Random updates

After a lot of consideration, and some reassurance from JWSmythe, I'm going with the Promise VTrak 15100 array for work. It has almost everything I want: serial ATA, dual SCSI adapters, and an ethernet interface. The downside is that Promise doesn't have an office in Canada, so there's the possibility that getting parts across the border could be a problem. However, there's a local company that'll do service, so that makes me feel better.

The other options just weren't as good: one was parallel ATA and had no ethernet interface. The other was the Fastora DAS-315, which certainly looked good -- but the local resellers couldn't be bothered to give me the time of day, let alone answer the questions I had. Best bit: when I asked for a copy of the service level agreement, the sales guy replied that he'd "have to see" if he could release it.

And at home, I've been running into problems with bridging, the 2.6.9 kernel and the 8139too driver. I thought I would enable bridging on Thornhill for some User-mode Linux fun, so I enabled it as a module, then rebuilt and reinstalled the modules. However, when I tried inserting it, I got unknown symbol: br_handle_frame_hook. Okay, what about rebuilding the kernel and including bridging within it? Tried that; when I booted, the kernel panicked as soon as it came time for the onboard 8139 interface to grab an address by DHCP.

It was similar to the earlier problems I had with the Shuttle, in that if I took out the ethernet cable everything was fine -- it was only when the response came in that the kernel panicked. And keep in mind this was without setting up a bridge at boot time, or anything like that. I had to go to the backup 2.6.7 kernel in order to calm things down.

I found this thread on LKML, and it seems to match pretty closely what I saw -- the stack trace matches what I saw; I wasn't able to see the whole message, because it would scroll off the screen. However, I'm reluctant to try this patch; I spent a whole evening rebooting (Sorry, Aaron) and trying different things before I finally confirmed that having bridging in the kernel was just a bad thing.

Interesting bit: I didn't realize that Linux does not have panic core dumping built into the kernel, as FreeBSD does; it's only available as a separate patch. Minus one for Linux.

Finally, it's the day after the office Xmas party, and what am I doing? Heading into work to unplug everything. The power is being shut off in our building (thirty-floor or so high-rise) while upgrades are done, so I'm shutting everything down and disconnecting it just in case. Tomorrow I go back in to reverse the process. Whee!