Does anyone here have any experience with cluster filesystems? I've got a a fibre channel SAN setup here (IBM DS3512) and I thought it would be neat to share it between a couple of my main Linux boxes with a cluster filesystem.  A little research suggested that OCFS2 would be the simplest for me. The ocfs2-tools package on Debian contains everything needed to configure the cluster heartbeat and all that stuff. Setting up the two hosts was indeed straightforward. I managed to get them accessing one filesystem on the SAN array without any problems. But the performa ..read more

Anyone else using Slackware? I dled and compiled the latest version of xscreensaver but if I try to use the settings it crashes every time. I had a little bit of back and forth with JWZ but, since the xscreensaver-settings binary won't generate a backtrace when run in the debugger (I have no idea why it won't, all the debugging symbols are in the binary) I ended up assuming that the problem is that Slackware doesn't "feature" systemd, which xscreensaver now supports. The weird thing about that is that the xscreensaver configure script DOES notice that my Slackware system isn't running systemd ..read more

I'm sad to see this. Even though I'm not an advocate of GNU/Linux I was certified for RHEL 6/7 and off and on did jobs with it until 2019. I always thought it was one of the more well designed distros, besides systemd, but maybe that was Stockholm syndrome. Either way, it was never that ugly mess Debian was under the surface, or Arch.  For those who want skinny and don't know what's going on they have basically closed off their public repositories for rhel in an attempt to cut off Rocky and Alma as downstream replacements of CentOS (which is dead, replaced with rolling release CentOS str ..read more

Hi SGI'ers, Unix'ers & GNU'ers, in looking at SGI/BSD status, I took a tangent and decided to give GNU Hurd a go.. There is a Debian/Hurd distribution that allows you to do a virtual install on KVM. This only runs on now old i440FX / BIOS VM which has emulated IDE HD/CDROM (obsolete HW). In doing some historical digging I came across these quotes from Thomas Bushnell (initial Hurd architect/developer): - RMS was a very strong believer -- wrongly, I think -- in a very greedy-algorithm approach to code reuse issues. My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel ..read more

The upcoming release of OpenBSD 7.3 is still some weeks away - it should appear around end of March IIC - and I also wanted some diversion from OpenBSD/sgi, so I did show my other machines some love in the meantime and tested NetBSD 9.3 on them. I tested a lot of machines and configurations so far for diskless operation and will list them here, starting with my SPARC machines today: NetBSD/sparc Sun SPARCclassic w/microSPARC running at 50 MHz and 80 MiB of RAM - actually this one here: Sun SPARCstation 10 w/2 x SuperSPARC SM61 running at 60 MHz and 512 MiB of RAM Sun SPARCstation 10 w/1 x ..read more

Long time since Nekochan days. Pureblood here, still kicking butt. I know...this ain't Crackberry.  Just wanted to know if any IRIX heads out there still use BB OS 10 devices. I've got a Dev Alpha C, a Passport and a Z30, but they are too precious to use as daily phones. Still use them once in a while.   I've got a few OS 7 BBs too, used a 9900 as a daily phone up until a couple years ago. Nice reading you again ..read more

First of all I wish you all a happy new year! I'd like to make you aware of something I've been plotting on since a while now - actually since OpenBSD retired the sgi architecture after 6.9 in Oct 2021. Back then I was pretty sad about that move, although it was on the table since a while already back then - actually since 6.6 IIRC, but some person or some people kept it alive until after 6.9. Much obliged for that. Back then I by chance - well, it was more like trial and error - discovered that the octeon userland is actually compatible with sgi kernels - they use the same packages tree, so ..read more

Previous thread here: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2443.html Operating Systems I reiterate that none of the big three are fantastic choices. GNU/Linux in particular is rather anti-user, but it's probably the least bad of the main three. I'm waiting to go to NetBSD when Framework gets graphics support for it, but until then because nothing else works properly on it that's a modicum of stable I'm using Ubuntu. Windows 10 remains my personal view the most balanced especially LTSC but support is slowly being phased out for 11. NetBSD and Tribblix are my current highest recommendations ..read more

It's been brought to my attention I tend to blog more than write good topics, but I will do better I guess  September will mark three years I walked away from my daily Linux admin job. There wasn't one single factor, but several. The first was I felt I was lured into the job under false promises. I wanted to go into compliance and resources, a section of the company where we deal with abuse, fraud, DMCAs, hacks, problem customers, etc. Instead they wanted me in admin.  What e thought my job was gonna be: Monitoring, handling non automation issues, and working on specialist issues ..read more

Does anyone know what happened to the old Red Hat ISOs, that were available at, for example: https://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/...iso/alpha/ They currently redirect to the legacy.redhat.com FTP server, but it seems something is wrong, and I end up on the "normal" red hat server (no old ISOs there, just a notice to connect to archive.download.redhat.com, which again redirects to the main FTP server). I've tried reporting "broken links" on their website via https://www.redhat.com/en/feedback , but they won't talk to me without a support contract. $299 is a bit too much for me for the abil ..read more