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| Author |
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| 25 new of 547 responses total. |
cross
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response 277 of 547:
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May 19 13:26 UTC 2003 |
Sure thing, Jan. I'm not sure what to say about the 7899G based card,
other than, ``try it and see if it works.'' I do see that a few
people on various mailing lists say things like, ``I beat the living
snot out of a 7899G with 20 drives on it and it worked just fine.''
(http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/openbsd/2002-12/0019.html).
It seems they probably cut and pasted the supported hardware list from
the architecture specific hardware web page into the install document;
I'd suggest that you're correct in guessing it's an artifact of a less
than perfect document update process.
btw- Just because it's absent from the floppy doesn't mean it's absent
from the CD boot media. For instance, the drivers for both the SCSI
card and RAID should be on ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.3/cdrom33.fs
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janc
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response 278 of 547:
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May 19 14:00 UTC 2003 |
OK, just starting to read about RAID. Looks like the Promise RAID controller
on the motherboard is for IDE only (and may not be supported by OpenBSD
anyway) so we are talking about software RAID, which in the case of OpenBSD
is RAIDframe. Apparantly OpenBSD 3.1 and later do support having the
root partition mirrored on RAID.
RAIDframe supports RAID levels 0, 1, 4 and 5 and miscellaneous other things.
It's not in the generic kernal. We'd need to rebuild with it. There are a
huge number of options here, just beginning with the question of which RAID
level to use.
My feeling is that RAID is a sensible answer for Grex. It can win us
performance gains and added data security in the case of a disk crash.
It wastes a lot of disk space, but we have the space to waste. It does
not protect us from someone accidentally deleting files, so it is no
substitute for backups.
However, going the RAID route means (1) spending some time weighing which
RAID configuration (if any) is right for Grex, and (2) spending some time
getting it all set up. Doing this right is going to require a lot of time
and a lot of staff members in the loop. I don't want to stall bringing
the system on line for code porting and other development while we do
this. Maybe I should do an OpenBSD install onto the IDE disk. We can
work there, build a raid kernal, configure RAID on the SCSI disks then
boot off that.
This may be the best choice right now. It gets the system to a state where
I can do what I know a lot about (software), and defers the decisions about
disk setup a little longer to give other staff time to chime in if they want.
If I'm going to implement Dan's plan, then I'll need to do it in two stages
anyway, since it doesn't look like you can get a RAID system straight off the
CD.
The minus with doing the OpenBSD install on the IDE disk is that it doesn't
give the three SCSI drives on the 29160 controller a good work-out, and that's
questionable enough to be worth beating on. However, I can create some
temporary partitions there, and start a program reading/writing stuff to them,
just to give them a workout.
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cross
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response 279 of 547:
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May 19 15:05 UTC 2003 |
The last time I did an OpenBSD install into RAIDframe, I think I did
something like the following:
(1) Installed onto a single drive.
(2) Recompiled the kernel and tested it.
(3) Booted single-user.
(4) Dumped /usr, /usr/local, /var and all the
partitions I was RAID'ing to temp space
somewhere.
(5) Reclaimed the space of all the partitions
I wanted to RAID'ify into one big partition
using disklabel.
(6) Configured and started up RAID.
(7) Edited the RAID set disklabel and set up my
partitions.
(8) Rebuilt the new RAID set's parity (which went
surprisingly quickly).
(9) newfs'ed the new partitions and mounted them.
(10)restored the earlier dumps to the new, RAIDed
partitions.
This is slightly more complex, but I think you could do something similar
to get RAID working on the SCSI disks. Certainly, installing onto the
IDE disk gives you the manueverability to bootstrap the SCSI drives.
Of course, that doesn't resolve the issue of deciding on an optimal
configuration.
Some more suggestions: Use RAID level 5. You only have three disks;
if you had four, I'd suggest using 1+0, that's out. Anyway, RAID 5 will
give decent performance (particularly if coupled with soft updates on all
partitions), will protect against dropping a disk, and won't waste *too*
much disk space. With only three disks, you don't have much else in the
way of choices for RAID levels. Striping won't but you any reliability,
RAID 4 is just dumb, and you don't have enough disk for mirroring.
The last real question is how big to set the interleaves. I'd say 64KB,
and the reason for that is that 4.4BSD's FFS implementation defines a
weak concept of an ``extent''; basically, it'll try to read or write up
to 64KB in a single burst from/to the disk, if it can. A 64KB interleave
size matches up with that idea of an extent as used by the filesystem,
and should give pretty good performance.
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cross
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response 280 of 547:
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May 19 15:06 UTC 2003 |
Oh, PS- Didn't remmers donate an OpenBSD machine that could be used
for software porting and things of that nature, leaving time to get
the nextgrex configuration right?
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janc
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response 281 of 547:
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May 19 16:09 UTC 2003 |
Yup, he did.
Well, ran into another snag in the OpenBSD install. OpenBSD can't find
a network interface.
During the boot up, when it is polling the PCI bus, it lists:
Broadcom BCM5702X rev 0x02 at pci0 dev 8 function 0 not configured.
That means it sees it, but doesn't have a driver for it. On th list of
supported hardware it says:
# Broadcom BCM570x (a.k.a. Tigon3) based PCI adapters (bge): (A) (B) (C)
The (A) (B) (C) business means that the driver isn't on any of the install
floppies.
I think this means I need the CD to do the install. I can't very easily do
an ftp install without a network driver.
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cross
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response 282 of 547:
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May 19 18:38 UTC 2003 |
Wait; if you burn a CD with the CD-ROM boot image on it, does that have
the driver? You should be able to boot with it and perform an installation
from there.
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cross
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response 283 of 547:
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May 19 18:39 UTC 2003 |
(PS- to Clarify. The CD boot image is different from the OpenBSD CD
distribution, and can be downloaded from the OpenBSD web site. Given
that there's a CD burner in Nextgrex, it shouldn't be hard to do. The
URL for the CD-ROM image is: ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.3/cdrom33.f
s
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janc
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response 284 of 547:
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May 19 19:06 UTC 2003 |
Right. Unfortunately, I blew away the Windows98 install Mark did on Next
Grex, so I'd need to first install something on NextGrex that can fetch
that file over the network and can burn a CD. I have a number of different
old OS's on CDs that I could try, but none are painless. I don't have another
computer with a CD burner.
The real live OpenBSD 3.3 bsd was shipped from Alberta on Tuesday, apparantly.
It should arrive in the next few days. There are also probably lots of people
who could make me a CD with that file on it. Either of these two paths seem
much easier than reinstalling Windows98 on NextGrex.
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aruba
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response 285 of 547:
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May 19 19:20 UTC 2003 |
We don't know for sure if our CDs shipped Tuesday, only that our credit card
was charged then. I sent mail to the shipping guy at openbsd.org to ask if
they really did ship.
But anyway, dang offered to make Jan a CD, and he'll bring it over tonight.
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remmers
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response 286 of 547:
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May 19 22:24 UTC 2003 |
Re #280: My machine is still online and available to any staffer who
wants access. It's currently running OpenBSD 3.2. If it's going to be
used to test out software, I should upgrade it to 3.3. If I have time
to do that in the next couple of days I will, but to be honest free time
is in somewhat short supply this week. I'll see how it goes. Dang
installed a CVS server on it, the idea being to use that to document
our work. The CVS server hasn't been used yet, and nothing much else
has been done with the machine yet either, so it might not be too
unreasonable to use the OpenBSD CDs, when they arrive, to install 3.3
from scratch on my machine, then ask dang politely to re-install the
CVS server...
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janc
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response 287 of 547:
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May 20 00:49 UTC 2003 |
Turns out Valerie can burn CD's. I should have known that. So I've got a
working boot CD now.
I tried logging into John's machine and failed. I should give him a call and
see what I've got wrong.
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janc
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response 288 of 547:
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May 20 01:54 UTC 2003 |
Hmmm. Got it installed on the disk, but boot from the disk seems to be
hanging when the kernel tries to initialize the audio drivers. I'll
investigate more later tonight and report back.
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aruba
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response 289 of 547:
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May 20 03:11 UTC 2003 |
I had a little trouble with the audio in Windows 98, actually. It mostly
worked, but occasionally produced static when it should have been playing a
sound. I figured it was because I needed a different version of the driver,
or it needed to be reinstalled.
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other
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response 290 of 547:
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May 20 03:22 UTC 2003 |
Why are we worrying about making the audio drivers on the next Grex
machine work?
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janc
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response 291 of 547:
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May 20 03:31 UTC 2003 |
OK, some details. As the kernal starts up, it prints out lots of messages
describing the various devices. When booting from the CD or floppy, it finds
the audio device, but doesn't have a driver for it (of course, since this is
a install disk and it doesn't need audio), so it says:
"VIA VT8233 AC97 Audio" rev 0x50 at pci0 dev 17 function 5 not configured
When we boot from the hard disk, it finds the device, and has a driver, but
the driver seems to fail to initialize. It types the following, and then
hangs forever with the cursor at the end of the line:
auvia0 at pci0 dev 17 function 5 "VIA VT8233 AC97 Audio" rev 0x50_
It should go on to finish the line by typing something like
auvia0 at pci0 dev 17 function 5 "VIA VT8233 AC97 Audio" rev 0x50: irq 9
We never get the ": irq 9" part. (It is IRQ 9, according to the bios).
One fix would be to build a kernal without the audio driver. It's not like
Grex needs audio. Any better ideas?
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janc
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response 292 of 547:
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May 20 03:39 UTC 2003 |
Eric slipped in. I don't care very much about making them work. Right now
they are keeping us from booting, which I do care about. I'd slightly prefer
to know what is causing it to fail.
We are going to have to do an OpenBSD install on this machine every year or
so. We need to figure out how to do it smoothly. It's worth a little effort
to find the *best* way to deal with problems, not just some workaround kludge.
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cross
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response 293 of 547:
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May 20 03:42 UTC 2003 |
Hmm; can you disable the onboard audio in the BIOS? It sounds like
it's hanging in the probe routine; perhaps it's having difficulties
disambiguating the audio device from something else it might share
an interupt line with? Maybe there's a bug allocating an IRQ?
Weird.
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janc
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response 294 of 547:
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May 20 03:45 UTC 2003 |
Found this:
http://www.netsys.com/openbsd-misc/2003/01/msg00734.html
Appears to be someone having the same problem.
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janc
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response 295 of 547:
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May 20 04:26 UTC 2003 |
The discussion of this problem above didn't find any sensible solutions, so
I'm willing to just disable the device. Looks like there are two ways to do
this without recompiling the the kernal.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=boot_config&sektion=8&arch=i38
6
To make this work, you need to tell it to boot "/bsd -c" instead of /bsd.
However, it doesn't prompt for a kernal to boot, and I don't know how to
make it do so.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=config&sektion=8&arch=i386
To make this work, I need a reasonably running system. Booting off the
CD and mounting the / partition under /mnt doesn't do it. The config program
is not on the install CD and the copy on the hard disk wants ld.so which it
can't seem to find while booted off the CD. I might be able to figure out
how to make this work, if I was less sleepy.
Either way, I just need to do "disable auvia" and that should kill the
audio card.
I'm going to bed.
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lk
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response 296 of 547:
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May 20 07:00 UTC 2003 |
Maybe you'll dream up another solution, like disabling the audio in the
BIOS so OpenBSD will never see it in the first place...?
(I suppose it could be a jumper on the motherboard if not a BIOS option.)
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janc
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response 297 of 547:
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May 20 11:24 UTC 2003 |
Yeah Leeron! There is a thing in the BIOS to disable the Audio Controller,
and with that turned off, we can boot.
I'd still like to know how to tell OpenBSD to boot off something else.
It seems to sometimes show a "boot>" prompt briefly, and if you type
something then it won't fill it in itself. However, when I started
booting off the CD, typed "boot wd0a:/bsd -c" at the boot> prompt,
it went ahead and booted off the CD anyway. Well, I'll get plenty more
chances to experiment with this.
In the true OpenBSD spirit, after all this work, it greets me by telling me
I'm an idiot:
Don't login as root, use su
Root's the only account on the system, and that's a comma splice, you idiots.
Sorry, I have personality conflicts with OpenBSD.
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cross
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response 298 of 547:
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May 20 12:49 UTC 2003 |
Most of the world has personality conflicts with OpenBSD. Hey, disabling
the audio device in the BIOS; I said that in #293!
Comma splices are bad, use semicolons.
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cross
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response 299 of 547:
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May 20 12:51 UTC 2003 |
So Jan, just so I can be sure I understand what's going on; a minimal
OpenBSD installation is on the IDE drive, and it's seeing all the
devices now?
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janc
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response 300 of 547:
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May 20 14:45 UTC 2003 |
Yup. Staff has been informed, John Remmers has successfully logged in.
My next step is to write some little scripts to copy data around fiercely
on the three SCSI disks, just to increase my confidence that the controller
really is working right with multiple drives.
Yeah, you did say that didn't you? I was way too sleepy last night.
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remmers
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response 301 of 547:
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May 20 14:50 UTC 2003 |
Yep, I logged in and created myself a "remmers" account.
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