Discuss April 2005

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234 participants
291 discussions

Document Management System
by Joao Medeiros 16 Apr '05

16 Apr '05

Hi all, I was wondering if someone can give me some pointers to a good Document Management System. I've been using Knowledge Tree for a while and just wondering if there is something a bit more robust. I'm archiving technical specs, functional documents, etc... TIA, Joao João Medeiros Linux User 381318

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RE: Older 3ware controller, was: [CentOS] Serial ATA hardware raid.
by Bryan J. Smith 16 Apr '05

16 Apr '05

From: Harald Finnås > You seem to know what you're talking about, Seems v. Knows is a whole new ballgame. But I have been deploying SCSI on Linux since 1993 (Advansys, now owned by LSI, was the first vendor to formally support Linux), SCSI RAID on Linux since 1997 (large ICP-Vortex), through 3Ware's original FPGA ASIC designs in the AccelATA and Escalade 5000 series in 1999+. For a more "concept-level" dissertation on: - Software RAID via OS LDM/LVM - Fake/Free RAID (FRAID) "dumb cards" - Buffering Microcontroller+DRAM intelligent cards - Non-blocking ASIC+SRAM intelligent cards see my article "Dissecting ATA RAID Options in Sys Admin magazine (http://www.samag.com) 2004 April. It's now dated, but the concepts still apply. > One of my friends called me the other day regarding problems with centos > installation on 3ware 7810-8 controller. I have several of that, same model -- 64-bit, 1MB SRAM > According to him the driver loads just fine, he can see AND partition the drive from the console, > but the installation program doesn't seem to want to use the array. The system doesn't dual-boot with Windows, does it? If so, it could be a LDM Disk Label (Dynamic Disc) which kernel 2.4.x supports, but Red Hat Anaconda (which uses GNU Parted/GRUB) does not. Also, consider upgrading to the latest firmware. If you're booting RH3+ (RHL8/9/FC1, RHEL3), you should be at least release 7.7.x. Otherwise there might be driver-firmware interaction issues. > He says it works like a charm on > mdk 9.2 beta. > Any tips? Boot with "linux expert" and hit Alt-F2 and run "fdisk -l /dev/sda". > I haven't looked into the problem yet, > and I don't even know what this old controller is. :) _All_ Escalade 7000/8000 series controllers use the same 64-bit ASIC, FPGA (field programmable) ATA logic and firmware. This includes a 7.5 (was it?) release that added LBA48 (ATA-6) addressing and UDMA Mode 6 (U133) speed support. Again., getting to 7.7.x should be a top priority - the RH3 and, especially, RH4 kernels have drivers that match these much newer 3Ware firmware-driver-3DM releaases. FYI: For reference: 7400/7800 = 33PCI64 full-length, 64-bit ASIC, 1MB SRAM, 4/8 channel 7410/7810 = as 7400/7800 but *half*-length 7450/7850 = as 7410/7810 but *2MB* 0 wait state SRAM 7500-4/8 = 7450/7850 merely renamed 7500-12 = as 7500-4/8, but with *4MB* SRAM and 12 channels 7506-x = as 7500-x, but 66PCI64 interface (ASIC clock doubled)

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Re: [CentOS] Serial ATA hardware raid.
by Franki 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

Jonathan wrote: > Franki: > > Can't speak for all of them, but the IDE 160s I bought failed me pretty > hard (2 of 6 failed within a year). The 250s Sata 8ms I bought for a > NAS application have been rock solid. > > Seems inconsistent, but in general the WD Sata drives I have are pretty > solid. > > Jonathan I don't understand, aren't they more or less the same drive with a different PCB on the back? I'm just remembering all the problems I had several years back when I was running RH4-6.2 on WD drives. I would imagine that with striping, the 8MB 7200 drives would be good enough, and besides, it's not like I can't upgrade later. The 10,000rpm drives have me alittle worried about heat and longevity anyway. Thanks for all your help guys, I'm amazed at the wealth of knowledge on this list. regards Frank

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Re: [CentOS] Serial ATA hardware raid.
by Bryan J. Smith 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

From: Franki > The 3ware 9500 goes for $1023 AUD. > once I add some fast drives to that this thing is starting to look like an expensive upgrade. RAID-5 is only ideal for lots of contiguous reads or disk storage efficiency. If you have more writes, or more random reads, then RAID-0+1 is better. Then the 8506 does nice for less. > My main wholesaler sells Adaptec stuff, I live 5 miles from one of Adaptec's major support centers in the 1,006 acre University of Central Florida Research Park. I know many Adaptec employees. Adaptec still does not officially support Linux for RAID cards, only standard SCSI adapters. And unlike LSI/Symbios, who treats OEM and retail the same (making suppor easier), Adaptec is retail focused, and produces variants for OEMs that are quite compatibility nightmares. > http://www.techbuy.com.au/products/34526/I_OCARDS_HARDDRIVECONTROLLERS/Adda… > For $450 it is a 4 port controller and has onboard 64MB ECC cache. Adaptec's aging 2400A/2800A series are 66-100MHz i960/IOP30x series based on their former DPT acquisition. In fact, before their DPT acquisition, they had virtually *no* i960 or StrongARM solution that worked with Linux. Since then, the support has been varied, although the dpt_i2o driver seems to work with most products. Intel designed I20 for its i960 to make drivers and user-space software more uniform compatible, but only a few vendors (like DPT and LSI) took advantage of it. I used to have DPT and LSI i960 SCSI RAID controllers on Linux, NT, OpenVMS and UNIX on a variety of non-PC platforms like Alpha and MIPS. But, as I mentioned before, the i960/IOP30x is a *massive*slouche* for today's drives. The ones used in the 2400A/2800A series were fine 5 years ago, but don't even bother with the 28x0 and the 24x0's i960 is going to be the bottleneck. And then you have the fact that Adaptec is "hands-off," officially, on the dpt_i2o driver. Get a 3Ware Escalade 8506-4 for about the same price, and either run RAID-5 if you have lots of reads, or RAID-0+1 if you are doing lots of writes (especially random). Yeah, you'll lose a disk in the effective storage for RAID-0+1, but I've yet to see an application where RAID-5 could beat RAID-0+1 on any controller. > But Alexander on the list here said that adaptec is questionable > for Raid cards. The last time I had an Adaptec anything was a 2940UW Scsi controller > and that thing gave me years of good service. Retail, of course. For those of us with OEM versions, Linux compatibility is a nightmare. Why can't Adaptec be like LSI and just have one set of firmware? > Not sure what to chase up now. :-( > Does anyone have any experiance with the above adaptec card? Yes. At RAID-5, it only beats the Escalade 8506 at random writes where the measly 2-4MB SRAM oveflows. But then the Escalade 9500S with 128MB+ of DRAM buffer (in addition to the ASIC+SRAM cache) wipes the floor with it because it doesn't have a 10 year-old i960 behind it. When it comes to non-writes (or RAID-0, 1 or 0+1 non-blocking), its 32-bit blocking/buffering i960 microcontroller+DRAM bottleneck looses badly to the 64-bit non-blocking/caching ASIC+SRAM design of any 3Ware product. And 3Ware writes the GPL drivers in the kernel, which have been included since 2.2.15 (yes, 2.*2*.15). 3Ware's 3DM2 suite is also very nice for user-space monitoring. And yes, you can load 3DM2 from the 9500S download on the older 7000/8000 series (just not the 6000 series). BTW, performance matters *little* if you are putting your storage controller on the same bus as your NIC. Especially if it's a measly, "shared" 33MHz PCI32 bus. You might as well use 2 hard drives in RAID-1 because you're going to saturate it - let alone your GbE is going to be "fighting" it. Get a mainbaord with PCI-X, or at least get a chipset with the GbE on a HyperTransport interconnect or PCIe x1 rail so it's not fighting the storage controller for the PCI bus. Of course most chipset GbE and 99% of GbE cards are poorly designed (8-32KB of SRAM is typical, 64KB is you are lucky), and one should get a GbE card for a server with at least 256KB SRAM.

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Re: [CentOS] Serial ATA hardware raid.
by Bryan J. Smith 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

From: Harald Finnås > 3ware (7500, 8500, 9500) is IMHO best bet on all distros 3Ware includes a GPL driver in the stock kernel. Although as with any "intelligent" storage adapter, you should verify the driver, firmware and user-space tools are compatible. I need to get my FAQ out showing 3Ware releases v. Red Hat updates. The 3Ware 7506/8506 are of the same 64-bit ASIC 66MHz PCI64 storage switch. They are non-blocking (like a network switch) thanx to their ASIC+SRAM (static RAM) design and kill at RAID-0, 1 and 0+1. While they are also high performing at RAID-5 reads, the small amount of 2MB (-4, -8) or 4MB (-12) SRAM can overflow on random, RAID-5 writes. The 3Ware 9500S series adds 128MB+ SDRAM to help buffer these overflows. Unlike RAID-0, 1 and 0+1, RAID-3/4/5 are always blocking/buffered I/O, so the ASIC+SRAM design goes from an advantage to a liability. So if your application calls for lots of random writes, either use RAID-0+1 or get a 9500S for $50-200 more. > I also run it on an LSI SATA controller, > but I cannot remember the exact model. > But I can find it if you want to know. :) Unless the model says "X" (for XScale), you don't want it. Pre-XScale (StrongARM lineage) microcontroller+DRAM designs are *dog*slow*. Intel i960 (including IOP30x series) can't push much beyond 60-70MBps. While that was sufficient for yester-year's drives in RAID-3/4/5, it is not today. And blocking/buffered is never ideal for ATA. The StrongARM and, subsequent, superscalar XScale microcontrollers change everything. They can push as little as 200MBps in old designs up to 500MBps in the new IOP32x/33x series. But you'll pay through the nose for the cards, $500+, although they do best even the 3Ware 9500S at RAID-5. Some have RAID-3/4 options that are more ideal than RAID-5 for desktops and NFS servers, respectively. But if you are looking for maximum performance, reliability and compatibility as well as load-balanced reads, RAID-0+1 on a sub-$300 3Ware Escalade 8506-4 (or a -8 for a little more) is pretty much unbeatable. The 9500S is overkill for just RAID-0+1, and if you're doing lots of writes, it's typically going to be faster than any RAID-5 solution. For extreme performance with disk redundancy, consider (2) 3Ware 8506 cards in an Opteron system with an AMD8131 or AMD8132 dual-PCI-X bus HyperTransport Tunnel -- with each card on their own PCI-X bus and then their individual RAID-0+1 volumes in a single LVM2 stripe set (RAID-0). Connected to a GbE in the HyperTransport interconnect or, better yet, a HTX (HyperTransport) 10GbE (just coming out) or InfiniBand (upto 1.8GBps actual performance on HTX) and you're slapping silly anything Intel can offer with either Xeon or Itanium over PCI-X by a factor of 2-3x.

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PHP5?
by Håvard Hebnes 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

Any ideas if or when PHP5 will be released? Do you think RH will release it to CentOS-4, or do we have to wait for the next major release? Noticed that PHP-5.0.4 is in the fedora-4 beta release.. Regards, Håvard

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IBM BladeCenter HS20 blades
by Brendon Colby 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

Greetings, We have purchased an IBM BladeCenter and I am in the process of testing Linux installation on these things (boot off SAN i.e. qla2300 driver, not using internal drives). My distro of choice is Debian, however, since I'm really not interested in trying to hand compile all the drivers, I decided to try CentOS (which I'm so far very impressed with). On boot, as with the Debian Sarge disk, the CDROM disappears. The installation media complains that it cannot find the CD. I'm testing using the DVD ISO of CentOS 4. Has anyone been successful in getting CentOS 3/4 installed on a BladeCenter server? I noticed back in 11/04 there were a few posts on it. Thanks. Brendon Colby

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Winbind idmap & Active Directory
by Kyle Gordon 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

Hey all, I'm running the latest and greatest CentOS4 here, along with Samba and Winbind coupled to an Active Directory server. It's all working smoothly, bar one little bit, the idmap gui and uid directives. It appears to be ignoring them completely. I've pasted the relevant directives below... winbind separator = + idmap uid = 10000-20000 idmap gid = 10000-20000 winbind enum users = yes winbind enum groups = yes winbind nested groups = yes Yet a sample user and group ID is 16777439:16777217 - well outside the range requested. Am I missing something really obvious here? The same config works just fine on a Debian Testing server. Regards Kyle -- Kyle Gordon kyle(a)lodge.glasgownet.com http://lodge.glasgownet.com

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rpmstrap & CentOS 4, feedback requested
by Sam Hart 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

Hi everyone, I've been working on a tool similar to debootstrap but designed to work with RPM-based distributions. The intent of such a tool is to be able to bootstrap a basic working RPM-based system (I use it primarily for creating chroots for cross-distro development and testing, but it could also be used for simple installs or even upgrade and dep-closure tests). It's called "rpmstrap" and it currently works "pretty well" with i[3456]86 versions of Fedora Core 2, Fedora Core 3, and CentOS 4. You can get it here: http://hackers.progeny.com/~sam/rpmstrap/ QND instructions on using it to build a basic CentOS 4 chroot can be found here: http://trac.samhart.net/trac/wiki/rpmstrap_CentOS4 Up until now, it's primarily been an internal tool I've been using for cross-distro work, but I would like to release it more generally. Before I do this, however, I'd really love some feedback from some of the CentOS 4 community to be sure I haven't done anything too screwy with the basic CentOS 4 packages my CentOS 4 suite script installs. It's really intended to be an extremely basic system, but one which you can quickly chroot into and "yum install" whatever you need above and beyond... That being said, I essentially started with packages that I wanted and did my best to solve the deps for them, so I may be missing some things that "should" be in a basic CentOS 4 system. Feedback /probably/ isn't appropriate for the CentOS mailing list, so please just send them directly to me. KNOWN ISSUES: (so I don't get emails about them ;-) * x86_64 does not work on any of the suites except for /maybe/ FC2. I honestly haven't had access to an x86_64 box to test, and I also haven't had the need for x86_64 chroots. x86_64 patches would be gratefully accepted :-D * Several parameters are listed but not implemented yet. Things like excluding and adding packages are presently just planned. * It doesn't really determine the native architecture in a way I feel is as portable as in debootstrap. * The docs for writing new suite scripts (or even understanding what wacky stuff is going on in them) aren't there yet. -- ''''''''''''''''''''''''' .O. Sam Hart, sam(a)progeny.com ..O Progeny Linux Systems, Inc OOO <http://www.progeny.com/>

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OT: WIndows 2000 discussion list reference
by James B. Byrne 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

I have need of a place similar to this list to ask about a problem that I am experiencing with windows explorer (not MS-IE) subsequent to applying the latest updates from MicroSoft. I have googled the net but the problem is one of overwhelming opportunity rather than want. Do any of you have recommendations for a preferred source of online assistance for Windows 2000? Regards, Jim P.S. Thanks for the suggestions regarding removing user profiles for resolving obscure Foxfire difficulties. The problems seem to have all disappeared since doing this. JBB -- *** e-mail is not a secure channel *** mailto:byrnejb.<token>@harte-lyne.ca James B. Byrne Harte & Lyne Limited vox: +1 905 561 1241 9 Brockley Drive fax: +1 905 561 0757 Hamilton, Ontario <token> = hal Canada L8E 3C3

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Discuss April 2005