Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:43:00 GMT
Bad, bad week was last week.
This was illustrated in no small way to me when I was compared to Marvin on Saturday night. Funny thing is, I thought that I was in a good mood.
The harsh reality is that I found out that I have been paying some kind of mate’s rates on my tax for the last six months, so come April I am £140 a month worse off. Also, Stef lost the overtime that she was doing, pushing the line even more. Hard times ahead…
On the plus side, I saw a kingfisher on Saturday in the park. I’m assuming that his appearance was due to the cold weather failing to have slaughtered them all, as opposed to some kind of habitat destruction outside the city, so that’s a good thing, right?
Posted in Cat, General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:03:00 GMT
Today has been very interesting, as in times.
Firstly, I discovered that the reason that my DHCP server was failing to respond to any requests was that I didn’t have the binaries installed. At some point in the past I obviously had a dumbass day like today and restored the configuration from backup without installing the package. When I think of the hours I have spent pulling my hair our in front of tcpdump and my ipfw configuration it makes me want to cry.
I also dropped a jar of redcurrant jelly on the floor, throwing sticky glass shards everywhere. And to top it all, I completely screwed the timing on today’s dinner, so everything is currently going cold in the kitchen while the meat is practically still trying to kick its way out of the oven.
On the plus side, my DHCP server works now. I managed to get FreeBSD installed non-interactively over the network, and proved that sysinstall doesn’t require you to specify a hostname in install.cfg, so long as your DHCP server provides one.
Back on the down side, the PXE article at FreeBSD.org is out of date and it looks like I just volunteered to update it. I cannot face any DocBook today, so here are some notes.
Setting up the TFTP server
- Enable
tftp in inetd.conf and restart inetd:
# grep tftp /etc/inetd.conf
tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/libexec/tftpd tftpd -l -s /a/tftpboot
# /etc/rc.d/inetd reload
- Copy
pxeboot to the TFTP root
# mkdir -p /a/tftpboot
# cp /boot/pxeboot /a/tftpboot
Setting up the DHCP server
- Don’t forget: install the
net/isc-dhcp3-server package!
- As a minimum, you want something like the following in your
/usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf:
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option routers 192.168.10.1;
filename "pxeboot";
option root-path "/a/pxeinstall";
ddns-update-style none;
option domain-name "private.submonkey.net";
option broadcast-address 192.168.10.255;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.10.17;
server-name "dr.private.submonkey.net";
server-identifier 192.168.10.17;
default-lease-time 7200;
max-lease-time 7200;
subnet 192.168.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
next-server 192.168.10.17;
range 192.168.10.32 192.168.10.64;
host quinch {
hardware ethernet aa:02:b3:d1:e2:77;
fixed-address 192.168.10.19;
option host-name "quinch";
}
}
If you will be specifying a hostname in install.cfg, you don’t need the host quinch entry. However, we’re definitely going to want to use the same install.cfg for all of our clients, since it has to go inside the mfsroot!
Setting up the NFS server
The loader is configured to do NFS by default. Can’t argue with that.
- Create
/a/pxeinstall and share it:
# mkdir /a/pxeinstall
# echo 'rpcbind_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
# echo 'nfs_server_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
# echo '/a -alldirs -maproot=nobody' >> /etc/exports
# reboot
Once the machine comes back up, you need to copy the boot files to the NFS root. The easiest place to get them is from a bootonly ISO, so grab one that’s appropriate for your environment - I’m installing the amd64 bits:
# ftp -a ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/6.0/6.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
# mdconfig -a -f `pwd`/6.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
md2
# mkdir /dist
# mount -t cd9660 /dev/md2 /dist
# rsync -avH /dist/ /a/pxeinstall/
Adding install.cfg to the mfsroot
Now you have the correct bits in the NFS root, we need to add our install.cfg to the mfsroot.
# gzip -d /a/pxeinstall/boot/mfsroot.gz
# mdconfig -a -f /a/pxeinstall/boot/mfsroot
md3
# mount /dev/md3 /mnt
# cp install.cfg /mnt
# umount /mnt
# mdconfig -d -u 3
Note that I haven’t gzip’d the mfsroot again, since in my testing that just caused the client to reboot.
Finally, we just need to add a loader.rc to tell loader to boot the mfsroot:
# cat >> /a/pxeinstall/boot/loader.rc << EOF
load /boot/kernel/kernel
load -t mfs_root /boot/mfsroot
set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c"
boot
EOF
I’m pretty sure that the vfs.root.mountfrom line should read /dev/md0 rather than /dev/md0c, but this works, so we’ll go with it.
Now boot your target machine from PXE. Hope you didn’t have anything you wanted to keep on there!
Posted in FreeBSD, General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 28 Dec 2005 13:16:00 GMT
First things first, we have a privacy policy now. Google Analytics insists that you have one in order to use the service, and since it is the lowest maintenance tool for creating inane and useless statistics, I am using it.
I managed to park in front of my house, whereupon someone drove a skip truck into my car (and yes, my number plate says GNU on it — call it coincidence). My insurer, Sainsbury’s, have been pretty good.
After discussion on hackers@, the crunchgen patch got committed. On a related note, had some discussion with Adrian and Philip Paeps about pivot_root(), which is a system call which switches the root mountpoint with another mountpoint. Seems that what we want is rather different to the Linux syscall of the same name. Adrian’s idea was to reuse the devfs_fixup() code, but I’m under the impression that this gets away with murder by virtue of there being no userland processes running while it is doing the business. More thought required…
I received a nice PowerBook from work, thanks. I still need a new i386 laptop, but my budget isn’t going to stretch to one this year unless Yonah does crazy things to prices.
In that vein, I finally caught up with this century and got a USB stick. Can maybe get to work on that GELI/kenv stuff now.
Christmas was good, although I haven’t been nearly drunk enough due to a cold that I just cannot get rid of. Six days left before we have to go back to work though ;-)
Posted in Apple, Consumer, FreeBSD, General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:06:00 GMT
As the words of The Wedding Present song go, every time I hear a bell I think it’s Murphy.
Some days it still hits me and I really miss the little guy. It’s been too long since I got covered in cat dribble. Unfortunately, he’s been gone about 5 weeks now, so we took down the posters.
If we only knew…
Posted in Cat, General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 18 Nov 2005 09:01:00 GMT
Just for the record, in a non-exhaustive list of in roughly ascending order, I hate:
- Cyclists who cycle on the pavement;
- Drivers who do not stop at a zebra crossing;
- Cyclists who skip red lights;
- Cyclists who skip red lights and then nearly hit you because you have the green man (WALK for our friends in .us);
- Blinking text;
- Groups of three or more people who walk in a line on the pavement, and expect you to walk in the gutter to pass them;
- People pushing prams who do not use pedestrian crossings;
- People who run in front of traffic using their child as some kind of guard.
That’s just the bastards I’ve seen on the 15 minute walk to work today.
Today will also see me performing the first Red Hat installation I’ll have done since 5.4, so I’m sure that there will be plenty to complain about later. Either way, I will write something about Oracle 10g on Solaris 10 Real Soon Now.
Posted in General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:29:00 GMT
Despite our best efforts and a number of false sightings, Murphy is still missing, which makes Rammstein’s “Wo Bist Du?” the most apt song ever — except maybe the bit about sleeping with a knife (“ich schlaf mit einem Messer ein”). Yep, Rosenrot is kicking ass (and has new German in that I don’t know).
Stand-out tracks for me are “Wo Bist Du?”, as mentioned, and “Spring”, which so far as I can ascertain is about a guy who stops on a bridge to look at the view. Everyone else assumes that he’s going to jump, to the point that someone pushes him off to put him out of his misery. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
I’ve previously said on IRC that the entire album sucked, but I’m taking that back. I was actually just pissed that Sharleen Spiteri is on one of the songs, but Flake agreed that it sucks and hopes the all-German version is released, which I agree would be nice. Then go back in time and get her fee back. Perhaps she won’t pay up and they’ll have to send the boys round to beat her up. Damn, I hate her.
Posted in General, Music | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Thu, 10 Nov 2005 18:02:00 GMT
There is a huge amount of fuss regarding the rejection of the Terrorism Bill yesterday with some pundits claiming that Tony Blair should now resign, and some mention that the next step should be a vote of no confidence.
Everyone seems to be missing the fact that this is how democracy is supposed to work — a motion is proposed and is then voted on. Frankly, I was far more concerned to hear that this was the first vote to go against the Prime Minister since he came to power over eight years ago.
No wonder he thinks he can do what he likes.
Posted in General | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 04 Nov 2005 12:15:00 GMT
Dick just brought my attention to the all new consumer Taser. Holy shit.
The promotion on the website has a picture of a man embracing his daughter at graduation, with the tagline of:
You saved money for her tuition…
But did you teach her how to save her life?
Unbelievable. Do these people really not think that a mugger/rapist/cop/burglar might find it slightly less hassle to Taser a victim rather than wrestle them to the ground with a knife? No, we’re all safe now that everyone has guns and Tasers…
Between that and the patent application for stories I’d love to gloat at the USA but these things are probably all coming here eventually.
In other (non–) news, the cat is still missing. Fate managed to crush my soul just a little more last night with the gift of an ultra-realistic dream wherein he came home and was fine. Fuck you, REM.
Posted in Cat, General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 02 Nov 2005 09:18:00 GMT
A guy 24 doors down responded to our leaflets this morning; he saw Murphy at about midnight last night and tried to tempt him into the house with some tuna (like that ever worked for me…).
I went to see the chap this morning and had a chat and it sounds like it was definitely our cat. So he’s alive, not trapped somewhere and has now had something to eat. He’s even still wearing his collar, so he’ll be able to get in the door if he does find his own way back. Good news.
Stef is wondering why he hasn’t come home if he’s neither dead nor stuck somewhere; I think it’s because 24 doors is quite a long way when we can’t even see the garden 4 doors down, and he probably just can’t find it. With that in mind, I’m leaving work early today to stand in the garden and shout — I know that there is a point to it now so any concerns about annoying the neighbours will have to wait. I’ll say sorry later.
Posted in Cat, General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 01 Nov 2005 19:11:00 GMT
Murphy has been missing for nearly 48 hours now.
We threw leaflets through all the doors round the block and put some posters up, and I checked all the gutters and under every car.
There are fireworks every night at the moment so hopefully he is hiding in a shed or house that he can’t quite get out from and will be found soon, but I don’t know. Even Stella seems to miss him; she has no-one to pounce on anymore…
Posted in Cat, General | no comments | no trackbacks
