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After struggling with growing CPU and I/O bandwidth requirements on my infrastructure, I finally made the jump to 64bit. A quick <$600 upgrade was not without its interesting issues.

A few interesting notes:

The Abit KN9 mobo requires me to override my default RAM voltage, and set it manually to 2.0V - Something that was conveniently included on a small note in my box - possibly put there by my reliable vendor, Premier Computer. (www.pccanada.com)
Without this little tweak, memory corruption on default settings didn’t even allow the system to boot. A sort of scary experience after assembling all the hardware.

Even after overcoming this, there was apparent instability running the Xen Hypervisor - strange messages similar to “Invalid CPU Instruction [SMP] CPU 0″ followed by kernel oops and general instability. Turns out a BIOS upgrade solved this - “Wheew”. A notable line in the Abit changelog is “Improved Linux Compatibility”.

In the end I have replaced my Pentium 2.0GHz with 1.5GB of PC133, with a Dual Core X2 4600 @ 2.4 GHz with 4GB of PC6400 OCZ Vista Series. The Xen 64bit PV guests boot in around seven seconds, including the slow MTA start. A fully virtualized 32bit HVM guest running Etch was required to handle the old Xen PV 32bit guests from the old hardware. Until Xen 3.1 is packaged, you can not run 32bit PV guest on a 64bit host/Dom0. The slower 32bit HVM is still much faster than the older system. The additional RAM gives plenty more room to each of the virtualized systems, Web, Mail, DNS, SQL, VPN and Media. Everything but the Media server will eventually become 64bit PV, until TwonkyVision add a 64bit binary to their list of architectures. Fast and Stable Hardware Virtualization for less than $600. Awesome what you can do for the the average small business with no software costs whatsoever. Debian stable packages make day-to-day management effortless, allowing the average enthusiast to focus on continued integration.

Constantly running the latest Debian stable environment, this recent 32bit- to 64it change will mark the first time I have ever “Re-installed’ my OS since originally deploying Debian Potato as my Internet gateway in 2001/2002.

Over the years, thanks to Debian, I have had time to add many new services to the basic mail and web infrastructure. With the addition of Xen, all the physically separate boxes merged into one piece of hot iron. Creating a new “LDAP” server, and a new “SVN” server, and testing out migrations to PowerDNS, Apache2, and leveraging OpenSWAN and OpenVPN all became trivial experiments that did not impact production services or incur any hardware costs, with the help of Xen.

Xen 3.x on a Debian stable system, supported by HP is certainly a winning combination we would love to help any leading edge and technology dependent business take advantage of.

Recently purchased a new 750GB SATA drive and a nice Vantec Nexstar 3 enclosure with the eSata interface, allowing up to 3.0Gbps transfer rates. (Only 1.5Gbps on PCI SATA)

Plugged it into a new SI3114 based PCI card. Interestingly the Linux kernel (stock 2.6.18) seemed to handle a power-up of the 750GB drive without any problem when the system was already running, however the 5.0.32 firmware it shipped with would freeze when the drive had power during the BIOS post. The common problem was easily resolved by downloading a firmware upgrade from Silicon Image and upgrading to the 5.4 series BIOS.

After building the FreeDOS bootdisk as recommended in the README, entering the command updflash r5314.bin fixed everything.

Up until recently, Debian users needed to understand various chip-specific flavours within each architecture. For instance -486, -k7, -k7-smp, -686, -686-smp, etc. were all under the i386 architecture (The 32bit AMD/Intel compatible architecture) and -amd64-k8, -amd64-k8-smp, em64t-p4, etc. were all under the amd64 architecture (The 64bit AMD/Intel architecture).

Recently the chip specific versions have been merging to common binary images with module component for chip-specific hardware and smp options. One binary flavour, the -k7, still exists separately suggesting some optimizations require separate binaries and cannot be rolled up into a common binary package.

This was fine until recently there was no longer an AMD-K7 specific flavour of the Debian Xen Linux System. For now, it appears all current 32bit AMD/Intel processors should run on the ‘686′ flavour and all current AMD/Intel 64bit processors continue to run on the ‘amd64′ flavour. Why there is not a transitional package, used to map the K7 upgrades to the 686 binaries must be due to the focus on Etch release. Since there is no Xen-K7 in Sarge, official transition is not required. Unfortunately for Debian K7 users, Xen has been stable and available for some time and many Etch deployments will face the unofficial manual transition from -k7 to -686. In any event, the lack of communication on this as indicated in Bug 405187 is a bit unusual. One interesting note is that linux-image-2.6-k7 is alive and well, suggesting it is no easy task to merge xen-linux-686 with the linux-image-k7 optimizations. For now, an AthlonXP user will have a -k7 image for non-xen usage, and a -686 image for xen usage. It just does not seem to be sound logic. Certainly it should all be resolved for the Etch release.

It all seems to be working great now. Running Debian default packages and kernels with iommu=off, I used QEMU to run the installer for WinXP and Win2K3. With Xen, both installers seemed to get hung-up at “Setup is Starting…” or thereabouts. In XP, once, I was able to see the F5 menu (only two options in XP) before it hung (still utilizing CPU). In Win2K3 I could never get to the F5 menu leaving me at “Setup is Starting” screen with CPU still being utilized. Using QEMU to get through until the first reboot worked great, and allowed me to proceed to boot using Xen for the subsequent installation process. Both OSes are now up and running, and surprising fast and responsive running on qemu qcow disk images under Xen. Time to test out Solaris, Nexenta and others, and fool around with Suspend/Resume.

After a bit of research, and a hot tip on iommu=off, I am now running Xen on my dv9000z, which is exactly what I spec’d it to do. Read more here.

Yesterday, I was digging around for a quick SATA controller to get a new 500GB disk online. The requirement was short term so I jumped on a $40CAD SIIG SATA-II controller at the computer shop (OTA) next to my office.  The cheapest option for $30CAD was a SATA-I SiG Chipset, but $10CAD more for the SATA-II/NCQ capability seemed ok, and I was anxious after having no luck with the $15CAD HW-629 IDE-SATA adapter. For all the time consumed so far, I would have been happy to just pay $60CAD for a high-end Promise controller.  The sticker on the SIIG chipset was the first sign of trouble.  A couple of old threads suggesting no Linux support for Initio Corporation 1622/1623 devices (as discovered by lspci) confirmed the worst.  Then, I found this new thread discussing recent linux support. There may be hope yet for anyone else with one of these Initio 162x SATA controllers mad by Sunix, SIIG and others.

I hope to find myself running Debian on one of these someday soon.  I have yet to see the hardware specs, however today I know of no other OS X capable device that does not run Linux well.  My fingers are crossed as I wait to see what the first ones look like on the inside.  Running a VOIP client on the Toronto Wifi network could certainly be one way to claw back at the increasing incremental cost of mobile phone technology.  Stretch your imagination to include a V4L device, a vlc server and client, a vpn client running on another small device, and voila, the home theatre goes mobile.  Native OSX could probably handle this just fine also - Just no fancy package management.

Well, I get a fair bit of mail these days.  Some can attest that my response to personal email can be at times, a bit slow.  Thank goodness for DSPAM.  I use a variety of e-mail clients (Linux-Evolution,  Windows-Outlook,  OSX-SeaMonkey, etc.) so having great spam filtering on the server, and NOT on the email client is very important to me.   Since DSPAM provides a nice GUI for analysis of spam,  I thought I would share with you my experience to date.   Here are my stats, noting that more than 3/4 of my mail is spam, and accuracy on delivery is over 97%, which is quite manageable. Not bad for free, and without a team reviewing emails for me.  I might say it is great.  A must for anyone who wants to publish their email address without fear of spammers.

Thanks to a colleague, I found a nice informative link on Virtualization. Trying to resolve ACPI on my new laptop, I recently stumbled on the 2.6.20-rc2 kernel option for KVM and assumed it to be some new piece my Xen hypervisor could take advantage of (once I get the ACPI issues resolved). Instead, I have just learned that it provides native kernel virtualization, such that you can just boot your favorite ISO (Windows, Solaris, OSX, Linux) and go. Seems easy enough I will try out the Deban instructions tonight as shown on kvm.sourceforge.net. The first step is only apt-get install kvm if you already have a 2.6.20-rc2 or greater kernel.

To install and run kvm on Debian, follow these steps:

1. Run the commands:
   apt-get install kvm apt-get install kvm-source
   m-a build kvm
   m-a install kvm
   modprobe kvm
2. Create a disk image:
   qemu-img create -f qcow vdisk.img 10G
3. Install an operating system:
   kvm -hda vdisk.img -cdrom /path/to/boot-media.iso -boot d -m 384If you’re installing Windows, add the -no-acpi flag.
4. After installation is complete, run it with:
   kvm -hda vdisk.img -boot c -m 384