Posts

Posted on

Raja Fashions

I seen an advert for Raja fashions ( http://www.raja-fashions.com/ ) in the economist the other week. I could remember someone mentioning that there is a group of tailors from Hong Kong who sometimes com over here to ply their trade so I decided that I would go and have a look to see what sort of outfit they operated.
Alarm bell 1.
They had hired a small room in the Hilton and there was absolutely nothing on display except cuts of material.
Alarm bell 2.
The advertised prices in the Economist advert are complete rubbish and a lot lower than what they offered me.
Alarm bell 3.
Ladies tailoring for a suit adds £100 to the price.
Alarm bell 4.
There was another guy being seen to by the man himself and he seemed to be making some noise about the whole setup ie none of the information he was now being told was on the website etc.
Anyway at this point I decided I would rather not have anything to do with them so promptly left.
Alarm bell 5.
When I left the guy came out and asked me if I wanted a cheap suit. I explained that the way he was pressuring the guy in there put me off and no I was not particularly interested in a cheap suit which is why I was leaving. I sincerely doubt I would be getting anything but a cheap suit from him regardless of price paid hence my quick departure.
I would still love a tailor made suit and a full length trench coat but it looks as if I am going to have to head to Saville row rather than fly by night traveling salesmen.

Posted on

Tombstone

I was browsing around the web and I came across some quotes from Tombstone the movie. If you haven’t seen it then I suggest you go and watch it post haste. Great story and the dialogue is brilliant.
My favourite character was the Doc (Val Kilmer). While watching his character being played out its a good thing to keep in the back of your mind that he knows he’s dying. Some of the lines the Doc gets to say are nothing short of brilliant.

Posted on

Software Raid

If you ever get this:

mdadm: error opening /dev/md0: No such file or directory

do:

ls -la /dev/md0

If the file does not exist create it as follows: (I am assuming your kernel already supports software raid)

mknod /dev/md0 b 9 0
Posted on

Xen Virtaul Machine

I have been using UML for quite a while now. Unlike most people my main reason for using it is security. You can run a UML instance inside a chrooted env as an unpriviledged user which is a bonus because it’s still a grey area if people can break out of a UML instance over the wire and remain connected (correct me if I am wrong). Breaking out into a chroot (/) as a user with no privs would definitely add another barrier to entry (I am not saying it can’t be broke, just that the guy cracking it is on a differnt level from the normal script kiddie at least until it becomes common knowledge how to do it).
Of course using UML has a price. Its slow. The main problem with UML Is IO. It’s really crap with high IO applications like databases. I tried it with PostgreSQL and it was awfull. Too much context switching.
I had heard of Xen on the grapevine and decided to have a look at it to see if it would be any faster and I was pleasently suprised to find that it is as easy to install as a new kernel. It was at this point that I really kicked myself, Xen as it stands today (version 2.0.7) does not support SMP. So I would be losing a processor using it. Unfortunately this is not acceptable on the machine I am on so I decided to postpone my foray into Xen and stick with UML for the time being on this box or at least until Xen domain 0 can support an SMP machine.
I am however tempted to invest in a single proc machine and run Xen on it. I am confident that Xen does what it says on the tin and that performance gains are substantial over UML but I would rather run a vanilla machine on a dual proc than lose one of them.

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Moving from Lilo to Grub

Is a pain in the ass, or at least it was for me. I have been a die hard lilo fan for a fair while but I wanted to try Xen which meant I needed to use Grub. The biggest problem I had was not realizing that if your grub.conf file is missing then you need to boot manually from the grub command line. The command line is actually quite simple once you know the steps to boot your machine (If you get a VFS error you probably don’t have your file system built into your kernel, try again).
Not knowing how the hell

title blah
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-nnnnnn root=/dev/sda2

the bits in bold above related to each other I created 4 entries in
/boot/grub/grub.conf
and tried each in turn until I realized that
root (hd0,0) is the partition my /boot/*files* are on
and
root=/dev/sda2
is the actual root file system. Would it not have been simpler doing

title blah
boot (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-nnnnnn root=/dev/sda2
Posted on

Software Raid

I created identical partition tables on my two SATA disks or rather I made the/dev/sdb identical to /dev/sda because my current root file system resides in /dev/sda2 and /boot/ is on /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1 == 200MB /boot/
/deb/sda2 == 2GB /
/deb/sda2
/dev/sdb1
/deb/sdb2
/deb/sdb3
I then ran the following command.

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 dev/sdb3

To make sure everything is running properly:

cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid5] [multipath]
md0 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0]
196996992 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[==>..................]  resync = 10.3% (20347136/196996992) finish=46.4min speed=63318K/sec
unused devices:

The next step is that when the resync is finished is to use lvm and set myself up some areas to work in.

Posted on

isd200_get_inquiry_data

If you are compiling a Linux kernel and it fails complaining about
isd200_get_inquiry_data
ide_fix_friveid
Make sure that
CONFIG_USB_STORAGE_ISD200=n
when
CONFIG_USB_STORAGE=y