Sexy Sexy Penguins

As of 8 AM MDT, Fedora 7 is available!

There are several to choose from so choose wisely. This Fedora is one of the largest undertakings by the Fedora Project. Here are just a few things you’ll get with Fedora 7:

• CD Creation Tools - Build your own custom Fedora CD/DVD with its own rpms and cateogories
• Live CD for both GNOME and KDE - Something cool to give away to somebody who has never tried Linux. Or use it for rescuing a machine.
• KVM Virtualization - A new way to make multiple operating systems run on your box.
• Tickless Kernel - Better power consumption for laptops.
• Extended wireless functionality - My wireless card will work now, yea!!!

There are many more than what are listed here. Go out and get your Fedora 7 today. There are two ways you can get the release, one by internet:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download — Currently, down. Keep trying!
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org - Currently working.

Or you can come to the release party tonight, where I’ll be demonstrating (hopefully) many of these cool features. You can find that announcement:

http://www.utos.org/2007/05/29/utah-open-source-the-open-source-technology-center-and-fedora-7/

And the map to the event:

http://tinyurl.com/25394b

Hope to see you with your sparkling new Fedora 7 box very soon.

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, I’ve been asked a few times how to use rtorrent so I thought it time to introduce it to others who might be interested in configuring my favorite bittorrent client.

First off, this is a Fedora tutorial, but much of what you’ll see in this tutorial is applicable to just about any Linux distro.

rtorrent is a ncurses based (meaning text user interface) client for bittorrent downloading. I’ve used bittorrent for a few years now and run a couple trackers of my own as well.

Getting rtorrent is quite simple:

# yum install rtorrent

This provides you the rtorrent binary, some documentation and an sample .rtorrent.rc file which we’ll use later on to make it easier to configure rtorrent to start it’s torrents automatically. So far the file list is about 7, but that’s what makes rtorrent great.

# rpm -ql rtorrent
/usr/bin/rtorrent
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/AUTHORS
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/INSTALL
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/README
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/TODO
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/rtorrent.rc.example
/usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz

Now that rtorrent is installed, there’s some knowledge your going to need to get it started. Once you’ve played with rtorrent for a while, you’ll feel right at home with all of the keystrokes you are about to learn.

Simply start rtorrent:

$ rtorrent

A screen appears something like this:

I tend to use screen with rtorrent so you may be interested in this as well. screen provides the extra functionality of closing the window and reconnecting to rtorrent at will.

The keystrokes you need to learn will come in two parts. One set for starting the download and one for maintaining the downloads and uploads. Lets start with the former.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - Each of these keys represent a different view inside rtorrent. The views are main, sort by name, started, stopped, complete, incomplete and hashing respectively.

Enter - Will allow you to load a particular torrent into rtorrent. Once you do this, you’ll get the following prompt:

load>

Enter the filename of the torrent you’d like to download. URLs are accepted as well

load> /home/clints/SSS_WIN_2007.01.torrent
load> http://mirrors.xmission.com/softwarefor.org/iso/SSS_WIN_2007.01.torrent

Once you have the torrent loaded, you’ll need to start it up. This requires the up and down arrow keys. Because this part is a little bit tricky, you’ll need to play around with it to get a feel for it. Try just hitting the down arrow, you should see something like this:

Once you’ve selected it, the three vertical * (asterisks) will appear next to your selection. Starting and stopping the torrent can easily be done:

Ctrl-s - Start the torrent
Ctrl-d - Stop the torrent

Once the torrent file is running, it should connect to the appropriate tracker and start the download to the directory where rtorrent was invoked. Now that the torrent is started, its easy to manage using the following keystrokes. Mind you, these are global controls:

a, s, d - Increase the upload speed by 1, 5, 50 Kb/s respectively.
z, x, c - Decrease the upload speed by 1,5,50 Kb/s respectively.
A, S, D - Increase the download speed by 1,5,50 Kb/s respectively.
Z, X, C - Decrease the download by 1,5,50 Kb/s respectively.

In all honesty, this is as simple as it gets, but there’s more you can do. In one of my next posts, I’ll cover the .rtorrent.rc file and some other advanced features of rtorrent. Until then, enjoy the coolest tool for downloading your torrents.

Cheers,

Herlo.

You’ve probably heard of RAID 0, RAID 1, and even RAID 5. But RAID 6?

What is Raid 6 you ask? Well, first we need to take a look at RAID 5 and understand how it works. If you understand RAID 5, then RAID 6 is an easy transition.

RAID 5 is what is referred to as a striped set with distributed parity. Essentially, the data is spread across the disk, and one bit is flipped each time a piece of data is written. This helps the RAID 5 set compute the missing data if one of the drives fails.

RAID 6 extends this concept one further by providing an additional drive for distributing the parity. Essentially, there is one more disk that can fail before data is lost. Comparing this with RAID 5, you get more redundancy. Comparing this with RAID 10 might be something you’d consider as well, but RAID 6 is better if for nothing more than the cost and efficiency.

So how do you configure linux with Software RAID 6? With Fedora Core 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, RAID 6 is easily configured. Here’s how:

Four disk drives are recommended (3 are required) to set up the raid, five if you want a hot spare. This initial sacrifice of two (or three) drives will come in handy later on when something fails. This demonstration will use 4 512MB usb drives, sdb, sdc, sdd and sde.

First we need to partition the drives and assign them the correct partition type. As a general rule, partitioning the entire space on the disk is appropriate:

# fdisk /dev/sdd

Create a new partition using the entire disk:

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-1019, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-1019, default 1019):
Using default value 1019

Change the type of the partition from the default (83 Linux):

Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): l

. . . snip . . .

17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 64 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fd Linux raid auto

Hex code (type L to list codes): fd
Changed system type of partition 1 to fd (Linux raid autodetect)

Now the device is created, lets have a look at it and write it out to the partition table:

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdd: 501 MB, 501088256 bytes
16 heads, 60 sectors/track, 1019 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 960 * 512 = 491520 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 1019 489090 fd Linux raid autodetect

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Make sure to do this for each of your devices. Once that the partitions are created, we need to load the module that will support RAID 6.

# modprobe raid6
# lsmod | grep raid
raid456 123985 0
xor 18249 1 raid456

Now create the software RAID 6 device:

# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=6 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd{b,c,d,e}1
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.

Yes, the array is started, but it does take some time to build. Try the watch command to show the array build in real time (almost).

# watch cat /proc/mdstat

Every 2.0s: cat /proc/mdstat Tue May 22 20:12:47 2007

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
978048 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
[====>................] resync = 21.3% (104760/489024) finish=23.8min speed=266K/sec

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
978048 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
[===================>.] resync = 95.6% (468472/489024) finish=1.2min speed=267K/sec

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
978048 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]

Make a filesystem on the new RAID 6:

# mkfs -t ext3 -b 4096 /dev/md0
. . . snip . . .

Mount the new filesytem:

# mkdir /storage; mount /dev/md0 /storage
# mount
. . . snip . . .
/dev/md0 on /storage type ext3 (rw)

Enjoy the RAID 6. Later on, I’ll write another tutorial on failing and recovering this RAID 6 and other software raid devices.

RAID 6 will grow more and more as its adopted and understood, get your Software RAID 6 configured soon.

Cheers,

Herlo

So, I recently installed Thunderbird 2.0 on my Fedora Core 6 box. Here is what I did to get it working:

# yum --enablerepo=development list thunderbird
. . . snip . . .
Available Packages
thunderbird.i386 2.0.0.0-1.fc7 development

# yum -y --enablerepo=development update thunderbird
. . . snip . . .
Updated: thunderbird.i386 0:2.0.0.0-1.fc7
Complete!

The great thing is Thunderbird 2.0 comes with some really cool features which I have completely enjoyed:

• Save searches as folders
• Type as you go search in the message body
• GMail and .mac accounts in two clicks
• Custom message tags

This is also fun to write as a comparison to the Thunderbird installation on Ubuntu.  I thought you’d like to hear the experience from another side.

Cheers,

Herlo

There is a great opportunity upon us to show Utah what Open Source can do.  Come on and join the rest of Utah Open Source.  Not only attend the Utah Open Source Conference, but submit a presentation or tutorial.

Here’s an excerpt from a post over at the Utah Open Source Conference website.  (http://www.utosc.org)

You have just two weeks left to get your papers in for the Utah Open Source Conference. The deadline for paper submissions is May 15, 2007.

The Utah Open Source Conference is September 6-8, 2007 and we need presenters and volunteers.

To submit papers for this conference please send an outline to participate@utos.org.

I’ll be there and will be presenting.  Will you?

I regularly run services I don’t need…until I find out what they do.  After that, I immediately (or semi-immediately) turn them off.  I was perusing Red Hat Magazine today and found a neat article that details just about every System V service available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This list should be pretty applicable for Fedora Core 6 as well.  I looked at a few of the items on the list and those were explained pretty well.

Here’s the link:  http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/03/09/understanding-your-red-hat-enterprise-linux-daemons/

Enjoy!

Herlo