Spodlife

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Well that sucks - my LJ specific email address and password have been leaked. I only know because I received a sextortion email to the address with the password in clear text. Password now changed.

For the past few years I have been using my venerable ThinkCentre A61e as a file server, but it finally died and wouldn't show POST or BIOS. I knew the disk was probably fine, so I took the opportunity to buy an HP ProLiant MicroServer (Gen8). Specifically a G1610T which came with 4GB RAM and no disks.

So, Linux (specifically I using Ubuntu Server 14.04) is usually pretty forgiving about hardware changes, so I whipped the drive out of the old machine, and into a neat front loading drive bay in the new machine. No disk boot. My USB DVD drive booted, and I could then see the true drive, so maybe the problem was in the BIOS? Yes, I didn't want to use the hardware RAID (yet!) so I needed to turn off the RAID and turn on ACHI.

In the future I can migrate to hardware RAID by plugging the old drive in differently, and using the drive bays for RAID.

Good, now it booted up by itself, but no networking. The kernel logs show a Tigon3 / tg3:

/var/log/dmesg:636:[    1.913271] tg3 0000:03:00.0 eth0: Tigon3 [partno(N/A) rev 5720000] (PCI Express) MAC address ...

The odd lines were:

/var/log/dmesg:657:[    2.006399] tg3 0000:03:00.0 em1: renamed from eth0
/var/log/dmesg:659:[    2.025785] tg3 0000:03:00.1 em2: renamed from eth1

How does one rename them back? After some Duck Duck Going I was looking at udev and systemd. The file "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules" is auto generated at boot from the detected devices, but does allow editing of the "NAME" tags so network sockets keep the same same name across reboots.

That file is generated by this script: /lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules
And in there is a bit code in there which only looks for certain types of kernel objects, so I added "em*|":

# device name whitelist
KERNEL!="em*|eth*|ath*|wlan*[0-9]|msh*|ra*|sta*|ctc*|lcs*|hsi*", \
                                        GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end"

Yet another reboot later and 70-persistent-net.rules now contained the right lines where I could tweak the names to make sense:

# PCI device 0x14e4:0x165f (tg3)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:01:02:03:04:05", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="em*", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x14e4:0x165f (tg3)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:01:02:03:04:06", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="em*", NAME="eth1"

If you found this useful, or have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Back in Taipei after China was Sunday (4th December) so I slept - I wouldn't say I had jetlag, but certainly the previous 5 days had included 6 flights through 8 time zones, with not nearly enough natural daylight inbetween, and had worn me down. I did finally spot Taipei's tallest building (and for a while the world's tallest building) from my hotel room:


imgp2811 - Taipei 101

Then on Monday through to Thursday was booked up seeing a different customer on each day, including one best reached by a high speed train service which puts Britain's to shame. Are there many countries that don't have a better and cheaper train service than the UK? These 4 customers had a good mix of predictable questions and new questions; one of them wanted to know more about the compression scheme on our new chip as well as asking probing questions about reliability and end-user support. This last one also insisted visitors' laptops were covered in security tape before entering their site and checked again on exit. I think it went well!

My Taiwanese colleague Richard was an excellent host in Taiwan and as well as going to as many different local restaurants as possible he also took me up the tower:



I was worried the falling light, low cloud and rain would be a problem, but it was just perfect that evening up on the 89th floor. The gift shop at the exit was full of weird things made out of local jade, including a giant cabbage. Wikipedia have a page on a small one.

On my second weekend I explored the local area where I was staying, miles from the tourist attractions. I finally found not one but two betel nut beauties after seeing many more warmly dressed (and some obviously male) roadside betel nut sellers. Speaking of dressing for the weather (17C peak day time temperatures), I was happy in a short sleeved shirt while the natives were wrapped up in puffer jackets and scarves.

On my last evening Richard took me to the 24 hour tearoom mountain and picked a tearoom he knew where you are provided with a kettle of fresh water, a teapot, fresh tea leaves, a tea tray (to catch the necessary over spill) and tea cups. I say tearoom - it was a partially covered terrace that would have overlooked the city if it wasn't for the low cloud and rain. I am not a big tea drinker, so I carefully sipped the hot green oolong tea to taste its different bitter flavours. The over spill of boiling water was so he could watch the level in the spout go down as the leaves absorbed, and this was the point he said it was ready to serve. When visiting customers I had been asking for just water which would then be presented to me hot. It turns out Taiwanese believe drinking cold water in winter is bad for your health, so they served me hot plain water. In summer they drink a lot of chilled tea as the temperatures soar over 30C.

I used to live nearly Horley - I didn't think they were this mental: http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk…

Apart from the 18 years before I first got Internet access (at university), the longest stretches would have been various holidays, the last one being a week in Morocco in 2004. I still had mobile phone coverage - a recruitment agent called me to talk about a job!