2.5" SAS drives

Slowly SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives are becoming the standard in servers, and we've been using the standard 3.5" sized versions for quite a few months. However, we purchased a 1U box for a new customer a few weeks ago, knowing that it would have 2.5" drives instead.

I'd been told by colleagues from other companies, who have already deployed a few, that they were pretty impressive in the field, often out performing their 3.5" cousins. Whilst I'm yet to see any significant improvement in performance at present (the box isn't under full load at present), they definately aren't slower and they do allow you to add more hard drives to a chassis, due to their reduced dimensions. They also consume less power and produce less heat.

Given the power restrictions becoming a more significant problem in the datacentre for both small and large companies alike, and the sheer number of SAS drives you can connect (both with and without expanders), I currently see no reason not to opt for them.

Front view of a 2.5 inch SAS drive

Isometric style view of a 2.5 inch SAS drive

Plus they look cute and deceptively delicate! :)

Debian Etch on a Toshiba Protege M200

This probably isn't news to anyone, but getting Linux on a laptop which is running Windows, and doesn't have a CDROM drive built in, isn't as easy as it could be. For this reason I've never put Linux on my work Toshiba Protege M200; the thought of arsing about with USB drives and making them bootable made me decide that it wasn't worth the effort - especially as I can't actually use Linux for work (we have a new VoIP phone system which has a Windows-only teleworker client).

However, with the availability of the Debian Windows installer and a free afternoon I sat down, fully prepared to have to do a restore next time I'm in the office. After resizing the partitions and running the Debian installer I was through to the usual text installer, which I'm used to. Basically went through the defaults and eventually rebooted into a semi-working Debian Etch system.

From this point it wasn't tricky in the least, as because it is an older laptop a lot of the problems have already been ironed out. Then again, I don't think it's something my sister could've done.

WiFi:
By default Etch comes with wpasupplicant, which does most the hard work with WiFi interaction these days. Unfortunately the actual device wasn't powering up. A quick google shows that the chipset used in the M200 is the ipw2000 - which needs firmware loaded into it at boot. A quick visit to the ipw2000 sourceforge website, a download, mv ./ipw2000/* /lib/firmware and a reboot, and the WiFi is working.

Tablet / touchscreen Functionality:
Etch comes with X.org 7.1.0-11, and the installer correctly works out that you have a WACOM touchscreen which mostly configures the system for you. However, to get the stylus working you need to add the following to your X.org conf:

Under the InputDevice's:

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver "wacom"
    Identifier "cursor"
    Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
    Option "Type" "cursor"
    Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver "wacom"
    Identifier "stylus"
    Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
    Option "Type" "stylus"

    Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver "wacom"
    Identifier "eraser"
    Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"

    Option "Type" "eraser"
    Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"
EndSection

And inside the ServerLayout stanza:

    InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"

    InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"

Save and restart X.org.

I'm yet to attempt getting the hotkeys working for changing the screen brilliance, or the volume, but I'm sure it can be done. The only thing that is really bugging me right now, is the fact that the button on the stylus isn't working yet. I'm sure I'll get it once I start fiddling with xorg.conf some more.

If you're so inclined, the nvidia drivers for the graphics card can be installed in the usual way. I have found that once I installed them (what can I say? I love free software, but I love the beryl project a bit more) the performance was actually slower than the vesa driver. Perhaps nouveau will recitify this.

Overall it was one of the least painful non-windows orientated laptop installations I've done in the last few months.

Unappreciated (sys|network|desktop)admins?

Whilst there are a few exceptions which prove the rule, Paul Cesarini speaks nothing but the truth;

Having been on the administrative end of academic technology, I appreciate the difficulties facing the information-technology staff. No one pats you on the back if nothing goes wrong, but if something does — if a virus or worm sweeps through the campus's network infrastructure, or someone hijacks some computers to churn out spam — you are off everyone's Christmas-card list.

We do "open source"

Whilst picking up my pay today, I briefly overheard a conversation on open source and cringed a little. Firstly the technical capabilties required for fully open source deployments, with centralised infrastructure are reasonably high, as are the administration costs from someone who knows what they're doing.

Secondly, and for the most important reason, that the team involved seemed to view it as a chance to provide something for very little price difference over "traditional" software. Free as in beer, rather than freedom to modify and contribute back. Generally I'll be found behind getting open source more notice, but is it snobbish to not want it at the expensive of obscenely profiting the "wrong" people?

Bear in mind that this is the team who couldn't debug a simple corrupted preferences file and proceeded to reinstall the whole application (to no avail), sat on the problem for some time, only to be solved by myself and my esteemed colleague in a little less than 2 minutes (including remote connection times to relevant desktops).

SBS 2003 missing Help and Support?

Occasionally Windows 2003 Small Business Server will "forget" (it appears to be an issue with one of the recent updates) about the Help and Support service. Unfortunately as this powers the Remote Assistance system, which I use to resolve some user incompetence / desktop configuration issues remotely, its slightly annoying when this happens.

I was talking to a friend in a similar situation from another company, and it appears as if he didn't know how to resolve the issue. As such I present the no-reboot solution:

  1. Open a command prompt and change directory to %WINDIR%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries
  2. Run the following commands:
    start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install net start helpsvc