Astro Shapes Information Technology Blog - Comments

GIles: Ubuntu 7.10, NVidia and Screen Flickering

nospam@example.com (GIles) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:17:09 -0400

To see the cause go into NVIDIA X Server Settings: PowerMizer and watch Performance Level go from 0,1,2 while trying something openGL-like e.g. compiz zooming. Notice the flicker occurs when the level changes.

To stop the flicker go to DFP-0 and uncheck 'Force Full GPU scaling'.

James Miller: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (James Miller) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:25:18 -0400

Excellent discussion.

I have followed the various bonding solutions available on Linux since I was doing load balancing work in the late 90's but have never found anything that delivers on bonding two links to maximize bandwidth utilization.

I have a FIOS and Cable link that I've been trying modes 5,6 on with various 3com 509's and netgear 100mbit nics that I assumed would be better without any luck. mii-tool seems to work fine with the nics.. but can't get them to attach correctly.

I've read through Darren Kindlund's discussion of policy routing (Great Read btw!) that's a case for two defaults but wonder if anyone has rules that will monitor and direct traffic based on load on the individual nics?

John Baker: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (John Baker) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:23:37 -0400

Policy routing (or source routing) with ip route2 is the way to do multiple gateways in linux. I use it on a Linux based wan-router to divide Internet traffic between what needs to go out over the wan through the TI and what gets to use the faster DSL. Basically it allows you to use separate routing tables based on criteria you set up with rules.

Craig Deering: Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Craig Deering) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:29:03 -0400

There are a few things I would try. After updating the BIOS, be sure that the network ports are enabled in the BIOS. I want to say it's under the integrated peripherals section.

Also check 'dmesg' after booting up and see if the kernel is recognizing the devices.

A final check is to do an 'lspci' from the command line and make sure the hardware is on and found. You'll also need to make sure the driver is loaded with an 'lsmod'.

P Perker: Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (P Perker) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:09:25 -0400

Hi, thanks for posting this useful document

I have one issue. I've updated the BIOS and since then the network card does not appear to be working. Any ideas on how to configure the network?

Craig Deering: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Craig Deering) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:19:53 -0500

The IP address you choose is really dependent on your network. Can you describe your current situation? Maybe give the output of:

$ ifconfig

josh: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (josh) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:02:55 -0500

I realize that this is the fix that I must employ. However, I am such a noob that I really have no clue how to execute this. I can open a terminal window and access network/interfaces but I really do not know where to go from there since I do not have any specific IP addresses for use in mind. Could you please help me get started?

jaremy: Windows, DNS and AJAX

nospam@example.com (jaremy) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:18:55 -0500

well, this information is very helpful for our programmer.

Craig Deering: Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Craig Deering) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:24:45 -0500

One thing that I found to be an issue was the MAC address. If the card uses the same MAC address as your OS, you will have problems.

What I normally do is give the card a separate unique IP address and make up a fake MAC address that you know will never appear on your LAN. For example, take the first byte of the MAC address and change it. So if the first byte is "00", make it "0F".

Mike Whitton: Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Mike Whitton) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:03:33 -0500

Hello, nice document, I found this to be helpful.

One issue I am running into is that when the server is up and running the card does not appear to be working (i.e. cannot ping it, etc.), however, when I reboot my machine, prior to the OS (ubuntu 8.10) coming up, everything works fine. As soon as Ubuntu starts and I can log in the IPMI infrastructure malfunctions. Any ideas?

NIks: Ubuntu 7.10, NVidia and Screen Flickering

nospam@example.com (NIks) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:16:37 -0400

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feel free to visit my blog and leave your comments and suggestion to improve my site.

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Goblin: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Goblin) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:47:21 -0400

Important note: bonding is a technology designed for layer 2 failover/loadbalancing, as such it dose not incorporate any IP layer logic, it simply works with L2 traffic. Thus if you need load balancing for internet connections where ISP dose not support bonding on the other side of the both links (99% of cases) then you should take a closer look at iproute2 with policy routing and other usefull L3 features.

John: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (John) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:00:50 -0400

Probably worth mentioning that mode=balance-alb doesn't work for all network drivers - it needs the driver to support mac address setting while device is open.

My realtek 8169 gigabit controllers didn't work until I changed to mode=balance-tlb

Oh and when it did work for some reason it had changed the mac addresses of the physical interfaces to all zeros except for the last two hex digits (which survived) - this made udev see them as eth2 and eth3 (I only have two interfaces).

source_code: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (source_code) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:20:46 -0400

I have used ifenslave package in the past. it seems to work pretty flawlessly but when it comes down to load balance or failover using multiple gateways there are some things you have to consider. first being that ifenslave is not your best solution if you are looking for multi wan. this is a great confusion with a lot of people.
during my initial setup for a poweredge server for our county probation office i decided to use ifenslave. its actually pretty neat.
further more i would like to advise "balance" this seems like a pretty good solution for network load balancing. When applying such a scheme. you must consider that your ISP allows multiwan bonding. Most of them will refuse right off the shelf but my suggestion is to give it a try.
if using load balancing you need to consider staying with the same ip for the second connection. which will probably result in you having the same gateway for both channels.
using two different isp's for bonding will only give you fail over since packets can not be routed to two different gateways at the same time.
most government institutions as well as most banks will not allow you a valid online session since they monitor you session by ip. packets received by two differnet sources will result in session rejection.
check this link out and see what you can learn:
http://balance.sourceforge.net

Mohammed: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Mohammed) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:11:31 -0400

I have two dsl modems i want to make two saperat bonds out of two interfaces & i also want only one gateway & one DNS.
Modem 1 --> 192.168.0.1
modem 2 --> 192.168.0.1
server Ip add --> 192.168.0.99
it is possible to do this.Plzz tell me

meLon: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (meLon) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:20:49 -0400

Awesome.

"UPDATE (05/22/2008): I have been notified that Ubuntu 8.04 has fixed the above arhitecture problem. If you are attempting this on the newest version of Ubuntu, perform the previous step in this file instead: /etc/modprobe.d/arch/. Special thanks to Dr. Silk for the information!"

This is the only tutorial I could find at the time with this KEY information :D

Craig Deering: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Craig Deering) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:21:34 -0400

I have never found a good way to handle multiple gateways connected right to the Linux computer. When I was researching it, it didn't look like Linux supported multiple default gateways.

If you are trying to spread the load across those two DSL connections, you might have to use a different method then the bonding module. Maybe with a routing protocol?

If you don't care about one of them being active all the time, simply pick one gateway and write a script that grabs something off the the internet, like the Google index page. If it fails, remove the default gateway and add back the other DSL connection.

Sorry I couldn't be more help. If anyone out there has any suggestions, I'd like to know how to do this as well.

JOSE: Port Bonding with Linux - Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (JOSE) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:28:34 -0400

hi, well, in this sample you are using a static ip and one gateway in bond0 (192.168.1.1). But if I have a two dsl routers? what gateway can I to use??
eth0-->192.168.1.254 (Gateway IP)
eth1-->192.168.3.254 (Gateway IP)
eth2-->LAN

Thanks for any help!!!

Rodney Brim: I.T. and MBO (Management By Objective)

nospam@example.com (Rodney Brim) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:53:17 -0500

Wade,
I enjoyed your comments. You made an interesting transition, moving from MBO (managing by objectives) to managing by results. There's an intereting gap there, which we've found that basic office tools like email and spreadsheets don't fill very well. E.g. it's hard to get real-time information on the results so that you have an accurate feel for what's working and what isn't in pursuit of the objective. I wonder if you experience the same gap? We use ManagePro to fill that gap.
Rodney Brim,
www.managepro.com/blog

Craig Deering: Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Craig Deering) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:39:45 -0500

I found the Tyan documentation for the M3291 to be a little weak. I ran into trouble the first few times I did this and finally came up with a formula that works every time. I am not familiar with your particular server enclosure, but I'll bet the routine is the same.

One difference with your server from mine is that you don't have the Broadcom chipset for your NIC's. I had to also flash that to the newest version or I couldn't even poll the LAN settings.

Here are a few things to check with the M3291:

1) I had to boot using a Windows 98 floppy and boot to a DOS command line with CDROM support. After flashing the SMDC, you need to run a program called "UH8.exe". There are DOS and Linux command line versions of this program, but I've only successfully made this work using "UH8.exe". The path on the CD for me was "D:\utility\dos\uh8.exe".

Once inside this program (which displayed a lot of goofy characters to the screen), I had to install the configuration script. It was the last menu option called "Config Script". Once in there, type "m3291.cfg" and it will load the default settings onto the card. If I skipped this step, I could never make the user accounts and passwords work.

2) Next in the "uh8.exe" utility, go to the "Lan Config" option. I've discovered a few things about this that the documentation doesn't cover very well. The biggest of which is that if you want to talk to the SMDC card AND the server at the same time, you need to set up a unique IP address and unique MAC address.

Here's the way I do it and it works every time. If you open the server case, the two NIC ports are at the back labelled with two MAC addresses. The port with the lowest MAC value is the primary port of the server. This is the ONLY port that the SMDC card will respond to so make certain you have a CAT5 cable attached to that port and connected to a switch on your local network. You can test this by plugging a cable into it with power off to the server and the link light will come on and show activity.

I then take that MAC address and mangle the number a little and put that into the LAN config. So if your MAC address of that port is "00:11:22:33:44:55", I put something like "00:11:AA:33:44:55" into the LAN config page. There is a possibility of a duplicate MAC on your network, but the odds are very small. You might want to search them out and make certain what ever you picked out is unique.

I use a /16 network so I also give it a unique IP address. It's easier for me if I change the third part of the IP. So if the server IP is going to be 172.16.5.30, I might set the SMDC IP to 172.16.6.30. Again, this is a preference on your part.

3) The Broadcast ARP option always seems to be "0" when I start the process, but always ends up being a "1" when it's over. I don't really have a suggestion here but I will tell you that having this enabled has always worked for me.

4) Once you save this, you will need to set up the user account passwords on the "User and Password Setting" screen. But this is not required for your ping tests.

At this point in time, you should be able to ping the SMDC card with the server power on or off. A great test is to power the server off and try to connect from the Tyan management console with the user "Admin". If it connects, you should be able to turn the power on. After the server starts up, you should be able to ping both addresses and access both of them simultaneously.

Once these steps were performed, I found I could configure anything I wanted to from the Linux command line using the "uh8l" command found on the disk.

Good luck!

Sascha Willuweit: Remote Management Card with Ubuntu Server

nospam@example.com (Sascha Willuweit) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 08:34:22 -0500

I'm trying to get the M3291 to work with my GT24 B2932 on Linux (Debian Etch) to no avail. I've updated the BIOS, the BMC firmware and configured the network stack. After that, I was able to connect IPMI locally (loading ipmi_si.ko), but have no luck neither pinging it nor ipmi over Ethernet (via lan, lanplus). Did you have any such problems? Any suggestions? How did you setup the network?

Thanks,
-Sascha