The Hive Archive

Keith Adams has an intriguing post about VMWare vprobes:

VProbes attempts to provide a set of tools for answering the question, “What the heck is this computer doing?” It’s an open-ended question, so vprobes is accordingly open-ended, as well. In its current form, it provides an interactive, safe way of instrumenting a running VM at any level: from user-level processes down to the kernel, and even into VMware’s VMM and hypervisor, if need be.

First, we are aiming to provide a Dtrace-like tool for other commercially important operating systems than Solaris. Second, VProbes can combine with other virtualization-based techniques in powerful ways. For example, VProbes and deterministic replay combine to make the most potent tool that I’m aware of for debugging intermittent performance anomalies.

Just an FYI, the NVidia Gigabit Forcedeth Ethernet driver in Linux uses the ethtool command to get and set the duplex rate and not the mii-tool like many other web pages erroneously state.

Today, I was searching Google for help installing Perl modules through CPAN using the default Solaris Perl. Sadly, my own blog was one of the search results, and it was no help. I guess this entry is going to make the situation even worse.

So I suppose I should put some useful information:

• Solaris Perl is compiled using Sun Studio and not gcc
• You must compile Perl modules with the same compiler Perl was compiled with
• The Blastwave Perl is also uselessly compiled using Sun Studio and not gcc
• Sun Studio is now free instead of thousands of dollars and free to download
• The Sunfreeware Perl Package is compiled with gcc. Go sanity!

I’m sure if you cared enough and wanted to waste time, you could download the Sun Studio compiler just for your handful of Perl modules, or you could download the Sunfreeware package and use gcc, the compiler that God intended you to use. Your choice man. BTW, Sun, you suck.

Device manufacturers still haven’t caught on that floppy drives are no longer standard equipment on most modern machines. I recently came across this issue when trying to install a RAID driver on a Solaris 10 (x86) box, and solved it thusly:


# lofiadm -a /export/home/mmichie/tmp/ARCMSR.DD /dev/lofi/1
# mount -F pcfs /dev/lofi/1 /mnt/floppy/

# mkisofs -R -J -o driverdisk.iso /mnt/floppy/
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 2428
Total directory bytes: 16384
Path table size(bytes): 122
Max brk space used 10000
278 extents written (0 MB)


In other words, download the raw floppy image and mount it as a loopback device. Then use mkisofs to translate it to an iso. Use your favorite CD-R burning software to burn the ISO. Install your driver disk. This can be done similarly in Linux, the main difference will be mounting the floppy image:

mount -o loop driverdisk.img /mnt

The mkisofs command will be exactly the same as Solaris.

Today, I was attempting to uninstall/upgrade Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on a Solaris 8 Sparc server, and spent well over an hour trying to get the display exported properly to my MacBook Pro. First, the OSX X11 component doesn’t seem to play nicely with the Oracle ‘Universal’ Installer, so I booted up Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a Parallels Desktop and used ssh to export the display.

Then, everything came up fine, but I couldn’t click any of ‘Next’, ‘Installed Products’, or even ‘Help’. It makes me wonder about the rest of Oracle when the installer buttons don’t work right, I mean that’s so hard to test and all….

Anyway, after searching the web the only recommendations I could find for this problem (going back at least 6 years) were:

• Turn off your numlock key (no, seriously)
• Try a different window manager
• Type: export LANG=C at the shell prompt before launching runInstaller

After trying all of these, including booting into Ubuntu, nothing was working. Out of desperation, I booted into Knoppix, exported the display and everything worked the first try. Ubuntu and RHEL both use Gnome and Knoppix uses KDE, so I guess the ‘try a different window manager’ is the solution.

Die Oracle, Die. Hope this helps someone Googling out there.

After attempting to play back some MPEG and DivX videos, I was getting strange colors in every program I was using, including VLC, Windows Media Player and mplayer.  Even tweaking the gamma, constrast, hue, brightness and every other setting I could find, the video still looked washed out and dark.  The only thing affected was video playback.  The desktop, web browsing and games all looked fine.

Finally, I figured out that in the NVidia control panel, there are seperate settings for video playback.  Somehow they had all been changed to bizzare values.  All it took was to return them to the default to fix the problem.  Very strange, as I know I didn’t touch any of these values and I had just reinstalled this system from scratch.  Anyway, hope this helps someone Googling this problem as I wasn’t able to find any useful information.