That Bytes

After purchasing two dell 720 machines for a project at work, I went around setting the machines up in a very basic Pacemaker cluster. Just one problem the network interface between the machines (crossover cable) would physically shut itself down. But the connection to the switches would be fine.
The only way to get it doing again was a ifdowm amd ifup, after scratching my head and looking through the device i found at the that I350 Gigabit network card support EEE, this is only noted on the IGB linux driver sheet from intel found here.
Basically in order for EEE to kick in both devices need negotiate, this was happening with the two I350 connected together but the switch didn’t support this so it wasn’t happening.
After adding option igb EEE=0 to the /etc/modprob.ed/options file the driver disabled EEE and stop being a pain in the arse.
We will not go into if I think EEE is a good idea for server hardware ( I don’t ) for a later post ( rant).

My first shot at a ruby gem and api client any feedback would help.

Producteev Api

As i use mutt at work i had no way to lookup email address for other people. Well now i have with some nasty hacky ruby. I may clean it up etc when i have time but for now it works.
Simply add this to your mutt config


set query_command = "ruby -W0 {location of below script} '%s'"


The -W0 is needed as there is a bug in the curb gem that i am using.

require "rubygems"
require "uri"
require "curb"
require 'yaml'
require "rexml/document"
c = Curl::Easy.new("https://yourexchangeurl/ews/Exchange.asmx")
c.http_auth_types = :ntlm
c.username = 'yourusername'
c.password = 'yourpassword'
resolve_names_xml = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
        <soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
        xmlns:xsd='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'
        xmlns:soap='http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/'
        xmlns:t='http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types'>
        <soap:Body>
        <ResolveNames xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/messages\'
        xmlns:t='http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types\'
        ReturnFullContactData='true'>
        <UnresolvedEntry>#{ARGV[0]}</UnresolvedEntry>
        </ResolveNames>
        </soap:Body>
        </soap:Envelope>"

c.post_body=resolve_names_xml
c.headers = "Content-Type:text/xml"
c.perform

doc = REXML::Document.new(c.body_str)
displayname = ""
email = ""
puts ""
doc.root.each_recursive do |elem|
        if elem.name == "DisplayName"
                displayname = elem.text.to_s
        end
        if elem.name == "EmailAddress"
                email = elem.text.to_s
        end

        if displayname != "" and email != ""
                puts email + "  " + displayname + "     "
                email = ""
                displayname = ""
        end
end

If you remove a package from a debian package and for get to add the –purge argument the package will leave its configurations files on your system. In order to view all the packages that have done this you can simply run. sudo dpkg -l | egrep "^rc" If you wish remove those configurations files you can simple run sudo aptitude purge ~c .

After trying to get hdmi to work for the last 30 minutes, you can do the following

Change it to the deafult card you can update /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and change these lines:

defaults.ctl.card 0
defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 0

to this:

defaults.ctl.card NVidia
defaults.pcm.card Nvidia
defaults.pcm.device 7

Once the machine reboot check that the configs are correct in gnome mixer and it should just work.

I recently purchased a new laptop, (Hp Envy 14) that came pre-installed with windows. After leaving it on the hard drive for some time i finally needed the space. I shrank the partition as small as it could go but alas i have a SSD and every GB is expensive and needed.

I thought to myself what’s the best way to back this up, dd + nc was the way to go i thought. So i fired up

 dd if=/dev/sda1 | nc 192.168.1.1 

and went away. After 2 minutes i came back and did a iotop only to find it running at 22MB per second. Interesting I thought, why is it so slow running over gigabyte Ethernet to another machine.

Arrrr the other machine has a spinning metal disk storage system. So lets try this again,

 dd if=/dev/sda1 | pv | gzip -c | nc 192.168.1.1 

I added the PV so i could see what was going on ( read more about pv here ). Ok now its running at 25MB per second, WTF its eating all my CPU and that’s now the limiting factor.

Ok after some time I thought what about lzo, OK it’s not amazing at compressing things, but its relatively CPU inexpensive. I only really knew about this after working with it on the Hadoop cluster at work. After compiling lzop i gave it a shot.

dd if=/dev/sda1 | pv | lzop -c |nc 192.168.1.1 8000 

After watching it for 1 minutes the normal throughput was abut 52MB per second. Giving me a massive speed increase, doubling the throughput. The limiting factor now is the disk at the other end. I could start playing with LZO compression options as my CPU is only running at 50% but its faster enough for me now.

Here is the xf86-input-synaptics driver portage overlay needed to work with the kernel patch in my previous post. xf86-input-synaptics

Here is a patch set that will get the envy14 working correct with gentoo and linux-2.6.34-gentoo-r6. They are mostly patches that i have found of the net, with some of mine sprinkled in, id credit the original authors but i have lost the links.
Please comment on this posts if you know where they came from and ill give credit to the original authors. linux-patches-envy14-inux-2.6.34-gentoo-r6.tar

After purchasing a new wireless card of ebay. I found out that it was a preproduction knock off. You can see Intels view on this . In order to get it working on linux you need to hack the driver. This is a hack and i mean a hack, it took me 2 seconds but now my wireless card is working.

iwl-eeprom.c.patch

--- linux-2.6.34-gentoo-r1-orig/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl-eeprom.c	2010-05-16 23:17:36.000000000 +0200
+++ linux-2.6.34-gentoo-r1/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl-eeprom.c	2010-09-02 19:04:12.672222822 +0200
@@ -618,10 +618,10 @@
 	eeprom_ver = iwl_eeprom_query16(priv, EEPROM_VERSION);
 	calib_ver = priv->cfg->ops->lib->eeprom_ops.calib_version(priv);

-	if (eeprom_ver < priv->cfg->eeprom_ver ||
+/*	if (eeprom_ver < priv->cfg->eeprom_ver ||
 	    calib_ver < priv->cfg->eeprom_calib_ver)
 		goto err;
-
+*/
 	return 0;
 err:
 	IWL_ERR(priv, "Unsupported (too old) EEPROM VER=0x%x < 0x%x CALIB=0x%x < 0x%x\n",

I only wanted to run a script if the machine had a specific network access so i constructed this below.

How to find the machines ip address

ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr" | awk -F: '{ print $2 }' | awk '{ print $1 }'

Then find out if its on a network we care about

ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr" | awk -F: '{ print $2 }' | awk '{ print $1 }' |  grep -qE '172\.24|25\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}' ; echo $?

Another option would be to use facter to get your IP address.