Flushing the disk cache

I’ve been looking for this over and over and over, until I had some inspiration today (thanks to Andew and Chris) .. this has one and only one sole purpose: safekeeping, so I don’t end up searching for it all over again …

To free pagecache:

To free dentries and inodes:

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

Once that is done, you’ll see the memory (usually RAM) freeing up.

PacketPro 1.7.0

After blogging the last time about the PacketPro 450 LoadBalancer appliance, the guys over at teamix seem to have taken that to heart and implemented a rather nifty thing for their new release.

It’s called “Port forwarding“, which is basically what you’d figure from the name. It bounces ports around the load balancer, but saves you from creating a separate virtual server (and adding the physical servers to that one), but also saves you from modifying the syslog-ng configuration on the balanced servers.

EPIA fun

Well, as for replacing my current fileserver (which I seriously need to consider replacing), I’ll just pick up these things:

  • 3WARE 9550SXU-8LP (that’s 399,00€) plus riser card
  • VIA EPIA EK 8000EG (that’s 201,69€)
  • Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 1 GB DDR-400 (that’s 57,00€)
  • 4x Seagate ST31000340NS (that’s 279,00€ each – making a subtotal of 1.116,00€)

So after browsing some more for a replacement for my current fileserver, I’d like to share the latest stages with you people. Thanks to Mike (who mentioned that binutils-2.18* already does the LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-z,relro” part) I replaced it with “-Wl,-O1”. Same old place, there’s fresh stages … (and thanks again to Mike, with working util-linux-2.13-r2).

I also tried getting a Gentoo/Hardened stage for PowerPC working, but that fails as due to >glibc-2.3 needing =gcc-4*. Though luck ….

Oh, yeah. If anyone is looking for the specs, they are in my overlay.

Deploying VM templates

Ok, so after my first day yesterday after a rather long vacation I today wanted to look at the problem that the Administrator password isn’t changed when using VirtulCenter’s clone customization functionality (which relies at least for Windows on sysprep).

After a short googling, I stumbled upon this.

Simple problem short … Don’t specify an Administrator password for the template. Then you should be able to change the Administrator password when cloning the template. It’s “should“, as the VM’s are still updating.

And it really works. After emptying the Administator password, the cloning works just fine. Damn sysprep bug …

stages

For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to get some stages together the last few days. Thanks to solar and Brent, the ppc-stages are now coming along quite fast.

I haven’t really tested them yet, but for what it’s worth, you’ll find stages based on Saturday’s snapshot (that is 200780105 for those not smart enough to take a look at the calendar) here for the following profiles:

  • uclibc/ppc (normal/-softfloat)
  • uclibc/ppc/hardened
  • uclibc/x86
  • uclibc/x86/hardened
  • hardened/amd64
  • hardened/amd64/nomultilib
  • hardened/x86/2.6 (x86/i686)

Now remember, this isn’t *official* release material. This is just *MY* effort (for now) to provide current stages.

And just a side-note for those brewing their own (uClibc) soup: if you remerge system/world, you’ll have to keyword =sys-libs/uclibc.0.9.28.3-r2. Otherwise you’ll stumble on bug 195368, which is fixed thanks to solar, just not marked stable yet.

Can’t find sheep^Hsleep

Ok, so I ended up lying in bed for two hours, so I stood back up and searched for some stuff that floated my mind. The end result seems to be the following:

  1. VIA EPIA SN10000EG (199,30€)
  2. 2x Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (each 31,31€)
  3. Club 3D GeForce 7300 GT, 256MB DDR2, 2x DVI, TV-out, PCIe (CGNX-HG736) (55,00€) — still need to find a riser card
  4. Transcend SSD/IDE 8GB (169,00€)
  5. 2x Samsung SyncMaster 204B, 20.1″, 1600×1200, VGA, DVI (LS20BRDBSQ) (each 309,00€)

I still need to find a fitting power supply, but I’ll leave that for tomorrow. The above leads me with about 520,00€ for the “PC” and 680€ for the TFT’s (as I don’t have any). And that’ll give me a full silent (as in not a single moving part), quiet workstation for my desk.

Another thing I went looking, was the at the “Unquoted value” stuff repoman started printing. Thanks to GNi (and solar) I was able to compute a rather looooooong list quite fast …

For my own remembrance, here’s the (combined) command I used:

The *real* original (from history):

Oh, may come in handy too:

  • repoman-full-20080107.log (2,1M) as well as
  • repoman-quoting-20080107.log (1,4M)