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  danw 6:22 pm on 2014-02-03 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: 3d_printer ( 2 ), project ( 4 )   

  3D printer arrived 

  The nifty 3d printer from DIY Tech Shop finally arrived! It’s been a long row to hoe.

  I originally ordered from MakiBox last September (2013), but they are/were having serious production issues; if you want to talk to some seriously annoyed people check out the forum. After the Nth delay (N is >= 4) in mid December 2013 I gave up on MakiBox and cancelled my order, even after they contacted me an assured me that my order was going to be “coming real soon now.” I ordered from DIY Tech Shop, although their website stated that they had run out of parts, and were planning on a large buy in early/mid February 2014. It arrived on Tuesday January 28th, 2014. As of this writing, Monday February 3rd, 2014, MakiBox is still only showing 504 shipped units. I am sure the forum has even more angry people asking the operator of MakiBox to remove his wildly optimistic “shipping estimates”, where by “shipping” they mean “lie” and by “estimates” they mean “LIE!”.

  So it arrived and I’ve gotten the hardware assembly done (see below).

  My oberservation:

  • The brackets for the Z-axis motors were not designed for the shape of these motors, lacking clearance for a ring near the output shaft. The first bracket cracked before I noticed the issue, the second one I shaved by hand to fit the motor
  • A few of the brackets pay more attention to aesthetics than function, lacking some more useful functionality. E.g. left and right sided parts that are functionally interchangeable, but would benefit from having nuts on either side to better fine tune connections.
  • It looks like the threaded rod was not cut with a chop saw, and one end of one of the rods wouldn’t let a nut on. I cleaned it up with a die, but I probably could have made do by spinning a nut down the rod from the good end and using a jam-nut to force it through to clean up the threads.
  • The website advertises a “RAMPS 1.4″ Arduino shield to manage the printer, but the manual specifies annother name. Although aparently they are the same board it confused me, in addition the RAMPS 1.4 board seems to be a dual hot-end controller and the manual doesn’t specify which parts are for the first hot-end and which are for the second hot-end. And since I only have ONE hot-end…..

  Now I need to start on the electronics. It’s just a bunch of crimp-on butt-joints but I’m not super confident of the vary non-specific nature of the instructions.

  

  ToDo:

  • Finish wiring
  • Get filiment
  • Print enough replacement brackets for a whole printer
  • Get components for a second hot-end
  • Redesign to a Bowden type extruder
  • Start work on a 3d printer that can print parts at least as large as the width of a rack server
  • Design brackets for the backplanes

  WiggleChampion and Kevtronic are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
  • 

    Kevtronic 1:23 pm on 2014-02-05 Permalink | Reply

    Uhhh.. huh huh… you said crimp-on butt-joints… Uhhhh…. huh huh….

  • 

    WiggleChampion 1:46 pm on 2014-02-05 Permalink | Reply

    cool. very very cool.

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  danw 8:00 pm on 2014-01-09 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: project ( 4 ), storage ( 4 )   

  Storage pod backplanes arrived 

  So the backplanes arrived. They look good. Upon investigation, it turns out these have SAS1 (3gbps) SAS expanders, and can only recognize up to 2048GB of disk, so when 3TB SFF drive appear on the market they will not be able to accommodate them.

  Now I need to make a CAD representation of the PCB so I can design the bracket I want to 3D print to hold the backplane, drives and fans. Hopefully I can do a reasonable unit with easy removal for on site servicing.

  

  Front of backplane

  
  

  

  Back of backplane

  
  Apparently my work BB takes poor pictures.

   
• 

  danw 4:16 pm on 2014-01-06 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: project ( 4 ), solaris ( 4 ), storage ( 4 )   

  Current storage setup 

  I’ve sunk a lot of $$$ into storage over the years and here is my current setup.

  • IBM x3650
  • 12GB ram
  • 2x dual core 3.0Ghz Xeon
  • 2x Fibre Channel PCIe cards
  • LSI SAS HBA
  • 5x SGI SE3016 disk trays (16 disks, 3u rack mount) (here)
  • 64x 40GB SATA disks for high performance I/O
  • 14x 2TB WD RED disks for bulk storage
  • 2x 120GB SSD disks for ZFS cache

  This allows me to host 20+TB of long term storage on the bulk storage, and 2TB for performance I/O, and export ZFS duplicated LUNs via redundant fibre channel switches.

  Future major additions are:

  1. Modify SE3016 disk trays to use SAS2 expanders that support 3TB and larger disks
  2. Attach bulk 2.5″ SFF SSD and SAS disks to storage server via new custom made disk tray (here)
   
• 

  danw 3:25 pm on 2014-01-06 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: 3d_printer ( 2 ), project ( 4 )   

  starting a delta type 3d printer 

  I’ve ordered a 3d printer (here) and I’ve decided I’m going to use it to bootstrap the build of a Delta style printer that can do larger jobs, over 8 cubic feet.

  I’ve already ordered “The Kraken” (here) a multi-hot-end extruder kit that lets you print four materials in one print job.

  I’m thinking of doing something similar to the 3DR (here) but with a print area big enough to do a volume of 8 cubic feet.

  • Kraken hot end (ordered)
  • Aluminium square tubing for frame (RONA)
  • Bearings (Princess Auto)
  • Fasteners with metric threads (RONA)
  • Threaded rod (RONA)
  • Motor controller board (TBD)
  • Brackets (from my own 3d printer!)

  I’m starting on the design now. Even more work to do now.

   
• 

  danw 10:58 pm on 2014-01-05 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: disk, storage ( 4 )   

  Storage Pod for 2.5″ disks 

  I’m a bit of a storage enthusiast and I’ve been trying to find a reasonable cheap way of bulk loading 2.5″ disks. I’ve been decided to make a SAS disk tray for 2.5″ disks with vertical disks, along the line of the Backblaze storage pod (here)

  I stumbled across some reasonably cheap 2.5″, 24 port backplanes with integrated port multipliers (Supermicro BPN-SAS-216EL1 here) and since they were going for less than $200/ea I got 4 of them.

  Basic plan:

  • Chassis from Protocase compatible with HP rail kits
  • HP rail kit
  • four or five 24 disk backplanes
  • 3x 3-pin chassis fans per backplane
  • Redundant power supply
  • some form of power management board for managing the power supply
  • out of band integration with the SAS expanders on the backplanes
  • SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 adaptor plate
  • some custom wiring to provide enough 4-pin molex plugs to the backplanes (most P/S don’t have enough)
  • 3d printed drive sleds for disks
  • 3d printed slots for disks
  • 3d printed brackets for fans

  Sooo… lots of work to do.

   
• 

  danw 8:47 pm on 2013-05-31 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: storage ( 4 ), tech, tips and tricks   

  Reset password on McData 4500 / DS 24M2 

  I got a few EMC DS 24M2 Fibre Channel switches from ebay (they’re re-badged McData 4500′s). I’ve googled around and everywhere I looked people said it was impossible to reset the password on these (firmware ver 7.x.x) without doing a full factory reset and losing any licensing feature that the previous owner installed. (Although this link has a solution for version 8 or newer firmware)

  But lurking though the switch for a few hours I found the way.. dun dun dun….

  First log in with the secret password ‘neergcm”
  
ifconfig 192.168.0.5 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1
pcp
pcpauth ?-help
pcpauth p 0

  What this does is:

  • ifconfig 192.168.0.5 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1 – set ipaddress to 192.168.0.5, netmask to 255.255.255.0, gateway to 192.168.0.1
  • pcp – enables a bunch of sub commands
  • pcpauth ?-help – shows you the many uses of this tool
  • pcpauth p 0 – resets http access to default (password)

  Now if you log in to the web gui with Administrator/password it will prompt you to enter a new password, then force you to log back in with your new password.

  IT WORKS!

   
• 

  danw 10:54 am on 2011-08-16 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: perl, solaris ( 4 )   

  sarpipe.pl – machine readable solaris sar output 

  I’ve been scripting somewhat with sar on Solaris 10. The major problem is that for some reason there is no flag to output machine readable output (ie. make it easy to import into spreadsheets or other script). The most imporant part was adding a time field to each and every block device to make it much easier to create disk statistics.

  So I threw one together sarpipe.pl:

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;
  
  #default field delimiter/separator
  my $delim = "|";
  
  while($_ = shift @ARGV) {
          if($_ =~ m/--delim/) {
                  #change the default field delimter
                  $delim = shift(@ARGV);
          }
          else {
                  die "Usage: sar [-A...] | $0 [--delim seperator]n";
          }
  }
  
  #preset so we don't get any concat empty val errors
  my $latesttime = "";
  #loop through the sar output
  while(<>) {
          chomp;
          #catch time field of output, remove from line
          if($_ =~ s/^(dd[:]dd[:]dd|Average)//) {
                  $latesttime = $1 . $delim;
          }
          #remove leading and tailing whitespace
          $_ =~ s/(^s+|s+$)//;
          #replace spaces with field delimiter
          $_ =~ s/s+/$delim/g;
          #if the line contains any content, print time field and line
          print $latesttime  . $_ if($_ =~ m/^.+$/);
          print "n";
  }
  

  In use:

  user@example$ ./sarpipe.pl  -h
  Usage: sar [-A...] | ./sarpipe.pl [--delim seperator]
  user@example$ sar -d | ./sarpipe.pl | more
  
  SunOS|bcaeao|5.10|Generic_144488-10|sun4u|08/16/2011
  
  00:00:00|device|%busy|avque|r+w/s|blks/s|avwait|avserv
  
  00:10:01|md110|0|0.0|0|1|0.0|29.9
  00:10:01|md111|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  00:10:01|md115|1|0.0|2|30|0.0|15.3
  00:10:01|md116|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|12.8
  00:10:01|md120|0|0.0|0|1|0.0|27.4
  00:10:01|md121|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  00:10:01|md125|1|0.0|2|30|0.0|13.4
  00:10:01|md126|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|13.0
  00:10:01|md130|0|0.0|0|1|0.0|0.0
  ...
  Average|ssd35,c|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd35,g|1|0.0|2|179|0.0|10.1
  Average|ssd36|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd36,a|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd36,b|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd36,c|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd36,f|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd36,g|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd36,h|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd38|0|0.0|1|5|0.0|2.2
  Average|ssd38,c|0|0.0|0|0|0.0|0.0
  Average|ssd38,g|0|0.0|1|5|0.0|2.2
  user@example$ 
  

  As you can see, it just formats the sar output to be easily used. It does not remove empty lines or remove annoying psudo block devices (ssd36,h). The default delimiter is a pipe because a comma would interfere with device names with a comma. If you change the delimiter via command line (–delim) be sure to be aware of shell escapes (eg –delim ! not –delim !).

   
• 

  danw 11:37 am on 2011-07-13 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: solaris ( 4 )   

  Solaris is cool and stuff 

  While research a problem with backing up Solaris zones I stumbled across a question about Solaris on Serverfault.com.

  And since all the answers didn’t really seem all that good I decided to drop some knowledge:

  This question is funny; this is almost the perfect question for a shill to ask to highlight Solaris 10 new features but no one gave the pro-Solaris answer.

  This is a textbook application of Solaris Zones. The shared kernel provided by Zones lowers the overhead of virtualization, and increases speed dramatically. If you have an idea of a standard install for VPS (bash, apache2, php5, python 2.X, …) you can create a single “gold” zone to use as a template to clone to new zones. Package repositories are available at sunfreeware and blastwave providing you with pre-compiled packages, removing the need to compile your own if you don’t want to.

  You can create your template, charge $X per VPS and clone the template for each new customer, total config time upwards of 5min, 0min if you script/automate it. Upgrading the “global” zone (the base system) will cascade those upgrades into the zones, or you can upgrade per zone, also highly automatable.

  Solaris has kernel space accelerated SSL encryption for supported hardware: expensive cards, Sun/Oracle Niagra2 CPU based systems, and the new Nahalem systems with AES acceleration, which greatly increases the number of SSL protected websites you can host per system (a href=”http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6926-Performance-Impact-of-kssl.html” target=”_blank”>link).

  Solaris 10 has many new features in resource management allowing you to segregate individual zones/processes/groups/users and keep runaway or compromised applications in one zone/group/user from impacting any others, as well as all the normal POSIX resource controls on memory use, file descriptors, etc.

  Solaris 10 Zones (and Solaris 10 in general) was designed from the ground up to prove excellent security, accountability, resource management, and to dovetail nicely with Sun (and now Oracle) hardware offerings. When released the Sun T5240 + Sun Solaris + Solaris Zones package was the best platform for page views per second for the money.

  In terms of technical merits, Solaris Zones is probably the best VPS solution available. But as is usually the case the issue is requirements and costs. Licensing, support costs, and Niagra2 or newer CPU hardware costs are rising with the Oracle takeover.

  So evaluate the following: Will the higher VPS density, better VPS isolation and wiz-bang features compensate for higher licensing costs (if using Oracle Solaris), smaller user base to draw peer support from, higher hardware costs (for SSL accel), cost of supporting yet-another-OS, cost of hiring people to support yet-another-OS, the longer time it takes for security patches to get released.

  If you already have a windows team, do you really want to hire a Solaris team just to shave a few percent off of your hardware bill? Stick with Hyper-V until it’ll save you money to switch. If you already have a large deployment of Solaris systems then go with Solaris. If you have a large Linux skill pool to draw on, do a Solaris trial and see how much extra time it takes 3 admins to learn the differences and maintain a new environment for 6 months

  But technology should almost never dictate your business decision process. Much as I hate to say it for most service providers it makes more sense to provide a Windows based VPS system than a Solaris one. Unless you know now that you’re going to need the feature set, and the advantages are going to save you lots of Time And Money(TM) you probably don’t want Solaris.

  But if this isn’t for a business and more about having fun, then go ahead, use Solaris! It’s alot of fun, has tons of features and options that you’ve never even thought of if you’re coming from a non-commercial Unix background. The deeper you get in to Solaris the more you learn about smart engineering and new ways of solving technical problems. I’ve yet to see a Linux box with a “load average: 1000.0+, 1000.0+, 1000.0+” that was responsive and easy to recover.

  @symcbean: I know Solaris (or Slow-laris as it is sometimes called) has a reputation for poor performance (eg your fork example) but I seem to recall that the “Solaris Internals” book said that they re-engineered the threads significantly for Solaris 10, and process creation/forking performance was among the industry leaders. The LWP framework where each thread in an app is mapped to it’s own light weight process in kernel space apparently gave a big boost to performance, reliability, and accounting. The big hurdles for Solaris aren’t so much technical as operational (bad ui), cultural (small user base), and political (Oracle).

  Link to original

   
• 

  danw 5:10 pm on 2010-06-01 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: solaris liveupgrade   

  Solaris Live Upgrade: NOOOOOOOOO! 

  I’ve been having a lot of fun with Solaris Live Upgrade at work lately. I’ve discovered a few interesting things that I thought I should share.

  Live Upgrade can down your server if you’re not carefull

  I don’t know why, but I’ve managed to down my server twice in the last week trying to create live upgrade boot environments. One zone lost the ability to see any mounted directories there by scaring the crap outta the DBA and requiring a zone reboot to fix, another abbandonned a cpio process copying data to the root file system. While it didn’t cause a crash, it could have broken some processes and SMF requires free space in /etc to operate correctly (aka save crashed processes)

  Live Upgrade lucreate doesn’t fail cleanly

  If live upgrades lucreate fails for any reason, it is very hard to recover. You can’t unconfigure the new boot environment, you cant delete the new boot environment, you can only complete the new boot environment, and that doesn’t work if say there isn’t enough physical space, or another hardware problem emerges

  Live Upgrade ludelete doesn’t work most of the time

  If you accidentaly destroy the metadevices or zfs file systems that live upgrade expects to exist in a boot environment, you cannot delete it. If the boot environment is “in complete” you can’t delete it, you preaty much can’t do anything with ludelete except remove pristine live upgrade environments. AKA only about 10% of the boot environments you wanted to delete.

  Live Upgrade is iffy at best

  So far this week I’ve had live upgrade refuse to patch zones because a single temp file didn’t copy correctly during boot creation. I’ve had lucreate mangle zone names then complain that the mangled name doesn’t exist. If you have a zone that mounts a file system, you have to include it in an exclude list file, or live upgrade will try to copy the contents of that additional file system onto your zones root drive.

  How I Live upgrade

  1. tar up /etc/lu*
  2. ls -al /tmp for each zone including global-zone
  3. create an exclude file listing all that you dont want on the zone’s root filesystem
  4. create a new live upgrade boot environment
  5. luupgrade either to a new version of solaris or to install patches
  6. luactive your new boot environment
  7. reboot as instructed via init 6
  8. confirm that the correct disk/filesystem is booting
  9. delete /etc/lu*
  10. restore /etc/lu* from the tar file
  11. If at any time something doesn’t work right, blow away all of the live upgrade configuration and restore with the tar file. Also remove any additional files from zones under /tmp that may be associated with live upgrade

  This is probably quite bad advice but I find live upgrade only seems to work when it is the first time you are using it. All subsequent times you get stuck with missing file systems that you removed since the last time you upgraded, weird file access errors, zone misnames, file systems filled to 100% with data you didn’t want copied, left of processes changing things you probably didn’t want it to.

   
• 

  danw 10:54 pm on 2010-02-25 Permalink | Reply  

  Sex chat with a spam bot 

  I don’t often feed the troll but I wanted to see how long the script was for this Bot. Although I didn’t actually find out as I was duity bound end the conversation in the appropriate manner.
  -dan

  (21:14:48) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: hey babes
  (21:15:11) dan: purple
  (21:15:22) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: think we chatted before right?
  (21:15:31) dan: bumpersticker
  (21:15:42) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: mhmm stick it in and cum in me !!
  (21:15:52) dan: coffee cup
  (21:16:04) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: i’m sorry i get to be forgetful at times!! how’re you?
  (21:16:21) dan: highway beep
  (21:16:32) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: i’m 24/f ……u?
  (21:16:37) dan: alphabet
  (21:16:48) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: nice, I just got out of the shower and finally got some time to relax ..what are you up to?
  (21:17:19) dan: internet beach soup
  (21:17:30) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Nice..I’m feeling a little naughty ..lol..U?
  (21:18:07) dan: tv gravel work
  (21:18:18) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Yeah I’m horny lol ..sorry if that’s forward ..is that cool?
  (21:18:56) dan: disney keyboard meow
  (21:19:08) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: I need a man who can make me squirt..have u ever made a girl squirt??
  (21:19:49) dan: paperwork sound plastic pop
  (21:20:00) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: lolz yeah i need it babe…i’m so worked up..wanna see what i look like?? i’ve got a sweet ass that loves attention!!
  (21:21:15) dan: tuesday fort angle tree
  (21:21:26) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: do you cam?
  (21:21:40) dan: calculator
  (21:21:51) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Well i don’t do msn cam or any other cam because i have been recorded before… But i do know one site you can watch me on cam, that assures me no one records…
  (21:22:19) dan: driveway cola
  (21:22:30) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: I mean… Do you want to see me on my cam?
  (21:23:03) dan: google blink
  (21:23:13) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Its http://twurl.nl/ae6vme just accept my cam invite,
  (21:23:18) dan: blank space
  (21:23:30) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Ok go to http://twurl.nl/lg4bay accept the invite on the page baby
  (21:24:03) dan: zigzag spaceship
  (21:24:14) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: sweet, fill out ur info..takes 2 secs..don’t worry it’s free!!..cause I’m sending you a buddy invite.. i can’t wait for you to see me baby let me find something nice to wear or maybe nothing at all ..k?
  (21:24:33) dan: upsidedown internet
  (21:24:44) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: if your internet is slow the site will load a bit slow, but don’t worry, you’ll see me sexy!
  (21:25:23) dan: dennys wafles
  (21:25:34) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: its the sites policy to ensure no minors get access to the site, so they might ask for CC to verify your age babe…but again no worries it’s free!!! k?
  (21:26:23) dan: engine baccon
  (21:26:33) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: cc is just to verify age..you’ll get in for free through my page!
  (21:26:57) dan: sideways star trek
  (21:27:09) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: What color Panties do you think i should wear? i might have you favorite color here somewhere…;)
  (21:27:26) dan: spellcheck roadkill
  (21:27:37) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Your such a good boy, i’m gonna show you what good boys deserve.. you can tell me to do anything you want me too!
  (21:28:09) dan: floor talk grey
  (21:28:19) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: ofcourse not babe, just requires cc for age verification, pretty much like every other raunchy site..lol
  (21:28:52) dan: insect tire game sneeze
  (21:29:03) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: Ok let me know when you get in so I can invite you directly to my cam.
  (21:29:31) dan: injured bike silently
  (21:29:42) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: u have to enter a cc, atm, or debit card so they can tell your of age, thats the ony way to see me sweety
  (21:30:20) dan: chewbacca
  (21:30:32) SerafinaSolich2792@hotmail.com: k you in yet babe??
  (21:30:46) dan: thats what your mom said
  (21:30:50) dan: BURN!