|
| Latest Web News |
Wal-Mart Aims For MySpace Crowd
The Hub will be the retailing giant's online attempt to win over the online teen crowd and bolster its flagging fortunes in the hotly competitive apparel market.
High-Priced Keyword Click Fraud Rises
Analysis firm Click Forensics recently released their Q2 2006 figures for their Click Fraud Index and found a not-so-little surprise in the numbers.
Yahoo Finance Bets On An Upgrade
Video content, revamped message boards, and the
formal debut of badges that can be used to display
Yahoo Finance content on blogs and websites should
help the site maintain its dominance in online financial
news...
Apple, Google Cults Verified
There's more evidence of the cult following that
cheers on both Google and Apple. Symantec would
seem to have a faithful consumer base, as well.
That's what several recent Net Promoter industry
reports indicated, anyway - Google, Apple, and Symantec
enjoyed the highest levels of...
Ranking Suit Against Google Dismissed
KinderStart will amend its complaint against Google for effectively dropping the KinderStart website from its index when Google assigned the company a zero PageRank.
Targeting The Podcast Crowd
New media brings with it a pocketful of questions. How do I utilize this new channel? Who is receiving the message? Is it the right audience for what I am trying to sell? Fewer people are asking, "what's a podcast?", but that doesn't mean the audience is diverse.
|
|
| Recent
Articles |
Where's the Memory?
I had happened across How To Remotely Monitor Memory Usage and smiled when I saw this...
Inward Bound
There's a Boston customer I have serviced for many years now.
SMB Caching
A customer had a particular shared folder setup so that only he had access to it. This happened to be a SCO Visionfs system, but you could run into similar problems...
PC-BSD
I do like BSD OSEs, but I think the most interesting thing about the release of PC-BSD is that the download page incudes a VMware image.
Oracle Ponders Novell Purchase For Linux
With an earnings announcement coming up on April 18th, Oracle founder Larry Ellison has been wondering whether his firm should pick up SuSE Linux by buying Novell.
Microsoft
Virtually Supporting Linux
The Windows maker announced at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo it would make the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 available at no charge to customers.
Google Hires Creator Of Vim
Bram Moolenaar, creator of the text editor Vim,
or Vi improved, will begin working with Google in
the company's Zurich offices...
IBM Wants To Eclipse Unix Developers
The command line is a wonderful thing, and a developer
skilled in the ways of vi (or emacs if you must)
can build great applications; IBM thinks developers
can do...
|
|
|
07.18.06
Legacy ISA
 By
A.P. Lawrence
I found a professed "competent" student at the local university who spent a couple of hours destroying the setup in one of the machines. We now have one machine working...
That's a snippet from email I got yesterday. The owner of the machines is a local doctor, and the procedure has been that the backup tape from the "working" server has been restored to the "spare" server, thus providing safety in the event of failure. Good idea, but the weak part was that they used Travan tape drives. These failed, and a local consultant decided to replace them with DDS4 DAT drives. Excellent idea, but he knew nothing about Unix, so he went looking for help. He's the one who sent the email.
He'd found some nearby college student who professed knowledge, but had instead "broken" the spare machine. Backup was not working. This was a SCO Unix system, so it was easy enough to find me on the web and he was probably pretty happy to see that I was one town away. I wondered if the college kid really knew anything about SCO or was just a Linux type.. either way, he should have been able to do this.
I offered to come look at the working box, but no, he wanted me to fix the "spare" that the student had broken. I hesitated: I'd much rather just go install the tape drive in the untouched machine then stick my fingers in somebody else's mess. But the consultant and the doctor were now worried about losing everything: if their working machine was broken, they'd have nothing. So, I reluctantly agreed to look at the spare. The consultant offered to drop it off at my house; I don't normally like to do that either, but I agreed and last night the machine arrived here.
I was amused by the bag of stuff that accompanied it: complete printouts from the online manual for the tape drive, 3 extra Adaptec 2940 SCSI cards, and screwdrivers. Yes, screwdrivers. There was also a book: "Essential Unix Administration, a Beginner's Guide".
I guess he wanted to be sure I'd have what I needed.
The hard drive is ide, so the scsi cards were for the tape drive, which was already installed. I took the cover off just to check. Ayup, no termination: straight from the card to the tape, no terminator. He can probably get away with that, but it's not done right. These drives can't provide termination, so we need to do it at the end of the cable. He'll need to fix that.
I booted the machine and noticed that it hung for half a minute at "wdinit". Well, that's easy to get rid of: just add "wd.delay=1" to the end of the "defbootstr" line in /etc/default/boot. But right after the "tape" line showed up during boot, an ominous looking warning appeared:
WARNING: idistributed: cannot handle interrupts from PCI device (handler F007282C, device 0/10/0)
I checked with "hw -r pci" and yep, that's the 2940 card. The %adapter line showed it claiming interrupt 255. No wonder idistributed is complaining. But what's the real problem? Bad driver? Nope. Bad card. Nope. Simpler than that. The card just could not acquire an interrupt from the BIOS. I looked at the PNP/PCI configuration in the machine's bios and every interrupt was reserved for Legacy/ISA. Obviously someone had gone a little too far with that.. I reset 9 -12 to PCI and a reboot eliminated that error message.
Next was the tape configuration. It was set to "Generic SCSI-1 / SCSI-2 tape drive", which is wrong. I deleted that tape and started over, this time setting it to "DAT drive (Compressing and non-Compressing)". The kernel relink failed, complaining of problems in the "blad" driver. Blad? We aren't using any blad. I edited /etc/conf/sedevice.d/blad and changed all the Y's to N, and tried the relink again. No problems now, reboot, and tested the drive. It worked.
I looked back in /var/adm/messages and noticed that at one point the 2940 had claimed interrupt 5, so obviously the BIOS hadn't been set this way when the student first installed the card. But he would have had troubles because of not choosing DAT anyway, and maybe the "blad" was him trying to get it working - I don't know. He got off course somewhere, but not knowing to choose DAT would have messed him up - SCO's "mkdev tape" can be confusing to the uninitiated. People quit out too soon before they even see the question.
So now the question is: will they let me touch the working machine? We'll see...
About the Author:
A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com
|
