Annvix Development Blog

I had too much ‘fun’ with Annvix with my > 5 years old hardware for last two days. (Actually, I just came back to US for a little vacation, and doing some cleanup and reinstalling the servers)

Of course I choose Annvix to install on my servers. I put in the CD and start installing…. I noticed something right away.. network does not work…. I thought it could be some minor problem with installer.. problem may go away after installation. But… No, it didn’t go away. It recognized the my 3com card alright, loaded the driver correctly but the packet just cannot be send nor receive…

now I start to think maybe my card is bad… after swaping cards (another 3com 3c905) still doesn’t work. Now I start to think PCI slot gets bad… so I start swaping stuff (you know how ugly it can be)

After couple hours, I decided to think it may be the software problem now… so I downloaded the ubuntu Linux and trying out.. Yep, the card WORKS!! it gotta be the software….
Anyone who has experience with Linux kernel stuff will goto http://www.kernel.org and checkout the newest kernel (actually, read the changelog first)

Here is what I found:

http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/marcelo/linux-2.4.git;a=commit;h=8511aca94801a49201cb31e7ab6a4d2373504411

That sounds promising enough to me that my old 3C905 card (without A, B, or C at the end) that needed this patch to work correctly. So, I spend another 3 hours (on my old hardware…..) to compile the annvix kernel (with the patch) just to try it out..

then.. WOOHOO!! it works!!

moral of the story? always have two different network cards while testing, and always have two DIFFERENT version of software in hands when troubleshooting hardware/software problem.

Yes, Vincent, I can start working on that autogen stuff now… maybe we can roll out a new kernel based on 2.4.33.x too? =)

Last week I asked how many people were using Annvix, and why, on the users@ and dev@ mailing lists. I didn’t get too many responses, so I’m sure there aren’t too many people using it, but one comment I got today I really liked because I find that, for myself, I end up dicking around with most distros to make things work the way I want them to (or even properly, for that matter), so this comment was quite encouraging (from the users@ mailing list):

“I use it just because I was trying it and it ended up working for me. I
don’t have to maintain it much so I can’t really say there is anything I
like or dislike about it. I can say though that it just plain works with
no extra BS.”

I kinda like that. If there are people out there who aren’t on the users@ or dev@ mailing lists and are using Annvix, I’d sure like to hear from you. For reference, the message I sent can be viewed here.

Since Last Thursday, i have been trying to get Annvix to run on my new machine based on Asus P5VDC-MX motherboard + Celeron D processor.

When I first load up the annvix, it is kind of slow (but who cares) but when I start typing in command, i noticed the whole system is not respoding the way it should be.. after fiddling around a bit, i found out that HDD’s DMA mode is off.. so I thought.. no big deal, just turn in on manually, and everything will be cool… NOT!! hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda gives me ‘Operation Not Permitted’ message… what the??? I am root! am I not? so I went on search the web, and found out the problem lies on the VIA chip 8251! it is not officially supported by linux kernel yet. o… crap.. after 2 more hours… i found a little patch that should do the trick.

However, the machine basically ‘craws’ without the DMA mode. (I am setting up software raid-5 array).. so it is almost useless…….

Anyhow, I went on search a bit just to make sure if other distributions already support this MB (just to make sure there is a solution).. Guess what, NOPE. Not even Fedora 5 and Mandriva 2006…..

Ok then, before I can convince Vincent to update the installer (for 1.2-RELEASE) so I can really setup the machine the way I like, I removed all other HDDs, and just install annvix 1.2-RELEASE on it (gawd.. painful…). then recompile the kernel with the patch (which already commited to 2.0-CURRENT, according to vdanen). After I reboot the machine, WOLLA! DMA mode is on, and transfer mode jump from ~2MB/s -> 60MB/s (no-DMA Vs DMA)!!!!

so.. the moral of the story is…. Vincent, can you update the installer (and walk me through it, so i won’t bug you again for small patch like this later on) please? =)

Got an email from my dad yesterday morning which essentially said “If you can get Annvix installed on this IBM server today, great, if not I’ve been told to install Windows Server 2003 on it tomorrow”.

Ouch.

My dad works for Northlands Park in Edmonton, AB, Canada, which is the largest venue for hosting shows in Edmonton (the Oilers play hockey here, all the big shows and big concerts are done on the grounds).

So I went out, took my 1.2-RELEASE CD with me, and within an hour of getting there had Annvix installed and configured (with apache, php, MySQL, and samba). This was actually a pretty sweet machine (although it’s not optimized for booting as the time from grub to a login prompt was shorter than the time it took for the BIOS to fully post). It’s a dual xeon 3GHz machine with hardware RAID and 4GB of RAM. Northlands is using it for an intranet server that my dad is developing.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but was very pleased with the install of this machine and how Annvix handled it. It didn’t properly write the SCSI module to use to /etc/modules.conf, not sure why yet, but I think that’s more kudzu auto-detection than anything else. Otherwise, the install was quite smooth.

I’l have to find out for sure, but I think this is an IBM pSeries machine.