted it as /data, and I think I'm ready to start developing.

First some data, though... I grabbed about 350MB of data from various picture CDs, copied it to /data/media/$cdname, and copied them around again to make sure there were duplicates in the data...

More to come...

Getting code/screens to show up nicely

After a knowledgebase search, I found Adam Flater's blog entry http://adamflater.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-source-code.html describing a nice-looking way to do code on blogger.

I've added to my template the following style definition:
pre.code {
overflow: scroll;
}

and now I can wrap the code with <pre class="code"> and have it look nice.

Thanks, Adam!

--Joe