My South

Due to a variable scope bug Cyrus timsieved() can crash. The issue is resolved in version 1.2.2.

In case you are using this plugin, please update your installation. The source package can be found here:

giengerldap_auxprop-1.2.2.tar.gz

The md5 checksum is 636e8261198ea69372058e858fc496e9.

You will need Cyrus SASL 2.1.23 to compile it! Please update from 2.1.22 to 2.1.23!

Is perfectly possible:

# echo '::memstat' | mdb -k
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
Kernel                    5740879             22425   68%
Anon                       724870              2831    9%
Exec and libs                6752                26    0%
Page cache                 331489              1294    4%
Free (cachelist)           941079              3676   11%
Free (freelist)            641375              2505    8%

Total                     8386444             32759
Physical                  8177548             31943

After substracting 16 GB of used ARC (zfs cache), still 6 GB are remaining for the kernel. 1500 threads/processes are running, it is a heavily used cyrus imap mail server.

PS: In Solaris 11 (OpenSolaris), the ::memstat-Makro does put zfs cache size apart:

Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
Kernel                     156800               612   15%
ZFS File Data              508041              1984   50%
Anon                       136957               534   14%
Exec and libs                2832                11    0%
Page cache                  15002                58    1%
Free (cachelist)            47368               185    5%
Free (freelist)            146333               571   14%

Total                     1013333              3958
Physical                  1013332              3958

This is my desktop computer at work.

The local TV network "rhein main tv" is offering a special programming for every airport enthusiast:

"Rund um den Airport" (Airport TV).

Frankfurt is our biggest and busiest airport. It is the third airport in Europe in terms of passengers transferred.

If you can understand the german language and you're interested in airports, this is for you!

Some highlights (just click to watch the videos):

• How your baggage gets transported
• How pilots are briefed for take off
• The "skyline bahn" (an automatic people mover)
• How unaccompagnied children travel
• How deicing of runways works?

The whole list of available videos can be obtained here:

• All videos "Rund um den Airport"

Yes, Horde (a PHP framework supporting applications like IMP (for mail), Kronolith (for appointments), Turba (contacts / addressbook), and many more) is quite nice for an open source collaboration framework with a neat web interface - even PHP is not the show stopper here (normally it is).

So I managed to introduce Horde Services for 13,000 user accounts, do the complete LDAP backend connection and using Cyrus IMAP as mail server. The system runs on 4 nodes (2 active and 2 standby), serving approx 600-800 users concurrently (for Horde Web/IMP) and 2000 users concurrently (for IMAP4 mail).

But then there was the question for SyncML and synchronization of the turba addressbooks and the kronolith calendar dates to a mobile device... And yes, it had to work on Windows Mobile...

Solution is - of course - Funambol. They offer nice community edition clients free to use implementing SyncML on many platforms, Windows Mobile is one of them. But it is not so "standard compatible" - it was impossible to sync... Until I discovered the reason: The "configuration" tree which does not exist in Horde!

The OpenSolaris default print system is "foomatic" (starting with build 107, you can use CUPS together with the graphical print manager program as well).

"foomatic" accepts PPD files to definer printers' capabilities and needed PostScript code to be sent with each print request.

So whenever you buy a new PostScript printer (or you are using a network printing service like Canon's JobTicket) you have to "install" a new PPD (PostScript Printer Description) file - it will then show up in the Printer Manager properties window.

I just finished a new movie, 60 MB in length. It's in ISO MPEG4 format and can be

downloaded here (scrub2m.mp4).



You'll see four blocks.
Upper left and upper right is mirror set one, lower left and lower right is mirror set two. The two mirrors build up the zpool.

At approximately 21:00 (9 p.m.) our backup server calls daily for the new backup, making a zfs snapshot before. At 09:20 on Apr 3 the scrub begins. At 21:00 it rebegins due to the backup snapshot (resilvering and scrubbing do rebegin after doing or erasing a snapshot!).

The file was made - as all mp4 files before - by ffmpeg.

ffmpeg can convert single gif images to a movie sequence. You have to use 'frame.%d.gif' as input filename if your gif frames are named "frame.1.gif", "frame.2.gif", ...

I've added a smaller video showing only two mirrored disks on my

YouTube Playlist.

It will fetch data from the next seven days doing a scrub on the disks, 8 TB in sum.

Stay tuned...

Start Photo Album (20 pictures)! Starting in 1993, a "new" product soon became a synonym for a total nightmare and the equivalent of a today's childrens' toy.

Everybody which had access to "real" computers and systems began to feel embarassed, and all parts of the body began to ache suddenly when a collegue asked for help with Windows for Workgroups...

Microsoft wanted to do a facelift to Windows 3.1 and felt the pressure of OS/2 just poking around. It had networking, something Microsoft could not offer! So Windows for Workgroups was born as a fast hack. There was Windows 3.1 for Workgroups (not sold very often) and then Windows 3.11.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 ! Ready to go! (Photoalbum, 20 images).

Enjoy!

The system was installed with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.1.4, Settings:

At this moment, Prof. Dr. Michelev from Moscow Mathematics Institute presents his paper presenting a solution for the classical asymmetric RSA problem. By using hyperbolic geometrical projections in a hilbert space he tracked down the problem in the case of 2048 bit RSA to 4096 tries to compute to get the key. He put the program to download on his server as open source, but the server was "knocked out" by high demand in 20 minutes.

Financial institutions are out of hell today, says APR analyst A. Prilstone. Bank shares are falling to nowhere, and the NYSE and NASDAQ will stop trading in the hours to come.

"Isn't your work an extreme danger for our lives and our security" Mr Michelev was asked. He replied "in the ourdays economic crisis this is also the begin to rebuild a better system: a better cryptographic system, a better financial system, a better world system. I'll spend the next days and months with my wife and my children watching things changing.".

RSA cryptography is used throughout the world to secure communication on the internet and other networks. RSA is the algorithm used to be able to "check each other" and to create a common symmetric key to secure the transaction/communication. This symmetric keys have not been cracked, defacto standard of today is AES. If RSA is used to share such a symmetric key, then the key is known and useless.

Experts urge users not to use any credit card or bank transactions via the Internet on these days, even if the browser marks the site as "secure".

Major banks in the USA have called government for strict regulation of cryptography and for laws to prevent chaos in the financial market.

As I have some days off, I have time to play with rather historic things - thanks to Sun's VirtualBox application. In the last days I created a little Microsoft OS zoo on my Notebook:

• a small Linux machine acting as a router between real network and a virtual one
• a windows for workgroups 3.11 box including network, sound and internet explorer 3 (!) (9 diskettes)
  
• a windows 95a box including 16,7 million colour graphics and Firefox 2.0.0.20 (!) (15 diskettes)
  
• a windows 98 box including 16,7 million colour graphics (a CD)
  
• a windows NT 3.51 box (a CD)
  
• an OpenSolaris 2008.11 box to test Samba interaction :)

Thank god I found all these setup diskettes in my university here... Making disk images was not so funny though, diskettes are not really long term storage...

As a side effect, I have got Firefox 2.0.0.20 working on Windows 95, even if the installer does not like it.

I admit. I like Amarok 1.4. And I don't like Amarok 2 yet. And I hate GNOME and its Rhythmbox. And - finally - I appreciate Open Solaris.


So this weekend I had that idea "What if I had an Amarok 1.4 on my Solaris box..."... At the beginning it was a nice idea but at the end I learned how deep dependencies between libraries are. At short - Amarok 1.4 needs KDE 3.5. KDE (at least the kdelibs) need many other libraries and packages. So at the end, I installed over 300 Megabytes to have my favorite music player. Really. As a side effect, I have many KDE 3.5.10 applications too, as konsole (I prefer it over gnome's terminal), kate and Konqueror.

After having set up the thinstar box  the next step consisted of the installation of Asterisk 1.4.23.1 from source.

I installed unixODBC, unixODBC-devel, the mysql ODBC driver and the mysql server + libraries from the Suse 10.3 CD. After that I compiled the UW IMAP 2007 toolkit to have access to the IMAP voicemail feature of Asterisk.

Asterisk itself took 2 hours to compile, not really terrific...

show translation is also really low end:

thinstar*CLI> core show translation
         Translation times between formats (in milliseconds) for one second of data
          Source Format (Rows) Destination Format (Columns)

          g723 gsm ulaw alaw g726aal2 adpcm slin lpc10 g729 speex ilbc g726 g722
     g723    -   -    -    -        -     -    -     -    -     -    -    -    -
      gsm    -   -   27   27       58    30   26   129    -     -    -   58    -
     ulaw    -  91    -    1       33     5    1   104    -     -    -   33    -
     alaw    -  91    1    -       33     5    1   104    -     -    -   33    -
 g726aal2    - 119   30   30        -    33   29   132    -     -    -    1    -
    adpcm    -  93    4    4       35     -    3   106    -     -    -   35    -
     slin    -  90    1    1       32     4    -   103    -     -    -   32    -
    lpc10    - 161   72   72      103    75   71     -    -     -    -  103    -
     g729    -   -    -    -        -     -    -     -    -     -    -    -    -
    speex    -   -    -    -        -     -    -     -    -     -    -    -    -
     ilbc    -   -    -    -        -     -    -     -    -     -    -    -    -
     g726    - 120   31   31        1    34   30   133    -     -    -    -    -
     g722    -   -    -    -        -     -    -     -    -     -    -    -    -

I also included chan_sccp to be able to access my Cisco 7960 phone.

Performance: Using 1 voice connection from ISDN to the Cisco phone, the CPU has approx 20 % load and no clicks or lost packets on the line. Remember, no format conversion is done in that case (alaw -> alaw).

Power consumption: 9 watts with the hard disk, 7 watts without. Not bad for an asterisk server.

I completed it with MySQL ODBC storage for the call data records and an Apache Webserver to be able to look these records from everywhere in the world...

At a company I saw many of these Thinstar terminals in a recycling container, ready to disassemble. I asked whether I could get some of them and yes, I was lucky.

After opening the case I saw a Cyrix Geode GX processor, operated at 300 MHz, a 64 MB S0DIMM-RAM and a 32 MB Flash module, containing the Windows CE operating system.

I thought I could make an asterisk box out of it. There were two problems:

1. The maximum RAM you can put into the S0DIMM slot is 128 MB, so a swap partition will be mandatory. Swapping on Flash is not something you really want to do.
2. The 32 MB flash "disk" is far too small to install a Linux operating system and asterisk.

I decided to use a 160 GB 2,5" hard disk for storage and an AVM Fritz! ISDN card (PCI) to build up my test system. On the picture above you can see the mounted hard disk (it is fixed via screws on the front panel), the installed 128 MB notebook RAM module (66 MHz or 100 MHz (which is compatible to 66), a 133 will NOT work!) and the installed ISDN interface card.

Just for the numbers:

Our tsm backup job scans 31 million files in 3 hours, including 300,000 deletes and 25,000 new files backed up:

01/03/09   23:38:48 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS BEGIN
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects inspected: 31,305,555
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects backed up:   25,347
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects updated:          0
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects rebound:          0
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects deleted:          0
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects expired:    308,991
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of objects failed:           0
01/03/09   23:38:48 Total number of bytes transferred:    2.56 GB
01/03/09   23:38:48 Data transfer time:                  280.87 sec
01/03/09   23:38:48 Network data transfer rate:        9,594.01 KB/sec
01/03/09   23:38:48 Aggregate data transfer rate:        209.05 KB/sec
01/03/09   23:38:48 Objects compressed by:                   15%
01/03/09   23:38:48 Elapsed processing time:           03:34:49
01/03/09   23:38:48 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS END
01/03/09   23:38:48 --- SCHEDULEREC OBJECT END SA_SO_MAIL 01/03/09   20:00:00
01/03/09   23:38:48
Executing Operating System command or script:
   /mail/bin/pr_backupsnapshot_off

This fantastical performance was achieved after activating GZIP compression on the mail zfs pool and copying all mail files to compressed format.

The machine is a 2xOpteron Dual Core with 20 GB of memory and 1200 mail users online connected.

Machine load did not go up noticeably. The mail pool is a zfs mirror with two SAN pools (7 TB each resulting in 7 TB mail capacity).

Tivoli Compression is set to on, and we use encryption to our TSM server.
We are using TSM client 5.5.1.0 for Solaris x86:

# dsmc
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Command Line Backup/Archive Client Interface
  Client Version 5, Release 5, Level 1.0  
  Client date/time: 01/08/09   09:40:56
(c) Copyright by IBM Corporation and other(s) 1990, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Using that TSM client

memoryefficientbackup   yes

is very important in dsm.sys, otherwise dsmc will crash after having used 4 GB of RAM (it is a 32 bit executable, there is no 64 bit version for Solaris x86 available from IBM yet - in contrast to the SPARC 64 bit-Version).

Last Saturday Mr Horst Tappert died at the age of 85.
Nearly everybody in Germany knows him for the role of inspector Derrick in a television series of the same name. The big glasses and the classical form of his lacrimals made him famous.

Article about Derrick in the english wikipedia

I did some tests with that array, as I did with an Infortrend OXYGENRAID device and an old LSI FC array.

With patch 137137-09 (SPARC) and 137138-09 (x86), Solaris 10 can handle zfs pools with version 10. You will have to upgrade your zpools; "zpool status" will result in this warning:

status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format.  The pool can
        still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'.  Once this is done, the
        pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.

To upgrade, use the command

# zpool upgrade yourpoolname

The GZIP compression known by OpenSolaris and Solaris Express is now in the Solaris 10 code base starting from (kernel) patch 137137-09/137138-09.

You may set:

# set compression=gzip mypool/test

and - to set a gzip compression level:

# set compression=gzip-9 mypool/test

Congratulations for your unbeatable victory. May god give you all you need to reunite your country and to solve many of the problems.

You're right: Anything is possible in America.