peteconnolly.co.uk » Linux

OSSIM 2.3.1 on a Dell Poweredge with a Broadcom NIC

pete — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:01:24 +0000

This should get filed under the ‘I need to remember this for the next time it happens’ category.

Installing OSSIM 2.3.1 (Debian based Open Source SIEM system) onto a Dell Poweredge 1950 would succeed but the network would not function. Doing an ‘rmmod bnx2′ and ‘modprobe bnx2′ would resolve the problem but it was no useful answer for a production system.

It turns out that the firmware isn’t installed for the Broadcom NIC as shown by the dmesg entries:

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw

bnx2: Can't load firmware file "bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw"

Simple answer to get running – download the firmware-bnx2 0.26 from http://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-bnx2, copy it to the target system and perform a dpkg -i firmware-bnx2_0.26_all.deb. This will trigger a rebuild of the initrd, so you should be able to do a restart and have networking available straight away:

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-mips-06-4.6.16.fw

bnx2 0000:08:00.0: firmware: requesting bnx2/bnx2-rv2p-06-4.6.16.fw

eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz found at mem f4000000, IRQ 16, node addr 00:15:c5:eb:0f:d7

VMWare Server 2.0 Console not working

pete — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:36:01 +0000

I’ve had a few issues recently� opening a VMWare Server 2.0 web based console with Firefox 3.07 running on OpenSUSE 11.1.� The console session just didn’t appear, which is a problem when you can’t SSH into the target VM due to lack of networking.� The answer is obscure but works well:

VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=TRUE firefox &

With this, the console works correctly as expected.� Lovely.

Speeding up a slow NVidia 8400 card in opensuse linux

pete — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:19:15 +0000

I was having dreadful problems on my HP Laptop with KDE4 or Compiz – jaggies, slow performance, difficulty switching tabs in Firefox, the whole experience was poor.� After a spot of Google trawling, I added these to the /etc/modprobe.conf.local on my installation of 11.0 (and 11.1)

#
# please add local extensions to this file
#

options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords=”PerfLevelSrc=0×2222″
options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=1

This was with a Geforce 8400M GS which shows up in lspci as:

05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400M GS (rev a1)

The difference was pretty dramatic.� KDE 4.1is usable with KWin display effects turned on, tab switching is smooth and generally it’s pretty usable again.� All using the NVidia 177.82 driver.

Getting symfony running on 1&1 shared hosting

pete — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 11:53:30 +0000

This is mainly for my own record. I’ve been playing with the Symfony PHP framework to see if it’s suitable for a new project I’m working on, but had a little bit of trouble getting it working on my 1&1 shared server.

The first problem was fairly easy to fix – the default version of PHP on the server is 4, but symfony needs 5.0+. A quick entry into the .htaccess file for the site fixes this. Add “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php ” and all is well. It’s a pain to have to remember to type “php5 symfony”to get things working, but no big stress.

The next issue is to get the images to show up in the test index.php page. I installed symfony using the PEAR packages, so the symfony_data/web/sf directory wasn’t visible as it was way outside the web root for the domain. A simple link fixed that. First, I needed to get the directory for my php/symfony data directory using the pear5 comand
> pear5 config-show
Configuration (channel pear.php.net):
=====================================

PEAR executables directory bin_dir /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/local/bin
PEAR documentation directory doc_dir /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/local/lib/php/docs
PHP extension directory ext_dir /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/pear/ext
PEAR directory php_dir /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/local/lib/php
PEAR Installer cache directory cache_dir /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/pear/cache
PEAR data directory data_dir /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/local/lib/php/data

Next I created a link in the web directory for my new application to the symfony web/sf/ directory in my applications web directory (the bolded one above):

cd web

ln -s /kunden/homepages/18/d96003440/htdocs/local/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf/

Hit the URL http://www.servername/app/web/app_dev.php and all was well. Now to crack on with some development.

Opensuse interview with Seth Arnold

pete — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:44:42 +0000

The opensuse.org news portal has a good interview with Seth Arnold, one of the main AppArmor developers. I’ve done a fair bit with AppArmor in the past when I worked for Novell, and for the times I got into trouble Seth was available on IRC. A good guy to ask questions – he always tries to help and be informative and normally succeeds.

Worth a read.

So near yet so far.

pete — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:22:22 +0000

I started downloading SUSE Linux 10.1 RC1, intent on catching up with the state of the distro tomorrow. To begin with, the download was fast – 150-200kbps, so when I left for the Day out with Thomas event, I was sure that it would be finished when I got back.

Almost right.

The first 3.14Gb (out of 3.2Gb) came down pretty quickly, but now I’m staring at a stalled download, and have been for the last hour or so.

Stopping and restarting doesn’t help, so I suppose I’ll just have to wait for the last smidgen to get here. Bloody frustrating

OpenSUSE 10.1 beta 567

pete — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:04:56 +0000

OpenSUSE 10.1 gets ribbed in this article on OSNews . As Homer would say, it’s funny because its true. The last minute inclusion of the Zen updater instead of good old YAST and YOU is a mystery to me still.

NOVELL Releases the latest Xgl

pete — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:11:19 +0000

This looks so sweet. You could say that it’s just eye candy, but it’s eye candy that uses the (mostly) redundant 3d hardware in modern video cards. The cube desktop looks a bit like 3D Desktop which I used for a while, but more complete. It hope it works nicely with the proprietary Nvidia driver for 3D but I suspect there’ll be some caveats there.

Link: NOVELL: Xgl

Spectacular development cycle.

pete — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:52:28 +0000

Sometimes, the pace of software developement in the Open Source world just blows you away. Today was one of those days. Firing up Akgregator, what should I see but Peter Rockal going from first test of Adept, through alpha, beta and release in less than a minute. Fantastic work Peter, I wish I could do the same and so does my boss and wife (two different people for now)
A slight update to blogging software might have something to do with this, but it amused me for a moment

Screenshots of Brand New Beagle UI

pete — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 10:09:54 +0000

Beagle, a Novell product that allows you to search through all the documents on your hard disk, including web pages, you’ve viewed, images, emails etc. has arrived. Looks a lot better than the original BEST search tool. Hopefully should arrive in Beagle 0.1.5.