Knightsofni

We recently received two Vodafone HSDPA cards. Under Mandriva 2007, getting them to work is quite trivial. Insert the card, run Mandriva Control Center->Network & Internet->Set up a new network interface.

It finds the card:

Enter the PIN for the SIM card:

Choose whichever non-Unlisted network it finds:

The provider is unlisted at present. I guess I should submit a patch or file a bug report with the provider details …

Set the access point name, “Internet” for Vodacom:

Set some options:

If you choose to start the connection on the next screen, you will be connected:

Another nice feature in 2007.0 is VPN support, and the ability to associate VPN connections to a network connection. So, if I had configured my OpenVPN connection first, I would have been offered to associate it to the 3G/HSDPA connection during setup, and bringing the 3G HSDPA connection up (via ifup or the Mandriva net_applet) would start the VPN connection too. Really convenient.

Effect of modifications to /proc/cluster/lock_dlm/drop_count & drop_period

A Service request was logged to obtain more information regarding the impact of changing the default values set in the /proc/cluster/lock_dlm/* files.

# cat /proc/cluster/lock_dlm/drop_count
50000
# cat /proc/cluster/lock_dlm/drop_period
60

There is no documentation to highlight the impacts on the gfs cluster of modifying these two values, so an advanced configuration request was logged to obtain this information.

Response from RedHat

Greetings,

I do not have a definitive answer to your question, but I would request you to refer to below Red Hat Cluster list threads.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/linux-cluster/2005-February/msg00129.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/linux-cluster/2005-January/msg00080.html
Can you let me know the reasons why you want to modify these parameters, is there any problem you are facing ?
I would request you to send me a sysreport of all the nodes so that I can consult with Sr.Engineer, and advice you.
Regards

This is obviously not what we were looking for, so I updated the ticket to inform them of this fact.

Update From Redhat

Hello Scott,
Am looking into this and will update you soon. I don’t think that sysreports are required at this point of time.

I will update this entry as and when I get a response from RedHat.

Further Update From RH:

Setting drop_count to 0 (or increasing it) will allow gfs to cache more locks which can dramatically improve performance in some cases. Allowing gfs to cache more locks will increase the chances that the dlm may run out of memory during recovery. I don’t think there’s any point in changing drop_period; it governs how often gfs will get drop-locks callbacks while the number of locks exceeds drop_count.

This is my first post on this blog.

Just though of putting the picture of my desktop running Mandriva Linux release 2006.0

Its nothing great, just a
* 2x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor
* 2 GB ram
* etc

Pretty good podcast from this site…

www.lugradio.org

Here is the rss link: Lug Radio

Here are some pics that I recently scanned with my new canoscan.

Scotland Landscape:

Winter in Scotland:

South African Wildlife:

After finishing the finance arrangements on Thursday morning, I picked the TDI up on Thursday morning, and added the first 150km to it, before taking this photo (on my 6600) on Friday morning.

So far (with about 400km on the clock), I’m averaging just under 6 l/100km, and I think it should improve a bit once the engine is run (which may be by next week).

For those out-of-the-loop, the TDI is a Golf 5 1.9TDI Comfortline, with the following extras:

1. 2-zone climate control
2. Leather seats (includes electrical adjustment and heated seats)
3. Sunroof
4. Service plan extension to 100000km (the 60000 km isn’t going to last more than 2 years …)
5. Foglights
6. Full-size spare wheel

I had to move the Fox over the weekend, and I almost broke my foot on the clutch pedal!

Now that we have a plethora of blades and workstations, I thought it would be wise to put some support articles up on the blog. The first article that I thought would be handy is the changing of the screen resolution. To do this you need to use the fbconfig tool.

$fbconfig -res /?

This command will show you all of the available resolutions and more importantly, which ones are compatible with screen+card. For the 19″ flat panel monitors, 1280×1024x60 with a color depth of 24bit is the best resolution.

$fbconfig -res 1280x1024x60
$fbconfig -defaultdepth 24

To get help using fbconfig, run:

$fbconfig -help

slr.

Is now available for access. I obviously am not going to give out all the necessary details here …
Documentation for openvpn is HERE

I will provide documentation for the openvpn server within the next few days.
If anyone requires access before then or would like to test, we are setting up an openCA server for cert and key management, but I can manually create on for you in the mean time.

cheers.

There is a new qmail-ldap patch released today - 20060201
There are some minor bug fixes that do not really effect us and there are some feature enhancements. Below is short description from the change log:

Rewritten forwarding code in auth_pop and auth_imap. The copyloop is now
using stdin and stdout for communicating with the client. This should fix
a problem with ssl encrypted sessions. Additionally write polling was
implemented. This should give better reaction on slow links.

~control/goodmailaddr allows more ways to check if a address is allowed:
foobar@qmail-ldap.org full match, user & domain
@qmail-ldap.org match domain only (all users are allowed)
abuse@ allow specific user for all domains
foo-catchall@qmail-ldap.org allow addresses like foo-bar@qmail-ldap.org
or foo-bar-baz@qmail-ldap.org
will only work if compiled with DASH_EXT
catchall@qmail-ldap.org same as @qmail-ldap.org

Enhance qmail-verify to check against ~users/cdb and /etc/passwd if local-
delivery is enabled (like qmail-lspawn does). This makes RCPTCHECK usefull
in mixed user environments.

Minor enhancements in qmail-verify error handling.

Some cleanup in qmail-smtpd mostly log stuff.

Set RELAYCLIENT everytime we allow relaying because of some reason (SMTP AUTH
or relaymailfrom). Requested by many so that qmail-scanner can make additional
decisions based on RELAYCLIENT.

Just use malloc() instead of the code in alloc.c that code could be exploited
on 64-Bit systems with a lot of RAM and no limits.

I will build and test the new patch on Ophelia so that we are in time for the change in 2 weeks.

After a hell of a long wait, I am finally getting my new toy. The CanoScan 9950F Here is a review.
Time to now start scanning all my 35mm & 6×4.5 Slides and negatives and post to the gallery….