For those of you that have tried installing Fedora 9 x86_64 on the latest Intel Quad Core chipset, you might find the kernel a bit pissy depending on your architecture. We recently got in a shipment of brand spanking new HP dc7800 workstations, only to find out that the kernel shipping with F9 is a royal pain in the ass. Earlier I posted this story about power management issues and the SATA drive not being found in the i386 install. Now with the x86_86 version, a new problem was found.

Upon loading the kernel in quiet mode (default install and live cd), it hangs after the loading kernel screen. With verbose mode on we found that it would hang indefinitely at this message:

IOMMU: Setting identity map for device 0000:00:1a.1 [xdefd6000 - 0xdefd7000]

Thankfully, there are two easy ways around this. The first consists of adding "intel_iommu=off" to the kernel boot line. For those of you that aren't Linux savoy, all you need to do is boot into GRUB and append that phrase to the end of the kernel line (or edit your grub.conf).

The second solution is even easier. Once you boot with the first solution, update Fedora 9 to the latest available packages. In the update will be the 2.6.25.6 kernel which has the proper code for this architecture! We didn't see anymore issues after this point, so you can remove the kernel append line if you still have it in your grub.conf

My favorite birdie just got a new pair of feathers! Songbird, the Internet's premier audio and web mashup, just turned another major milestone with their 0.6 release. I've been following this project closely since its inception and the 0.1 days ever since I saw a post on a random tech site about the concept. The idea is really very simple, and fucking cool as hell in practice. Take a bunch of seasoned developers, come up with an open sourced version of iTunes, throw in Mozilla's Firefox engine, and give it the ability to play anything anywhere! If that doesn't sound cool, maybe DRM is more your speed.

Since it's inception, Songbird has seen a huge amount of changes both on and behind the surface, regardless, it has done nothing but become increasingly better as time goes on. Running on Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP/Vista, with full MTP and Ipod support, this little birdie is without a doubt going on to a very promising future. Oh and did I mention it is fully extendable and comes with a ton of user community add-ons? To say it is an iTunes killer is only just the start.

Regardless of the picture of the left, this article doesn't actually discuss the Thief Series, but I thought it would be an appropriate lead in considering the topic, and the fact that Thief 1 and Thief 2 were amazing works for their time. Thief 3 on the other hand is a rant for another article. Damn you Warren Spector! Anyways... recently at the office personal items started disappearing from locked offices. Mostly the thefts involved small change out of jars with coffee money, and in one instance someone's reserved twelve year old whiskey mysteriously was low, so no one ever put much thought into it, until an Ipod disappeared right off of a desk.

To make things worse, the Ipod was actually slipped out of the case which was still there, and the USB cable was just hanging. Immediately, the staff began to question who it could have possibly been, and we quickly realized that the only people with keys are our immediate group of employees and the cleaning staff. Since our group has worked together for a good deal of time, most bets were on the cleaning crew, so some investigating was done. Luckily, the Ipod had been mounted to a Fedora workstation, so we actually had a record of when it happened: 4:50 in the morning. To back this up further, we had records of the electronic doors being opened only five minutes before.

Considering I spent a good amount of time fighting through the Drupal learning curve while setting up digitalruin.net, I thought it would be nice to share some of the tips and tricks that can be used, especially when running a Linux server. These days it seems like most of the quick and easy fixes for Linux server issues can be found on small blogs and mailing list archives after a quick Google search. Please do note though that these topics will be strictly *NIX related (RedHat specific). I don't claim to know much about Windows servers, and honestly I don't plan on running one anytime soon. ;-)

Installation Choices

One word: package. This might seem like common sense to a lot of full time techs out there, but you'd be surprised how many occasional Linux users install from source. Whether you're running Debian, RedHat, Solaris, or any number of other distro's, don't skimp in the beginning; always install from a package, or build one if you can't find a suitable mirror. Personally, I always use Dag Wieers when I can. If you are an RPM user, his repo has a great selection of third-party apps that are already built and essential in my opinion. If the package you are looking for is not quite up to date, build it yourself! All it takes is a .spec file, a source ball, and a little bit of patience.

If you're planning on installing Linux kernel 2.6.25.4 or newer with SATA, beware. This past Friday I decided to upgrade my departmental workstations from Fedora 8 to 9 with preupgrade, and the process itself went extremely smooth compared to the three hours I spent trying to get the latest kernel update to boot. Fedora just released 2.6.25.4-10.fc8 this week, so as part of the upgrade I first made sure that FC8 was completely patched. Upon rebooting a found that once the kernel loaded after the bios my drive suddenly disappeared:

Unable to access resume device (LABEL=SWAP-sda2)
mount: could not find file system '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory

Of course my first response was, "Freaking awesome!" Which I'm sure is a sentiment that would be shared by all. Subsequent posts to the Fedora mailing list and IRC chat room came up with nothing useful. Actually, that's not exactly true. One user responded with, "Why not just user your old kernel?" That has to be one of my favorite responses of all time. Another great response was, "Might not be related, but that kernel doesn't seem to be available yet, I just tried updating." Of course! That has to be it. For some reason my locally maintained yum mirror must have magically time traveled into the future and grabbed an unrelease kernel, or maybe it mugged the Fedora dev's for it. Either way, he needs to get hooked up to a better mirror.