The last three 20 oz bottles of LiveWire I’ve obtained have had the “Free 20oz bottle with purchase of Pepsi or Dew” caps, thus granting me three free bottles now. This rocks!

Categories: Life of Peawee
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Why is it that after I accidentally remove system-config-users from my FC 6 box, when I go to reinstall it, it wants to install wireless-tools?

For those not in the know: to install the user management tool, I have to install wireless networking configuration tools.

Whumba?

Categories: Geeky Peawee
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OK, I have two three Special Someones tonight to discuss.

The first is Supermicro, because there’s the least to rant about. Namely, when I wrote my last post, it did not take very long at all for someone from an IP address that resolved to Supermicro to respond to my post; less than an hour. It typically takes a day for their tech support to respond to an actual request for help, and even then it’s generally a cryptic one-line answer that makes me more confused as to how their products (don’t) work. Especially when dealing with their terrible IPMI card for the PDSMA motherboard- what gets it working is completely different from what their tech support and documentation says. For a department of our size, we’re buying a lot of products from them. We may not be big customers, but we’ve been loyal customers, goddamnit, and now I would like to see about buying future needs from other vendors due to SuperMicro not just sucking, but rubbing it in my face how much they suck through my own website. If anyone wishes to elaborate on this, I will.

Next up is Seagate. We purchased 16 750 GB SATA-II drives from them. We expected them to work as SATA-II drives, yes? They come pre-installed with the little jumpers that force them to work as SATA-I drives. No big deal normally; the average home user wouldn’t ever tell the difference. However, when you’re trying to get them to work with a SAS backplane and controller that the hardware vendor says “Well, yeah, it kind of sucks, sorry you had to buy our product to find out” with, it’s a Big Deal. We’d be getting all sorts of data errors across the 16 drives, and things just Wouldn’t Work.

Why didn’t I remove the jumpers? Because I didn’t know they were there. These things measure about 1mm x 1mm x 2mm. They’re small. With my Wonderful Awesome depth perception under the harsh fluorescent glare of the machine room, I thought at first they were colored plastic bases for the pins, so you knew exactly which ones to jumper. Then, I noticed they were jumpers, but so small that either they were blocks to discourage random jumpering, or that they were configured like that for SATA-II from the factory.

Only after the “Storage Doctor” commented about SATA-II did I figure on forcing the drives to act as SATA-I. So, after spending too much time looking through crappy documentation, I realized those drives were jumpered. So I took out the jumpers, and found the only dead drive in the batch (you order lots of drives at once, you expect a lemon or two). The system is working more or less alright now.

And, finally, the Wheel Of Suck turns to the Portland Group. They make a set of really handy compilers for Fortran and C/C++. There is, however, a big problem. The model I’m hacking on won’t compile with the latest version (7.0). It didn’t compile under 6.2 either, leaving us stuck with 5.2. It’s not my problem- it throws an Internal Compiler Error, which means their compiler broke somewhere on the inside. I tried to get help. I’ve been sending them weekly emails since June 22nd. Until I get an answer, I’m going to start emailing them twice a week. Then three times a week. I might just set up a cron job to get their attention. Something has to be done.

Categories: Geeky Peawee
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So, continuing the saga of the new storage cluster node, my boss figured out the problem with the MegaCli program. Both the syntax in the manual was wrong, and certain characters in the proper syntax needed to be quoted, otherwise the shell would try and do something with them.

Now, the next problem is our chassis, the SuperMicro SC836E1-R800V. It has what is known as a drive backplane; instead of each of the 16 drives attaching directly to a controller card, which is incredibly messy, the drives plug right into this backplane, and then the backplane attaches to the controller card with a single cable. Nifty, yes?

This chassis has a SAS backplane. SAS is the new storage technology for the new millenium. It works a lot like a normal network, and the industry specifications say it is to be backwards compatible with SATA, the current consumer-level drive interface, so that you can pack something full of cheap, huge drives (and huge SAS drives just don’t exist yet).

The controller chip on the backplane is an LSI SASx28, which proclaims its SATA compatibility long and loud. The controller card on the computer itself is an LSI 8888ELP, which says it’s a SAS/SATA controller. However, apparently, SuperMicro never took the time to ensure that their backplane itself is SATA compatible for one reason or another. And they only informed this of this fact after buying the $1,000 chassis, a $1,000 SAS controller, and $5,000 worth of SATA drives. We’ve been sending them nastygrams, and it looks like they might actually do something about it now, while really we wanted this storage in production by yesterday.

Grr.

Categories: Geeky Peawee, Life of Peawee
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So at work we’re testing out building a new departmental storage cluster. Our needs, especially with regards to Manabe, our cluster, are still network I/O and CPU-bound, so it doesn’t need to be particularly fast, but we would like a single storage namespace, and we want it big. So, withe the combined research that my boss and I have done, we have decided the least unsucky option is to go with a OpenSolaris-based frontend (to use ZFS exported via NFS) with an iSCSI-over-gigabit ethernet SAN. This lets us transition the department over to the storage cluster with a minimum of fuss and grumble, and not worry about iSCSI connection drops due to the campus network repeatedly dropping out, which it does all too often.

So, to implement this SAN, we have currently 4 working chassis of 15 SATA drives each hooked up to 3Ware 9550 controllers. Our newest member, the 5th one, and the one we’re going to actually start the SAN with, is a new notion for us. It’s a 16 SAS drive server, with an LSI 8888 controller. So far, things haven’t been going so well; we started with an Adaptec card, but it was broken, so we got rid of it and are trying the LSI card, seeing the backplane chipset in the server is LSI as well.

However, this backplane apparently doesn’t officially “support” SATA, even though SAS allows for backwards compatibility. Trouble in paradise there. In addition, this LSI card has a command line interface management software called (imaginatively enough) “MegaCli”. This software… has problems. The interface is seriously brain damaged as the command line options suck hardcore… when they work as documented. Which I’m finding out doesn’t happen all the time. I’m looking at you, -PDInfo -PhysDrv. I spent nearly five hours today pulling my already thinning hair out trying to figure this out. It needs to get done sometime soon so we can get this array online, but how can I when it doesn’t work as advertised?

Categories: Geeky Peawee, Life of Peawee
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So, my Tempo died the other night, taking Krystal to dinner at Pasha’s in Champaign. The restaurant is on Windsor and Duncan, so while it was off in the boonies compared to the rest of the urban area, it still counted as “in town” to get my car towed back to my place. It’s awfully frustrating to be out with someone and have your car die. I wouldn’t have minded nearly as much if it was me alone, but when you’re out with someone, you’d like to make sure their night continues to go alright.

It looks like it’s the starter that’s cooked, which will take about $80-$100 in parts to fix. I might do it myself, but the car is acting wonky in other ways, so I might just listen to my dad’s pressure and take it to a repair shop and have them look at the poor thing, though I can see that getting mighty expensive mighty fast.

I saw Young Frankenstein last night with Chip’s family at The Virginia Theater in downtown Champaign. It’s a pretty nice place, really. You can tell it’s clearly still under renovation, but it’s still amazingly beautiful. I’d like to volunteer for the renovation bits, or something technical, but they only have crowd control parts available for volunteers. Oh, well.

Categories: Life of Peawee
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