Technophile Monkey

NRK (Norsk rikskringkasting, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) has one unbelievably huge website. Hidden somewhere on it is NRK Nett TV. Yes, that’s streaming net-TV. They seem to put nearly all of their broadcasts online for anyone to watch, even going back several months as far as I can tell. Some other national broadcasting corporations, such as the BBC, started doing similar things, but almost always with the caveat that you have to be within their nation’s borders to watch the content. Not so at NRK, there are no restrictions here.

This is a great tool especially if you’re stark raving mad, like me, and want to improve your Norwegian. NRK can’t even imagine what a fantastic present this is for the language learner.

Unfortunately, they use the closed, proprietary WMV format for their files. It would be better with a free format such as Ogg Theora or XviD. But all is not lost, it’s not a problem for mplayer to play the stuff, you can even make a copy (via the -dumpstream option) to your own drive. Whether this is legal, both the playing of WMV and the dumping of the stream, depends on your jurisdiction, of course.

Yargh, another Planet to publish on! Planet SNM is not what you think, as it involves barely any whips and chains at all. It’s the Planet of the New Media Studies department of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Zürich. Where I work. Still.

The design there is NOT final, of course. It’s not even… uhmm… initial.

There is a simple way to cut this review short: Have you ever liked Type O Negative’s music? Then you will buy this album.

It’s the despair and intensity of Slow, Deep and Hard coupled with the sweet panty-wetting pop of October Rust. Oh, and sometimes, someone hits a few keys on an organ. Brilliant work, and a huge relief after the last two so-so albums. Finally, Type O are back.

We’re currently evaluating solutions for virtualizing GNU/Linux servers at the HGKZ in order to replace seriously aging hardware (700 MHz P3’s!). At the same time, we can be hip like you and use important-sounding words such as “machine consolidation”, “hypervisor” and “cuttlefish”.

Gino is evaluating OpenVZ while I’m looking at Linux-Vserver. Both solutions have a similar approach: Don’t create virtual machines. Instead, create virtual servers that are sealed away from each other, but running on the same kernel. This has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but I won’t go into that, you can read about it elsewhere.

Here’s a handy comparison table of what we found out so far:

There, that’s hard scientific facts for you.

After all of this probing, compiling, tickling, testing and general mayhem, we have decided to go with OpenVZ. To reach that decision, we of course evaluated both solutions on many levels (don’t let that table fool you). There are clear philosophical and architectural differences between the two solutions, but one key factor in our decision was that for the administrator, both systems are almost too similar.

Yes, OpenVZ takes a more complicated approach to networking, but Linux-Vserver takes a more complicated approach to configuration. Yes, a Linux-Vserver host’s default config is mostly what you want and just seems to work out of the box, but this lowers your motivation for learning the details of the resource management system. And details, as you surely know, are nearly always ugly.

With OpenVZ, you are forced to learn these things up front, which presents a steeper learning curve but gifts you with a more solid grasp of the technology. You get to flex your math muscle to fit virtual servers into your actual hardware’s limitations without creating an impossible physical paradoxon that rips a hole into space-time, and that’s quite handy. With Linux-Vserver, these things might come back to haunt you later, when you’re trying to put vserver no. 22 onto your machine and discover your 16 GB of memory are already spent, and that’s when details bite a tasty chunk right out of your lower backside. The decrepit state of Linux-Vserver’s documentation does nothing to ease your fears in this department, either. Convoluted configuration is okay, as long as it’s well-documented convoluted configuration.

Now what if we are wrong, and within the next 8 months someone writes The Linux-Vserver Bible (Illustrated Swimsuit Edition) and SWSoft decides to pull the plug on support for OpenVZ, leaving us without any burly Russian engineers to take care of the code? That may seem sad, but it paves the way for such a beautiful pink-colored fluffy thought that it nearly makes my skull burst: We would still be fine. Both of the solutions are open. No proprietary formats. No secrets. We can migrate from one to the other at any time.

It’s the beauty of Free Software once again.

WINE is an implementation of the Win32 API on Linux, so that you can run programs written for Windows on your GNU/Linux installation. It normally reeks of office applications, spreadsheets and polka-dotted ties. Cedega, then, is a commercial version of WINE optimized for games. It runs a larger library of Windows games than plain WINE can. So far, so good, right? Now, common sense might dictate that the games should run slower in WINE or Cedega, because those things are busy translating the Windows-nonsense the games speak into something that GNU/Linux can understand, and that surely costs performance, no?

Common sense is wrong. These benchmarks say that GNU/Linux with Cedega or WINE runs the tested games 33 – 40% faster than Windows Vista. 40%! That’s not just the fraction of fps that the hardcore crowd lusts for, that’s a significant number.

So the best modern platform to play Windows games on is not Windows but GNU/Linux? Creepy.

(This article is only available in German.)

Einige Intel Gigabit-Ethernet-Karten, die unter GNU/Linux mit dem e1000-Treiber laufen (z.b. 82573E) haben einen Fehler im
EEPROM. Fälschlicherweise aktiviert sich das Energiemanagement, auch mitten in einem Transfer. Das hat zur Folge, dass sämtliche Verbindungen gekappt werden — nicht lustig. Nach einer knappen Minute hat sich der Treiber erholt und der Kernel fährt das Interface wieder hoch. Der Fehler zeigt sich als “TX unit hang” im Kernel Log.

Die HGKZ ist davon teilweise betroffen, denn einige Server von Thomas Krenn haben solche Karten onboard. Beispiel aus dem SNM-Backupserver: Intel Corporation 82573E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) (rev 03).

Einen Fix bietet das e1000-Treiberteam über Sourceforge. Das Skript greift auf ethtool zurück. Nach dem Fix funktionierten meine Karten sowohl im 1000- wie im 100 Mbit-Modus wieder zuverlässig.