After installing Fedora 16 on it, I was a little disappointed in how its video worked with my HP 25″ display. It was kind of slow and I noticed the mouse could move off the left edge near the top. Huh? There is only one video output from this motherboard, but it was acting like there were dual displays. A quick review of xrandr revealed an output LVDS1 which is for a laptop panel and does not exist of course.

So that led me to review the i915 kernel module parameters using modinfo. It suggested to me I could instruct the module to ignore the laptop panel display and also enforce modesetting on the VGA port only. I attempted this by editing /etc/grub2.cfg and appending these two kernel options:

i915.modeset=-1 i915.panel_ignore_lid=-1

After a re-boot, I was instantly gratified by the super-fast boot (5-seconds for Linux and another 10-seconds for automatic login to GnomeShell to complete). For $69, the speed and versatility of this motherboard/CPU is outstanding. I will have to contemplate ordering more, heh.

The result is this Tcl/Expect script (listed below).  First, you will need to make certain you have these dependent packages installed:

yum install expect fluid-soundfont-lite-patches timidity++

Next, you will need to fetch the multimedia files into your home directory:

svn co https://robert.hurst-ri.us/svn/rpgd/trunk/snd Music/hack

Then, setup your telnet session attributes in .telnetrc to automatically load when you connect:

robert.hurst-ri.us
    mode character
    set crlf off
    unset escape

And last, simply copy/paste the script below into an executable text file of your choice and run it.

#!/usr/bin/expect -f

# play a MIDI file
proc midi s {
  set mid [string range $s 3 end-3]
  set bool [string range $s end-1 end-1]
  set cmd "killall playmus 2> /dev/null; playmus -v 25 Music/hack/$mid.mid &> /dev/null &"
  system $cmd
}

# play a WAVE file
proc wave s {
  set wav [string range $s 3 end-3]
  set bool [string range $s end-1 end-1]
  set cmd "play Music/hack/$wav.wav &> /dev/null"
  if {$bool == 0} { set cmd "$cmd &" }
  system $cmd
}

# connect to the game server ...
log_user 0
spawn telnet robert.hurst-ri.us 7000
wave "...dungeon;0."

expect_background {
  -re "\033\\\[\\\{.*\\\}" { midi $expect_out(0,string); return }
  -re "\033\\\[\\\[.*\\\]" { wave $expect_out(0,string); return }
  -re "(.*)" { send_user -- $expect_out(0,string); }
}

interact

The most obvious change, of course, is the introduction to Gnome 3.0 with Gnome-Shell.  Wow, has it come a long way in usability from my preview of it about a year ago.  After an hour of self-discovery of this shiny new user interface to the Gnome window manager, I am pleased to say I have adapted to it quite readily — and that’s a good indicator.

The UI is intuitive enough to me.  I like the ease of managing its favorites menu and I especially like the window management with the dynamic workspaces to the right.  I do miss some of Compiz features, such as wheel zoom and mouse selecting any area to snapshot to a graphic image, but I am confident such niceties will arrive eventually.  It is a must to install gnome-tweak-tool, simply to increase the font rendering scale and use preferred fonts — as nice as the default liberation fonts look, I have grown accustomed to my preferred combo of Arial, Lucida Console, and Trebuchet.

Firefox 4 is also a welcome change.  It starts up faster and it renders faster — I was starting to warm up to Google Chrome as a replacement, because of Firefox’s prior performance.  I had to first install an extension NoSquint that manages page zooming to leverage my high definition monitor and accommodate my aging eyes.  Next came the usual suspects from Adobe, except they now offer a 64-bit flash player, which means nspluginwrapper is no longer needed; OpenJDK and IcedTea have proven to be capable enough for my Java-enabled web needs; and mozplugger with mplayer and timidity++ (removing totem-mozplugin of course) allows HTML embedded media to play without fuss.  Finally, CUPS with system-config-printer continue to not disappoint with its auto-detection of our networked HP Color LaserJet 2605dn printer.

As a long-time end user of OpenOffice (I still got my boxed copy of Sun’s StarOffice), I am happy to see a parallel fork of it as Liberation Office.  Remember what happened when XFree86 messed with its licensing and became Xorg?  It is a reminder that open source projects like these in danger of getting strangled by commercial interests can quickly become a non-issue when its development community takes charge over those few that would seek to exploit the masses with their shortsightedness goals.

Ok, enough applications and usability talk — time to fire up MAME and other classic emulators and do some retrogaming — woot!

Peoplesoft is setup to do an IPVS direct routing method.  That is, client connections connect into the IPVS director hosting the virtual IP address.  The packet gets redirected by IPVS to a physical host running one of the Weblogic services.  After the client requests are processed by Weblogic, the reply packets get sent back directly to the client machine — without traversing back through the IPVS layer.  This is the most lightweight of methods offered by IPVS.

To configure IPVS for direct routing, all the hosts must be running on the same VLAN.  And since IPVS in this mode does not do any network address translation (nat), all of its virtual service port numbers must match the real service port numbers, i.e., https://hrms.somedomain.com:8443 might redirect as https://blade4.chassis2:8443.

It is important to setup any IPVS timeout that works with your application needs, i.e., our Peoplesoft portal pages have an enforced application timeout of 20-minutes, so IPVS should not drop any idle client connections in advance of that.  Just modify /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm and add a line like:

--set 1200 0 0

Start the ipvsadm service, which merely echos this file to ipvsadm -R.  You can always change this value on-the-fly, too, so no worries here.  Then configure /etc/sysconfig/ha/lvs.cf to load-balance for two web services on different hosts:

serial_no = 12
primary = 10.25.63.62
service = lvs
backup_active = 1
backup = 10.25.63.63
heartbeat = 1
heartbeat_port = 539
keepalive = 3
deadtime = 6
syncdaemon = 1
network = direct
debug_level = NONE
monitor_links = 0
virtual hrms8443 {
  active = 1
  address = 10.25.63.64 eth3:0
  vip_nmask = 255.255.255.0
  port = 8443
  persistent = 1200
  expect = "200 OK"
  use_regex = 0
  send_program = "/usr/local/sbin/check_hrms_ssl.sh %h 8443"
  load_monitor = none
  scheduler = wlc
  protocol = tcp
  timeout = 6
  reentry = 15
  quiesce_server = 0
  server hrwebp01 {
    address = 10.25.63.60
    active = 1
    weight = 1
  }
  server hrwebp02 {
    address = 10.25.63.61
    active = 1
    weight = 1
  }
}

Start the pulse service and dump the IPVS table:

$ sudo ipvsadm -L -n
IP Virtual Server version 1.2.0 (size=4096)
Prot LocalAddress:Port Scheduler Flags
 -- RemoteAddress:Port           Forward Weight ActiveConn InActConn
TCP  10.25.63.64:8443 wlc persistent 1200
 -- 10.25.63.60:8443             Route   1      0          0
 -- 10.25.63.61:8443             Route   1      0          0

The last step is to setup each of the real servers running a web service each to process the redirected TCP packets for the virtual IP address, i.e., 10.25.63.64.  So, modify their /etc/sysconfig/iptables and add the following ruleset:

*nat
: PREROUTING ACCEPT [136:11568]
: POSTROUTING ACCEPT [12:1557]
: OUTPUT ACCEPT [12:1557]
-A PREROUTING -d 10.25.63.64 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8443 -j REDIRECT
COMMIT

Startup the iptables service to enable these rules.  Again, there is no NAT’ing going on here, but these rules ALLOW the redirected packets from the IPVS host to be processed on this host’s networking stack, just as if it held the virtual IP itself.

For a number of years we have enjoyed the high availability successes of IPVS handling this Peoplesoft architecture.  Thus, we have also implemented IPVS for our core clinical information system running InterSystems Caché.  This implementation, however, does not make any use of piranha and does not use the direct routing method.  The main reason why we chose not to use piranha’s pulse / lvsd services is because there is a large mix of stateless (web) and stateful (telnet, ssh) connections into the applications.  And while the pulse / lvsd services could be configured to accommodate these requirements, there are some associated complexities in its configuration, startup, and fail-over scenarios that were undesirable to its system engineers.

Also, we were planning to run multiple Caché application services per physical blade, but alas, those services listen on ALL the host’s adapters (0.0.0.0) and cannot be configured to listen to assigned virtual IP addresses, only port numbering.  The thought of running one instance per KVM virtual guest to circumvent the port conflict was explored, but that introduced an unsupported RHEL 5 cluster configuration (it may be supported using RHEL 6, so that might be a future consideration) since there are integral, shared GFS2 clustered filesystems needed for the application, too.

These limiting factors did not hinder us from moving forward with IPVS.  Instead, we developed our own framework to operate this useful load-balancer without introducing “too much” complexity.  That is, the service configurations are maintained consistently on all physical hosts (dev-test-production), making for simpler startup and shutdown sequences, yet allowing for real-time dynamic changes to any environment without contending with fixed, running daemon services.

The IPVS host must have NAT enabled, so enable that in /etc/sysctl.conf as:

# Controls IP packet forwarding
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

The IPVS ruleset can be maintained in /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm, although we have a cluster service (start, stop, status) script that invokes the appropriate ipvsadm commands, like thus:

start)
  # if either LAN is NOT configured, do nothing but exit normally,
  # because we may be running in some monolithic mode
  if ! alive $VIP ; then
    println "$INSTANCE ($VIP) is not alive"
    exit
  fi
  if ! alive $DIP ; then
    println "$INSTANCE ($DIP) is not alive"
    exit
  fi 

  # ok, setup as an IPVS director
  echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
  grep -v '^#' /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm | $ipvsadm -R
  $ipvsadm -A -t $VIP:22
  $ipvsadm -A -t $VIP:2972 -p
  $ipvsadm -A -t $VIP:9671
  ;;
stop)
  # downtime, teardown an IPVS director
  $ipvsadm -D -t $VIP:22
  $ipvsadm -D -t $VIP:2972
  $ipvsadm -D -t $VIP:9671
  ;;
status)
  # not a running IPVS director, just exit
  [ ! -f /proc/net/ip_vs ] && exit
...
  ;;

The result of this IPVS host looks something like this:

$ sudo ipvsadm -L -n
IP Virtual Server version 1.2.0 (size=4096)
Prot LocalAddress:Port Scheduler Flags
 -- RemoteAddress:Port           Forward Weight ActiveConn InActConn
TCP  10.25.63.79:22 wlc
 -- 192.168.2.131:22             Masq    1      1          0
 -- 192.168.2.132:22             Masq    1      0          0
 -- 192.168.2.133:22             Masq    1      1          0
 -- 192.168.2.134:22             Masq    1      0          0

TCP  10.25.63.79:9671 wlc
 -- 192.168.2.131:9671           Masq    1      105        0
 -- 192.168.2.132:9671           Masq    1      103        0
 -- 192.168.2.133:9671           Masq    1      103        0
 -- 192.168.2.134:9671           Masq    1      101        0

TCP  10.25.63.79:2972 wlc persistent 360
 -- 192.168.2.131:1981           Masq    1      10         0
 -- 192.168.2.132:1982           Masq    1      9          0
 -- 192.168.2.133:1983           Masq    1      10         0
 -- 192.168.2.134:1984           Masq    1      0          0

Note that there are only three clustered IIS web servers connecting into the four application server pool, so each web server (and each of its threads) connected to a discrete application server; the web client paradigm typically requires client persistence enabled, so there are no concurrency issues that comes with multi-threaded requests.

Optionally, you will need to setup some iproute2 rules on each of the application services, but only if you want the hosts running those target virtual services to be also reachable by other means, such as ssh’inf directly to the physical hostname.  Here’s how to configure that on a RHEL 5 server.  Modify /etc/iproute2/rt_tables and append:

118    development
128    test
138    production

… and create two new files in /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts as rule-{adapter} and route-{adapter}, substituting {adapter} with the name of the physical network adapter, i.e., eth0 or br1.  First, the rule file:

from 192.168.2.111 lookup development
from 192.168.2.112 lookup development

from 192.168.2.121 lookup test
from 192.168.2.122 lookup test

from 192.168.2.131 lookup production
from 192.168.2.132 lookup production
from 192.168.2.133 lookup production
from 192.168.2.134 lookup production

Then the route file:

default via 192.168.2.118 table development
default via 192.168.2.128 table test
default via 192.168.2.138 table production

XTerm*background:       Light Cyan
XTerm*colorBD:          DarkBlue
XTerm*colorBDMode:      True
XTerm*cursorColor:      DarkSeaGreen
XTerm*font:             -*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-14-140-*-*-*-*-*-*
XTerm*font:             -*-lucidatypewriter-bold-r-normal-*-14-140-*-*-*-*-*-*
XTerm*foreground:       Black
XTerm*geometry:         100x40
XTerm*rightScrollBar:   True
XTerm*saveLines:        5000
XTerm*scrollBar:        True
XTerm*scrollTtyOutput:  False
XTerm*toolBar:          True
XTerm*trueType:         True

$ vi /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-13.repo

[fedora13]
name=Fedora 13 – $basearch
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/13/Everything/$basearch/os/
enabled=1
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

$ yum –nogpgcheck –noplugins –disablerepo=* –enablerepo=fedora13 downgrade cairo cairomm cairo-devel cairomm-devel

Essentially, you are going from cairo-1.10 back to cairo-1.8. Re-start Firefox and voila, no more annoying GIF issues!

# lvcreate -n lv_winxp -L 32G vg_supermicro8
# dd if=/mnt/virt/winxp.img of=/dev/vg_supermicro8/lv_winxp bs=8192
2621440+0 records in
2621440+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 458.669 s, 46.8 MB/s


Next, I added registered that logical volume as a block device to device-mapper:

# kpartx -av /dev/vg_supermicro8/lv_winxp

I saved a copy of its partition table, and made a new one from it for the new physical size:

# sfdisk -d /dev/vg_supermicro8/lv_winxp > winxp.save
# cp winxp.save winxp.new
# vi winxp.new

I changed the old 41913522 size, divided by 63, and multiplied by that by 1.6 (32GB / 20GB), dropped the decimal,  for the new value of 67061610.

# sfdisk --force /dev/vg_supermicro8/lv_winxp < winxp.new
Warning: partition 1 does not end at a cylinder boundary
Successfully wrote the new partition table
Re-reading the partition table ...


# ntfsresize /dev/mapper/vg_supermicro8-lv_winxp1
ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0)
Device name : /dev/mapper/vg_supermicro8-lv_winxp1
NTFS volume version: 3.1
Cluster size : 4096 bytes
Current volume size: 21459722752 bytes (21460 MB)
Current device size: 34335544320 bytes (34336 MB)
New volume size : 34335539712 bytes (34336 MB)
Checking filesystem consistency ...
100.00 percent completed
Accounting clusters ...
Space in use : 18258 MB (85.1%)
Collecting resizing constraints ...
WARNING: Every sanity check passed and only the dangerous operations left.
Make sure that important data has been backed up! Power outage or computer
crash may result major data loss!
Are you sure you want to proceed (y/[n])? y
Schedule chkdsk for NTFS consistency check at Windows boot time ...
Resetting $LogFile ... (this might take a while)
Updating $BadClust file ...
Updating $Bitmap file ...
Updating Boot record ...
Syncing device ...
Successfully resized NTFS on device '/dev/mapper/vg_supermicro8-lv_winxp1'.

Woot! De-register it from device-mapper and fire up the virtual machine:

# kpartx -dv /dev/vg_supermicro8/lv_winxp
# virsh start WinXP
# virt-viewer WinXP

Windows XP booted into a blue screen, not death, but rather into its own NTFS filesystem consistency check. I allowed it to check the new filesystem size and it passed just fine. Of course, after fully starting up, Windows decided this was “new” hardware and prompted me for a gratuitous re-boot. {SNICKER}

That was a somewhat pricey decision, but I cannot see me ever using that OS again.  I will maintain my XP desktop running under KVM at home and on VMWare Player at work.

First, the standard add-on packages I find most useful after a Fedora 14 workstation install, not unlike the package set I posted earlier with Fedora 13:

yum install alacarte alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 anjuta anjuta-doc avant-window-navigator awn-extras-applets ballbuster byacc ccache ClanLib ClanLib-devel codeblocks codeblocks-contrib codeblocks-contrib-libs codeblocks-libs compiz-fusion-extras-gnome compiz-fusion-gnome compiz-manager conglomerate cups-pdf dosbox ecj eclipse-cdt eclipse-changelog eclipse-dltk-ruby eclipse-jdt eclipse-phpeclipse eclipse-rpmstubby eclipse-shelled eclipse-subclipse emerald emerald-themes extremetuxracer fedora-packager fluid-soundfont-lite-patches fusion-icon-gtk games-menus gambas2-ide gcc gcc-c++ gconf-editor GConf2-devel ghostscript-doc glade3 glest glunarclock gnome-applet-sshmenu gnome-doc-utils gnome-games-extra gnome-games-extra-data gnome-hearts gnome-themes-extras gnubg gnuchess gnubversion gtkglext-devel gtkglextmm-devel gtkmm24-devel hexedit htop intltool iptraf kernel-devel libnet-devel libxml2-devel livecd-tools manedit Maelstrom meld mono-basic mono-basic-devel mono-core mono-data mono-data-sqlite mono-debugger mono-devel monodevelop monodevelop-debugger-mdb monodevelop-debugger-mdb-devel monodoc mono-extras mono-jscript mono-locale-extras mono-nat mono-nat-devel mono-tools mono-winforms mozplugger multimedia-menus ncurses-devel neverball nspluginwrapper.i686 oxygen-cursor-themes oxygen-icon-theme p7zip penguin-command perl-libwww-perl preferences-menus pulseaudio-libs-devel PySolFC* revisor rogue ruby ruby-devel ruby-irb ruby-ri scorched3d SDL* security-menus sgml-tools stellarium stellarium-doc strace subversion-gnome supertuxkart texinfo timidity++ wesnoth wine xmlcopyeditor xmlto xscreensaver-extras-gss xscreensaver-gl-extras-gss

Then, add the RPMfusion repositories to yum and do:

yum install atari++ e-uae gltron gmameui lame-devel mame mame-ldplayer mame-tools mess mess-data mess-tools mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-tools stella vice

NOTE: an excellent alternative to gmameui is Gelide, but is packaged as a source tarball to download, configure, and make install.

Next, add-on these Adobe essentials:

yum install AdobeReader_enu flash-plugin

… and add Sun Java support for the command-line and web browser:

alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/latest/bin/java 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/java/latest/bin/javac 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/java/latest/bin/javaws 20000
alternatives --install /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so.x86_64 /usr/java/latest/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so 20000

To get optimal use out of your Firefox browser with the above add-ons (mp3, midi, wav), you still have to yum remove totem-mozplugin and vi /etc/mozpluggerrc to find the timidity entry and remove its -Od option to make it work with pulseaudio.

Finally, to get a rich set of fonts working for Gnome, Firefox, and OpenOffice, I like to unpack a copy of this fonts archive into my home directory folder, .fonts

My Fedora 13 desktop

Nice!!

Then there have been the upgrades on my personal workstation housing this web site on its own KVM virtual guest.  I opted to upgrade beyond the Fedora-supplied WordPress 2.8 to the latest 3.0.1 using WordPress automatic upgrade.  I did this mainly because I wanted to replace the software tab with downloads instead, using a new plugin to make for a spiffier files section.

I do not have a SAN for LUN live migration operations, but I accomplished the same by merely appending 10gb of filespace for this KVM guest’s disk:

dd if=/dev/zero of=newroot.img oflag=append bs=8192 count=1310720 conv=notrunc
kpartx -a newroot.img
fdisk /dev/loop0
vgscan
vgchange -a y vg_hurst
lvextend -L +10G /dev/vg_hurst/lv_root
resize2fs /dev/vg_hurst/lv_root
vgchange -a y vg_hurst
kpartx -d newroot.img

Speaking of opting away from a yum repository, for some fun, I upgraded to the latest Stella 3.2.1 over what is available in RPMFusion, because it has a lot of new enhancements and features that make this Atari 2600 emulator priceless.  And speaking of Atari, I added another Java-based emulator in JStella to my retrocomputing page.  Yep, it has been quite a full month of upgrades.