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Mounting unpartitioned disk image files in Linux is easy. You just execute ‘mount -o loop disk.img /mnt’ right?

Well, if your disk image file happens to contain partitions its a little bit trickier. Here is what you need to do:

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I recently purchased a new Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard for use with MythTV. The choice of input device for MythTV is a very subjective thing to be sure, but I love this device because its as small as it can be without feeling cramped, its thin, light weight, and stylish.

Setting the device up to work with Debian Etch is fairly straightforward once you know what to do

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With the forthcoming release of Debian Lenny it happened to be a good time for me to re-evaluate my decision to use one monster RAID6 device to back all my iSCSI targets. I ran a semi-formal test on different disk configurations for software raid and came up with these results…

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Yet another update to the bacula client (and bconsole) for Mac OS X. System requirements and upgrade process are the same as with 2.4.0.

Enjoy!
bacula-client-242-1

Recently I came upon the need to do all my network routing and firewalling inside a Xen domU. I am not the first to do this but I thought I’d do a little write up on it to help others trying to accomplish the same thing in Debian.

The idea here is to end up with (at least) two VLANs on the network with the dom0 and domU’s being able to choose one or both networks on which to exist. In the case of both, you can set up a handy domU firewall/gateway :)

As you can see from the diagram above, we will end up with three bridges in the dom0 with all the appropriate glue to tie everything together. Best of all, this is all assembled on the fly during bootup.

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This wasnt incredibly difficult to figure out, but if you have a Debian etch system with iscsi-target compiled from source (as I regularly do) getting both open-iscsi and iscsi-target to play nice together takes a small amount of fiddling.

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Binaries for the latest bacula-fd and bconsole have been updated. Upgrades from previous versions should be handled in an intelligent fashion.

Please report any issues and I will resolve them ASAP. Thanks and enjoy!

bacula-client-240-1

The final installment of our coraid adventure and not really much to say other than this: it works! Hotplug support is working as of kernel 2.6.25-git11 and appears to function as it should.

Thanks go to Mark Lord, Marvell Corporation, EMC Corporation and Red Hat, Inc. for the coding magic.

The next phase of this project is choosing AoE or iSCSI. The debate on the relative merits of each protocol continues to rage on the Internet but in my particular case the criteria are pretty simple; which one performs better without causing excessive system load? Just from reading about the two protocols I am already leaning toward iSCSI for the simple fact that I can use all my TCP/IP management tools (routing, NAT, firewalling, etc.) on every iSCSI device. The only (potential) drawback is CPU load on the involved systems since it has to calculate TCP checksums for all those packets. Yes, there are many, many other advantages of one protocol over the other. No, they don’t matter to me in this scenario :-) So here we go!

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On the plate today is getting ethernet interface bonding working to provide load balancing and failover on the dual onboard gigabit interfaces on our home-built Coraid.

This actually turns out to be much easier than expected…

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