dbaranski.net

I enjoy using Ubuntu as my OS of choice.  But there are always a few quirks to work out to make things “just right”.  Here’s a short list of changes I’ve done to make Ubuntu work better for me.

Wireless light

The wireless light always remains turned off.  My laptop (and probably most other dv4000′s) uses the ipw2200 wireless card made by Intel.  This card is actually supported very well in the open source community thanks to Intel releasing the driver code.  Here is the command to get this working:

Mute light

The Mute LED never worked on my laptop.  The muting itself worked fine, but the light never turned on.  Here\’s a fix to solve this problem.

More information on different quirk options is available on this forum topic.

More information to follow as I remember / do it!

I’m working on a web based administration tool for srcds based servers. It’s in the works but you should be able to administer any server that runs srcds with it with zero setup. All you require is the address and rcon password.

If you’re interested in trying it out you can find it at http://rcon.dbaranski.net/

Please report any bugs / feature requests to me via email or the proper forum on my site.

Enjoy

My search for a simple solution to a 1000Hz Xen Kernel lead to dead ends all around despite having heard of success stories from others on the Xen mailing list.

I’m still unsure as to why Xen decided to run at 250Hz instead of the default 1000Hz. Though I’ve heard there are software “problems” with specific packages when shifted over to a 1000Hz environment. I myself am stuck and require 1000Hz for proper operation of my gaming servers. I’m currently capped for performance because of this (don’t ask me why… ask Valve..) and am not looking forward to recompiling the kernel every time there is an update to Xen or the kernel… Though its looking like the only option.

I’ll document my findings as they come (probably along with a guide on how to do this as well, since there is none).

Well, after a few weeks of trouble I’ve finally got my DomU image working at 1000Hz.. The interesting thing is that I didn’t even have to reboot my server running dom0 to achieve this success!

Initially I ran into trouble because I was attempting to compile the xenified kernel from the xen.org site. This code lead to kernel panics during boot because that kernel couldn’t detect LVM volumes which CentOS uses by default. I was unable to find the “exact” reason for this problem and therefore moved onto other solutions.

I eventually came to CentOS’s own wiki and found that their kernel-recompile tutorial would work perfectly since the xen configs were included with the source! (awesome stuff).. Though, originally I had thought that I would need to replace the dom0 kernel and therefore worried a bit if problems arose. (I have servers far away that are not at arms reach for human intervention)… So I used a test box at home..

After a kernel recompile locally I installed the kernels (after configuring for 1000Hz) on dom0 and booted up a DomU.. To my surprise it was still using the original kernel that was installed which lead me to my conclusion… I ended up installing the recompile kernel only on the DomU that required it! And it works perfectly to boot with no need to sweat over dom0 not booting.

I’ll make a guide for this shortly however if anyone is interested in following the steps I took (very well written) head over to the CentOS wiki article CenOS Custom Kernel. Well written indeed.

Be warned for anyone interested in running 32bit guests on 64bit dom0 instances that it us currently not supported in CentOS 5.1. This will apparently be corrected in the upcoming release of RHEL (5.2) which is scheduled to make it’s appearance in a month or so. (It should have left beta May 7th).

The stability is SO bad that the image won’t even stay up for a single day. You have been warned. Stay away from mixing 32 and 64 bit Guests. Note that this has long been fixed in the Xen repos. One would just have to figure out how to go about building Xen by himself. Not suggested for production environments either..

CentOS 5.2 came out this week. I’ve been looking forward to this release now for some months because it adds support for 32 big images on 64 bit dom0s.

Previous attempts to use 32 bit images on 64 bit dom0s resulted in serious domU crashing goodness. (The image wouldn’t stay up for more then a day or so…) The New RHEL/CentOS release back ports Xen 3.1 which fixes these issues.

I’ve always had problems running SRCDS servers on 64 bit images and therefore wanted this 32 bit support. For some reason I only get half of the server fps that I should with 64 bit images. For example a 500fps server would only run at 250fps. Though I have seen success stories when using 64 bit UNIX distros I never looked into fixing it properly because of my peculiar setup.

With the new update I’ll be shifting back to using 32 bit images for hosting my SRCDSservers. I mean after all, the SRCDS binaries are i686 .