Mute your PC speaker (bell) under FreeBSD / VMware

If your daily job is taking place in an open-space shared office then most likely you will want your laptop/PC to be as quiet as possible in order not to disturb your co-workers. Unfortunately the FreeBSD console does employ quite a loud bell signal (beep) and lots of operations in the terminal are prone to trigger it (especially if you are accustomed to TAB completion).

To disable generating the bell sound in FreeBSD at the console you can set the following sysctl in /etc/sysctl.conf:

hw.syscons.bell=0

Unfortunately it does not work to set it in the bootloader (/etc/boot/loader.conf). However, if you're running under VMware there is another trick — add the following line to the .vmx configuration file of the VM in question:

mks.noBeep="TRUE"

Alternatively you can add it to on of the following configuration files to make the change global for all your VM's:

• Linux: ~/.vmware/config
• Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

PS: to disable the bell in the X interface you need to run "xset b off".

Photos from SNW Europe 2009 conference

Here are a few pictures I made while participating at the SNW Europe 2009 conference:

• The conference (held at the Congress Frankfurt, Germany)
• Some slides from the conference

The conference gathered topics such as Storage, Cloud Storage and Services, Virtualization, Solid Storage, IT Management, etc.

Installing Linux kernel headers for Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instances

When you play around with Ubuntu EC2 instances on AWS you might, at one point, stumble upon needing to install the Linux kernel headers to build some kernel module(s) from source. However, the standard Ubuntu repositories do not offer the -xen images used to build those AMI's:

# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package linux-headers-2.6.27-23-xen

You should try to use the Ubuntu EC2 PPA packages for the Xen kernels — e.g.  you may use the following:

# echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-on-ec2.list
# apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 9EE6D873
# apt-get update
# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Don't forget to replace "YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE" with your own Ubuntu flavour (hardy/intrepid).

Slides and Audio from EuroBSDCon 2009

For those of you who missed the talks or want to remember some of the things said, the slides and some audio recordings (only Stream A sessions) have been made available on the EuroBSDCon 2009 website.

While at it you may want to check out the EnterpriseBSD introduction slides that I presented in the Works-In-Progess session -- see my blog post on enterprisebsd.com.

Photos from EuroBSDCon 2009

Here are some pictures I made at EuroBSDCon 2009:

• The conference (held at the Robinson College, Cambridge, UK)
• Some slides from the conference (only "Stream A")
• Walking around the parks (near the Robinson College) and London

And a lot more pictures made by Rodrigo Osorio (?).

EuroBSDCon 2009 is over

Yes, the last day of the eighth edition of EuroBSDCon just passed. Nevertheless it was yet another interesting day which brought up to the stage interesting talks -- among them the "accf_smtp" filters built by Martin Blapp (and the small SMTP architecture war started with the OpenBSD "aussies"), the network stack tunings done by Henning Brauner in OpenBSD, the gory details in (correctly) implementing the SMB/SMB2 stack for FreeBSD presented by Zach Loafman and Brooks Davis' porting efforts for the major HPC (High Perfomance Cluster) packages (Ganglia, Sun Grid Engine, [Open]MPI). The "Stream A" took the spot again thought I kind of missed attending the PC-BSD presentation...

Then I took some time to walk a bit around the parks and came back just in time to catch the "State of BSD" session: Alistair Crooks presented NetBSD's advancements, Owain Ainsworth and Henning Brauner (as the "slides bitch") spoke for OpenBSD and George V. Neville-Neil took the stage for FreeBSD (and even beat the records for the presentation timing). Then the Work-In-Progress session: each speaker had exactly 3 minutes (strictly observed by Robert Watson :) ) to present his work or project. During this session I had the chance to introduce the new (unborn) kid on the block named EnterpriseBSD and make a short statement about what it wants to be and what help it needs from the community (e.g. we want your feedback!). Besides that we had on the stage the syadmins taking care of the internal network of machines that makes the FreeBSD project's wheels turn, 64bit quotas, FreeBSD on ARM plaform, mmap() improvements in FreeBSD, Luigi Rizzo's (continued) work on Dummynet and pluggable disk schedulers, ZFS gone production in 8.0, DHCPv6 (IPv6 support in DHCP 4.x), new NTP package and configuration in FreeBSD, NanoBSD on big servers.

During Robert's introductory speech it was announced that the next EuroBSDCon will be held in Karlsruhe (again, after 5 years) in October 2010. Hope I can be back there next year.

I still got pictures to be posted and more impressions to be shared — stay tuned...

A full first day at EuroBSDCon 2009

The first day of the conference was really a full one. I decided to follow all the "Stream A" talk sessions and I could say it's been the best for my research related to the EnterpriseBSD project — e.g. feedback on usage of FreeBSD in the enterprise/business environments.

Harrison Grundy brought up a nice insight on the oil & gas industry and their use of FreeBSD on staggering levels of storage and processing sizes. Then Konrad Heuer unveiled some details about what makes the gwdg.de network tick and the problems they encountered on their heterogeneous setup. And that brought up an interesting discussion about IBM TSM backup support issues on FreeBSD.

After a first tea & biscuit break Peter Losher entertained us about what ISC is doing (like, say, DNS root servers and mozilla.org/kernel.org/*BSD mirrors) and their help with testing the FreeBSD releases — you might be surprised to know that some root servers may be sometimes running a -BETA or similar snapshots (of course under the protection of anycast balancing and failback). Then came the lunch in the nice restaurant of the Robinson College.

Then almighty Kirk McKusick stepped up to speak about superpages in FreeBSD 8.0 under the close scrutiny of front-row phk@ (Poul-Henning Kamp) and John Baldwin. Hacker galore!

Afterwards, Zach Loafman unveiled some of the "secrets" under the hood of OneFS from Isilon — their clustered filesystem product. Hope they will succeed in releasing their mods to FreeBSD (especially Infiniband). And an amazing trip with Sam Leffler on the top of the Chile mountains where he helped installing a wireless link between two astronomical observatories found ~2,4km above the sea...

Then came Robert Watson with a short update session and then introduced one interesting security expert fellow (think prof. Dumbledore) who showed us what tricks the 'net gangsters are using nowadays. Quite a bit of laughs...

Then came the famous "Conference Dinner in the Great Hall at Clare College"; luckily I've been able to trade a place with someone else. Wouldn't have been surprised if Harry Potter shared the table with us... Lucky enough to get a place right next to George V. Neville-Neil, Poul-Henning Kamp (say "beerware license"!) and Brooks Davis. Robert Watson was just around, too. Quite a lively bunch they are...

Lots of pictures for today, unfortunately I forgot to bring an USB cable with me so it'll have to wait until I get back in Brussels. Until then... there is one more day. And possibly a surprise, if Robert W. will be kind enough to approve my WIP proposal on EnterpriseBSD.

EuroBSDCon 2009 has started

Day one of EuroBSDCon 2009 is already over — it was the tutorials session day. Tomorrow the talks session will start and probably it will be the peak of the conference.

I'm eagerly waiting for some of the talks tomorrow. Especially that some of them are from the enterprise/business perspective that I'm researching now for the EnterpriseBSD project. Like, say, "How FreeBSD finds oil" and quite a lot of the rest of the talks in "Stream A". Too bad I won't be able to join the Conference Dinner (booked out).

Will be posting more news tomorrow evening...

Running oldie VMware Server 1.0.x on latest Ubuntu

If you're like me and hate to get along with the VMware Server 2.x resource hog then you will want to go for the older and more streamlined VMware Server 1.0.x (you will also get a real console client too).
Now if you do that on the modern Ubuntu distros then you will step into some troubles (Server 1.0.x shows its age). Most of them can be solved following the tips here (performance tips included!). However here are some more hidden gems:

• The latest 2.6.27 kernels have some changes which break the building of the VMware kernel modules (stub sources are really old anyway); use the patcher here (yes, it works for Server too).
• At least the MUI component assumes that /bin/sh is Bash, which on Ubuntu is really dash — this in turn will break setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment and apache will complain for missing libraries; correct the shebang magig at the top of the initialisation file /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware.

Good luck. And don't forget that 1.0.x is really old and already obsoleted by VMware in favor of 2.0.x...

Network messup in Ubuntu Jaunty when using VMware

While I was testing a brand new Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10 alpha) installation on my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to checkout whether it better reacts to the suspend issue, I stumbled over another problem: after installing VMware Workstation the network setup would get messed up at every boot requiring manual tweaking.

It turns out that the NetworkManager service, in its great wisdom, was trying to automatically initialize the vmnet1/vmnet8 virtual interfaces created by VMware (it's using them as network injection points for the VM machines and they are managed by the vmware startup script). That means running the DHCP client over them and acquiring some garbage IP settings (these settings are supposed to be acquired by the contained VMware virtual machines, not by the physical box!). Subsequently this was installing a phoney VMware default route and DNS server entries, overriding the expected wireless settings, which in turn renders networking useless.

It seems this new behavior may have been triggered by a change in the [un]managed mode of the NetworkManager service in Ubuntu Jaunty. However, trying to change the managed=true/false statement in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf yielded no results.

Luckily you can easily fix this by adding specific configuration files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ to prevent NetworkManager from touching the VMware network interfaces. You can use the following commands (assuming you kept the default interface numbering):

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet1 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet1
autoconnect=false
EOF

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet8 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet8
autoconnect=false
EOF

RF Kill switch, Suspend and other demons on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li 2735

Some time ago I have bought a cheap Fujitsu-Siemens (AMILO Li 2735 model) laptop on a refurbish sale. I don't know whether it was the smartest idea, it looks like the guys at Fujitsu Siemens had nothing else but Windows Vista in mind when they designed this spartan model :-/ ...

My first problem was the software wireless/RF killswitch which works with Vista after installing Fujitsu-Simenes drivers (you need to press Fn+F1), but not out of the box on Linux/others OS'es. The not-so-obvious solution to this problem was to use the acerhk module.

The second problem was that the CPU (T5450 1.66Ghz): while it's a Core 2 Duo CPU, it lacks the virtualization support needed to run 64bit OS'es under VMware (among the last ones not supporting Intel VT). Well, I guess it's just my bad luck for this one...

Now the third problem that I'm struggling with is that suspending in Ubuntu is broken, and I have tried both 8.10 and 9.04 alpha. The weird thing is that if I boot from the LiveCD suspending works (although not too many times, SquashFS errors keep accumulating), but if I boot from an installation made from the very same LiveCD then I have no chance to correctly resume from suspend — it's doing a weird "powerup/powerdown/powerup/hang" cycle. There is a bug filed for the (similar) Li 2732 model which was at one point closed as fixed in the Jaunty alpha versions when tested from the LiveCD but I had to reopen it since it doesn't work from an HDD install...

If any of you has some ideas for this issue please leave me a comment. Thanks.