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2008-07-01

Displaying by page

How to enable, disable displaying by page and change the number of lines by page in various OS’es

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Un(un)mountable file system

After hitting this bug (yes, again and again) I had to unmount the broken file system and run fsck (twice). But then I apparently hit anoter bug (or a feature?) - I could not mount the file system back.

xeon# mount /dev/dsk/c2d0s3 /export/docs
mount: /dev/dsk/c2d0s3 is already mounted or /export/docs is busy

Neither pwdx not lsof showed any processes using /export/docs. The solution was to recreate the directory:

xeon# rm -rf docs
xeon# mkdir docs
xeon# mount /dev/dsk/c2d0s3 /export/docs (after a loooong pause)
xeon# mount | fgrep docs
/export/docs on /dev/dsk/c2d0s3 read/write/setuid/devices/intr/largefiles/logging/xattr/onerror=panic/dev=1980043 on Tue Jul  1 01:07:08 2008

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Unkillable process

Snv_92 has been entertaining me since I upgraded from quite stable snv_88. I’m hitting a bug after a bug. (See here).

This is the latest - unkillable process, which can’t be killed with kill -9 or zone reboot. Reboot just hangs. Truss ends up with:

xeon# kill -9 22131
xeon# ps -ef | fgrep 22131
root 22728 5471 0 00:49:27 pts/5 0:00 fgrep 22131
alekz 22131 1 0 20:48:30 zoneconsole 0:03 /opt/sfw/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -P Sun –no-remote
xeon# truss -p 22131
^Ctruss: unanticipated system error: 22131

dtrace shows nothing. The only workaround is to reboot the entire system.

See also:

Revenge of the unkillable process
Unkillable process
Bug ID 6455727


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2008-06-30

Hard drives: Enterprise vs. Desktop

What to choose for a home server? The most important difference is not the accelerometers or MTBF but whether the disks will be used in RAID’s.

An excerpt from Western-Digital FAQ:

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array.

If you install a RAID edition hard drive in a desktop computer, the computer system may report more errors than a normal desktop hard drive (due to the TLER feature). Western Digital does not recommend installing RAID edition hard drives into a desktop computer environment.

Source: What is the difference between Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives?


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Solaris and ATA and SCSI errors

After upgrading from snv_88 to snv_92 (Solaris 11 or Nevada b92) my home server started spewing  the following errors:

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2008-06-25

SqueezeCenter and upsampling

In order to upsample 16/44.1 stream to, for example, 24/96 and play it on the Transporter you need:
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SqueezeCenter and Compress::Zlib

After upgrading to Nevada b92 SqueezeCenter refused to start with the following error:

The following modules failed to load: Compress::Zlib

# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install Compress::Zlib
. . .
Module [Compress::Zlib] failed to load: is only available with the XS version
. . .

But the actual problem is Scalar::Util. To solve the problem reinstall Scalar::Util and then Compress::Zlib. Use force install if CPAN says that the latest version is already installed:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell
. . .
cpan[1]> install Scalar::Util
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.12)
Going to read /var/tmp/cpan/Metadata
Database was generated on Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:02:57 GMT
Scalar::Util is up to date (1.19).
cpan[2]> force install Scalar::Util
. . .
cpan[3]> force install Compress::Zlib
. . .

Sources: whirlpool.net.au and Usenet forums.


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2008-06-19

Firefox 3.0 and Solaris

Just a brain dump.


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2008-05-06

SqueezeCenter 7.1 under Solaris

The idea was to use “bare” SqueezeCenter without bundled CPAN (the CPAN directory was moved away) modules, Solaris 11 (or Nevada build 88) and supplied with Solaris PERL and MySQL.

Then if you start slimserver.pl the errors will let you know which CPAN modules to install. For example:

The following modules failed to load: version JSON::XS YAML::Syck GD
. . .
Can’t locate JSON::XS.pm in @INC (@INC contains: squeezecenter-7.1-19407-noCPAN/CPAN/arch/5.8/i86pc-solaris-64int

To install a module run the following:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install JSON::XS

The only exception is Encode/Detect/Detector.pm or Encode::Detect::Detector. It’s has not being touched by the developer for many years and is not recommended for use. The module can be compiled with c++ or g++ (instead of used by default cc or gcc), but with a lot of pain and manual intervention. The easiest way is to get rid of it completely:

  • Remove Encode::Detect::Detector from modules.conf (in the root directory of SqueezeCenter)
  • Remove or comment the following line in Slim/Utils/Unicode.pm:
    use Encode::Detect::Detector;

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2008-05-02

Solaris snv_88 and wine 0.9.61

For the first time I did not have to do anything special to compile wine. Just configure and gmake. The rest is pretty the same: Picasa runs at 100% CPU load, Firefox 3b5 crashes every 5 minutes ;-)


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