After reading that Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on Slashdot I decided that chances are good my next laptop will not be a black one.

A buddy of mine works at IBM, he has a big ass SCSI raid array (DS300) on which he runs RAID5 (which is bad, BTW). He wanted to know what the overhead of running software RAID10 (aka RAID1+0) on this system would be. His numbers are here.

So my [sbc]{tag/sbc} of choice these days is the WRAP 1C-2. This model is powered by a 266Mhz Geode and has 128M of RAM, a CF reader, 1 mini-PCI slot, a serial console and 3 10/100 Mbit NICs. I get mine (I have three now) from Xagyl Communications. Each was about $200.

This entry talks about bootstrapping debian onto a CF card.

I was installing openswan on my [sbc]{tag/sbc} router box. The sbc doesn’t have much hardware on it, and what it does have did not contribute to the entropy pool.

I have a few boxes around with relatively good entropy (keyboard/mouse input), but there was no way to pass that entropy to the router for RSA key generation. I had to write some code to fix it. Be warned, it’s pretty EVIL…

UPDATE: see below about rng-tools.

How to convert 22kHz mp3 to a CD playable in a CD player. Not the most spectacular task, but I had to do some digging to figure it out. And I might as well write it down for the next time :)

This is part of my [xen box setup]{rtag/xen-box-setup} “series”.

Xen domain 0 (or dom0) is special. It starts up all the other xen hosts and, be it by a rule or simply by convention, it tends to run all the drivers.

I have already covered how I [partitioned my disk]{lvm2-on-raid1}. Let’s now start with this fresh install of debian/testing and get a xen dom0 running on top of it. The following steps assume that the system:

• is a 32bit x86 box running debian/testing
• has RAID1 devices configured as per my [LVM2 on RAID1]{lvm2-on-raid1} writeup
• uses grub for a bootloader
• was booting a recent 2.6.x kernel

This is part of my [xen box setup]{rtag/xen-box-setup} “series”. :)

I’ve installed debian on a RAID1 device, /dev/md0. This takes up a fraction of the disk, and my plan is to create a large LVM2 group on another RAID1 that I can use to dynamically create devices for my xen domains.

Sometimes I have a need to reproduce bugs on other platforms. When that platform uses a heavily patched kernel, it makes it hard to debug. Below are some notes I took while building a RHEL4 kernel with kdb support.

I decided to try out xen on my development / test box. I will write a bit more about what I did, but first here are some links:

I found a bug in vim6.4 (my comment block was too big and the line after the comment block was not left-justified) and wanted to see if vim7 had a fix.