I mentioned last entry that wehad seen problems with the onboard nVidia Ethernet ports on our SunFireX2100-based Linux iSCSI backends . Here's thedetails.

The SunFire X2100s have nVidia motherboards and four onboard Ethernetports, two nVidia based ones and two Broadcomms. In our configuration,one Broadcomm and one nVidia port are used for iSCSI networking, theother nVidia port is used for general system access, and the secondBroadcomm port is used only by the integrated service processor

One of the things I said before about ZFS in Linux boilsdown to that it's a lot of hard work to get outside code into the Linuxkernel. This has an important corollary.

This sort of hard work, of modifying foreign code so that it fits intothe Linux kernel, takes people who are pretty skilled Linux kernelprogrammers. These people are skilled enough to have a choice of whatto do, so they can either work on the tedious grinding job of adoptingother people's code into the

Suppose that you have a ZFS pool with redundancy (mirroring or ZFS'sversion of RAID 5 or RAID 6), and that someday you run ' zpool status 'and see the alarming output:

status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. Anattempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.

action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear theerrors using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.

(This has been re-

For an operating system that is theoretically all about being ready torun on enterprise-sized systems (ie big ones), Solaris 10 software hasan awfully bad habit of not dealing well with lots of (iSCSI) disks. Iwouldn't be so put out about a single tool having this flaw, but Solarisprogrammers seem to make this sort of scaling mistake over and over.

The first case I ran into was the version of iscsiadm from the currentversion of patch 119091 (

The Solaris 10 update 6 introduced the new ZFS pool property cachefile , and with it the idea of ZFS cachefiles. I misunderstood what these were before the S10U6 release, so I feellike writing down what they are and how you can use them in a failoverenvironment.

To be able to quickly import a pool without scanning all of the deviceson your system, ZFS keeps a cache of information about the pool andthe devices its found on. Before S10U6 there was only

Here is an interesting question :when is it safe to assume that all of the filenames on your Linuxmachine are encoded in UTF-8?

The simple answer: it's only safe to make this assumption when you (andyour system) have lived entirely within a hermetically sealed UTF-8only bubble, never coming in touch with filenames from outside thatbubble. Now, this is a pretty big bubble and it is slowly expanding,given that basically all new Linux machines default to UTF-8, but

Recently (for my version of 'recently'), R. Francis Smithwrote The Right Social Networking Model Is From 1989 , in praise of social muds(and one in particular, DinoMUSH) as a model for social networkingin general. As it happens I have a certain amount of experience withhanging out on DinoMUSH myself, and so I think that there are somespecific reasons that it works so well as a social network, reasons thatmay make its virtues and approaches harder to apply to social

Linux has a reasonably good set of open source programs for processingand editing photographs shot in the various camera RAW formats ( ufraw is the one I have the most exposureto). But, to my surprise, it seems to be mostly lacking image viewersthat I could use to browse through my pictures to pick out the onesthat are actually worth processing. Or at least image viewers thatmeet my criteria, which include 'must not want to own the world' .

(This criteria disqualifies DigiKam and F-Spot

Every so often, I run into examples of bad RPM packaging . Today's encounter takes the cake for utter packagingfailure, though:

The RPM for VMWare Workstation 6.5.1 contains exactly one file, whichthe postinstall script runs and then removes. This one file is of coursethe regular self-extracting installer that VMWare gives you if you optfor the non-RPM version of VMWare Workstation, which means that it dumpsall sorts of things over your filesystems, thereby completely defeatingalmost all of the