Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer – my everyday fights with reality

All parts are here, time to do some work.

My main goal was small initial cost as well as small footprint if at all possible. I got myself old Dell GX280 desktop with P4 2.8 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM. It has “relatively” new technology onboard including one PCI Express port in which I was able to insert controller card.

The enclosure itself is highly apprised all aver the Internet Sans Digital Tower Raid that can house up to 5 drives. As you can see both are rather small and do not take too much space on/under my desk:

Now onto the setup.

As my server is supposed to serve multiple purposes, including driving my hvac system, I quickly dropped the idea of using one of dedicated NAS distributions (FreeNAS namely) and decided to stay with old mighty Ubuntu 10.04LTS. The installation went smooth and within minutes I had the server running.

But there was nowhere to find my drive inserted into external enclosure. It turns out that the controller provided by Sans Digital is built on HighPoint Technologies’ 622 chip which itself is not supported by Linux Kernel. Thankfully Sans Digital provides source codes for drivers in both RAID and passthrough versions. I’ve chosen the passthrough version as I plan to skip hardware raid provided by the enclosure and use zfs.

First some additional software needed to be installed:

sudo apt-get install dkms

Then we’ll get some sources:

wget http://dl.sansdigital.com/images/downloads/TR8M-BP_TR8MP/Non_RAID_Driver_Linux-SourceCode-v1.0-100421-1320.tar.zip
unzip Non_RAID_Driver_Linux-SourceCode-v1.0-100421-1320.tar.zip
tar -xzf rr62x-linuxla-src-v1.0-100421-1320.tar.gz
cd rr62x-linuxla-src-v1.0/

We are going to use dkms so dkms.conf file needs to be created:

vi dkms.conf

MAKE=”make -C product/rr62x/linuxla/”
CLEAN=”make -C product/rr62x/linuxla/ clean”
BUILT_MODULE_NAME=rr62x
DEST_MODULE_LOCATION=/kernel/drivers/scsi/
BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION=product/rr62x/linuxla/
PACKAGE_NAME=rr62xla
PACKAGE_VERSION=1.O
AUTOINSTALL=yes
REMAKE_INITRD=yes

Now the source neds to be moved into /usr/src folder:

sudo cp -R . /usr/src/rr62xla-1.0

And some dkms magic applied:

sudo dkms add -m rr62xla -v 1.0
sudo dkms build -m rr62xla -v 1.0
sudo dkms install -m rr62xla -v 1.0

Mere seconds later I was able to load the module:

modprobe rr62x

and see this in syslog:

[ 260.187351] rr62x: module license ‘Proprietary’ taints kernel.
[ 260.187357] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
[ 260.190622] rr62x:RocketRAID 62x SATA controller driver Non-RAID v1.0 (Feb 20 2011 11:26:43)
[ 260.190678] pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 260.190689] pci 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 260.190727] rr62x:adapter at PCI 1:0:0, IRQ 16
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 0 ] start port.
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 0 ] start port hard reset (probe 1).
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 1 ] start port.
[ 260.196263] rr62x:[0 1 ] start port hard reset (probe 1).
[ 263.808262] rr62x:[0 1 ] start port soft reset (probe 1).
[ 264.456614] rr62x:[0 1 ] pmp attached: vendor 1095 device 3726.
[ 268.104271] rr62x:[0 0 ] failed to hard reset.
[ 268.104286] rr62x:[0 0 ] failed to perform port hard reset.
[ 269.709009] rr62x:[0 1 4] start device soft reset.
[ 270.360323] rr62x:[0 1 ] port started successfully.
[ 270.360323] rr62x:[0 1 4] device probed successfully.
[ 270.396411] scsi4 : rr62x
[ 270.399912] scsi 4:0:9:0: Direct-Access ATA SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 270.401625] sd 4:0:9:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 270.402425] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
[ 270.402513] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 270.402520] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 2f 00 00 00
[ 270.402565] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
[ 270.402907] sdb: sdb1
[ 270.419594] sd 4:0:9:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk

So far so good. All pieces of hardware accounted for and work well.

Now we just have to make sure it will load the module at boot time:

sudo echo rr62x >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
sudo update-initramfs -u

And we are set for now.

Referrals:
1. Ubuntu forums.

From time to time my VMWare Fusion refuses to start saying that it can’t find /dev/vmmon device. Which shouldn’t be a surprise considering that pursuing every last bit of battery time I have turned off every possible daemon I could find that I do not use frequently (I use Fusion maybe once a month). One could argue that Fusion should be able to start it’s own daemons automatically when it’s opened but apparently guys at VMWare did not get that far yet.

Bottom line – to start up all the daemons you need to run Fusion simply run this command from the terminal:

sudo ‘/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh’ –start

Disclaimer – some of the links in this post are affiliate links.

Many of you probably saw my previous post about cleaning up Mighty Mouse here

After using my mouse for another 2 years I have found out that using this method may in fact become less and less effective (meaning I have to do it much more often that I used to). So I had to come up with something to solve this problem too. Now I’m using a modified method which is much more material involved :-)

I bought small bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol and I put one or two drops on the ball when mouse is still in upright position. then I use ‘Apple method’ of pushing down on the ball and turning it around to loosen up the dirt.

Then I continue with the above method using either white sheet of paper as before, or even better – clean microfiber cloth I got with my new pair of glasses recently. All that helps greatly to get the dirt off of the sensors.

After such treatment my mouse is working flawlessly for over a month now.

Recently I came to the point when free space on my virtual drive under VMWare was almost nonexistent. Usually it doesn’t bother me at all but I wanted to watch a movie from Netflix and all I got was information that Netflix’s player requires at least 1GB of hard drive to play anything at all.

Unfortunately disk size option in virtual machine settings was in my case grayed out so I couldn’t do it directly. After quick search in Google I have found that there is a command line tool already included that allows you to do so. All you have to do is run this little command:

cd /Applications /VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/
./diskTool -X 15Gb /VmWare/Windows\ XP.vmwarevm/Windows\ XP.vmdk

Be sure to pt the path to the actual vmdk file. After a minute or so I saw

Grow : 100% (10485760/10485760) done.

And all that left to do was to start the virtual machine and resize partition using partition resizing software of your choice.

Yesterday I was trying to install new Logitech webcam on Iza’s computer. During installation I was repeatedly getting this error:

“error 1327. Invalid drive: F:\”

during one of the installation software steps. Funny thing is that this particular computer does not have drive F: at all.

After some unsuccessful Google research I started to think (yes, that’s a skill I’m using sometime). One thing that came to my mind was DAEMON tools – the software used to create virtual CD/DVD drives to mount disk images without burning them. I opened it’s setting page and disabled it completely. Another try – and voila! Logitech webcam software no longer checked mystery drive F: and installed itself properly.