August 2006 - openSUSE Users - openSUSE Mailing Lists

SPAM: Emptied CMOS battery.
by pelibali 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

Hi, My mom uses a p2 system from 1998/99, running SuSE 8.2 Pro. Suddenly her e-mails started to arrive to me with a date from the past and seemingly the system clock works only, when the computer is turned ON (= is under electricity). I never had such symptom, but thought that when the CMOS battery is empty, the system clock is set to some stran- ge 1970-like time everytime the system is turned on. Maybe I'm wrong, but would help if someone would confirm that the above symptom can be caused by (almost) empty mainboard-battery. Thanks, Pelibali

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Evolution/thunderbird
by Richard Bown 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

Hi, up to the time I moved over to Suse from MDV, I'd been using Thunderbird as a mailer. I've use Evo in the past, but changed when they introduced junk/spam checking, If anyone remembers it took ages to down load mail while it was being checked. One nice feature in Thunderbird was the ability to auto delete messages that were older than a settable time limit. Is this feature available in Evo, as so far I haven't found it ? TIA Richard

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Restricting CPU and memory usage
by Marc Lanctot 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

Hello, I'm a system admin for the department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences ant McGill University. I have recently become in charge of an SGI Altix Itanium machine running SUSE Enterprise Linux 9.0. I'm looking for a way to control/restrict memory and CPU usage on this server. I know about nice and ulimit, but I need something more flexible that can: - restrict the CPU usage time for a process (or user) - limit the percentage/amount of the CPU allocated to a given user, and not just for a single process - limit the percentage/amount of RAM allocated to a given use, and not just for a single process I suspect to do so would require turning on some flags in the kernel and maybe using a tool to set these limits for each user, but I don't know if this exists. Could someone recommend a tool or procedure to implement this? Thanks, Marc

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ehci_hcd Module prevents mounting of USB hard drive
by Mike Coan 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

I am running SUSE 10.0 x86_64 on our office server. I was using a cron file to make daily backups to a Maxtor One-Touch usb hard drive. Initially when I plugged in the USB drive it was recognized automatically. At some point this behavior stopped, and the drive was not recognized automatically. I posted a message here and received some answers, but none of them solved the problem. Yesterday while googling on this question I found an entry in someone's blog that indicated the ehci_hcd module was buggy, at least for certain chipsets. I ran "modprobe -r ehci_hcd" and lo and behold after a brief delay two windoes popped up (one from suseplugger I beleive and the other from kde0 asking what they wanted me to do. The USB drive showed up in /media/usbdisk. In retrospect it seems as if the USB drive stopped being recognized after a kernel update. As I said, the server is running 10.0 with all updates applied via YOU. The motherboard is an Epox 9NPA Ultra, which uses the nforce4 chipset and has 4 SATA II drives (3 of them in a RAID5 configuration) My desktop machine, which also has an Epox 9npa motherboard with the nforce4 chipset and one SATA II drive, is running SuSE 10.1. it too exhibits the same behavior. With ehci_hcd loaded, the computer recognizes that a device has been attached, but it cannot make contact. It eventuall gives an error message that ends in "error -110". It never creates anything in /dev for the hard drive. As soon as I remove ehci_hcd, there is an entry in /dev; /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1 for my desktop machine and /dev/sde and /dev/sde1 for the server. The drive is automounted in both cases. The disadvantage is that it is using USB 1.1, rather than 2.1, although the backup occurs at night when no one is in the office. It doesn't really matter if it takes longer, as long as it is reliable. On my desktop machine if I reload the ehci_hcd module it seems to be OK. i did that yesterday and this morning the drive was not visible in /media, but there was still an entry for /sdb1 in /dev and I could manually mount it to /mnt with the command "mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdrive" I didn't do any testing with this. Is the ehci_hcd module buggy, or am I doing something else wrong? Mike -- Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue, Suite 203 New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 Tel: 914-632-3778 Fax: 914-632-5502

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[SLE] HDD Upgrade
by Brian Blater (BBList) 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

I have SUSE 10.1 installed on a machine here with a 40G HDD. I have just received a new 80GB drive. I want to replace the 40G that is partition as follows: Dell partition, /boot partition, swap partition and / (root). I have imaged the machine (used systemrescuecd) and copied everything to the new HDD and resizing the / partition using qtparted to include the free space. I disconnected the old HDD and booted with the new drive and the system is up and running. However, when I do a df -h it still shows the / partition at about 36G. Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda4 36G 5.2G 31G 15% / udev 506M 184K 506M 1% /dev /dev/hda3 502M 40M 463M 8% /boot I've never done this before, so am I missing a step here? What do I need to do to get the / partition to recognize it is now larger? Thanks, Brian -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help(a)suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq(a)suse.com

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installing windows with suse 10.0 currently installed
by wmeler 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

folks, i have suse 10.0 installed, and i want things to stay that way. at the same time, i want to install windows xp. (please don't get into the "why do you need windows?" stuff. don't worry, i'm loyal to linux, but i need it--or rather my girlfriend does--from time to time. thanks!) basically, i get to the point in the windows installation where it shows me the partitions that are already installed. i have 3 partitions of roughly 4.8 Gigs each. (i think 2 are for linux, and one is a swap partition.) regardless, it won't allow me to even try to install windows on those partitions as windows installation basically claims it doesn't recognize those partitions, though it calls them the C, F, and G drives. that's fine with me, because i still have one more available partition with about 24 Gigs, which windows calls "unknown." i specifically didn't use the whole drive when originally installing linux. windows installation claims it needs about 1.2 Gigs, but when i try to install on that drive, windows says it cannot create any more partitions. so, i am pretty much confused as to how to solve this. ideally,here's what i want from most important to least important: 1) i won't have to blast any of the linux partitions. 2) i will be able to install windows and have a way to choose at boot time between windows and linux. 3) i will be able to install windows in as small a partition as possible (my 2.5 gigs or something), and then will be able to allocate the rest of the 24 gigs to a shared windows/linux partition (if such a thing exists?). alternatively, i will be able to re-allocate that remaining 21.5 gigs back to being usable by linux. (i really don't need a lot of space for windows, though i appreciate any tips on any swap space i should allocate for windows.) for what it's worth, i have a p4 with hyperthreading, if that matters. -- Cheers, wmeler

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Bug in nfsd from kernel 2.6.16.21-0.13
by Christian Gerstner 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

Hi, does anybody know something when there will be a fix for this problem? I'm asking because I don't know if I should wait for the fix or downgrade to the old kernel. Christian

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network/disk/system performance
by Dave Howorth 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

I just got some surprising performance numbers. I have three systems, call them A, B and C. A is a file server, B is supposed to be a fast server and C is my desktop. I'm trying to improve the performance of a job that normally runs on B and manipulates files on A, so I wrote a little test program. I ran it on all three machines. My test creates 10000 symlinks to a file. Symlinks and the file are accessed via NFS from A. It was fastest on A (less than 1 second) - no surprise using local disk. It took 5 seconds on C. It took 23 seconds on B! Big surprise. Anybody have any thoughts on what makes B so slow? All are connected to each other through a gigabit switch. In addition, A and B have additional gigabit NICS connected directly to each other. Here are some system details: A: Tyan S5350 Tiger i7320 dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, 1 GB memory, lots of SATA disks with 3ware controllers. SUSE 9.2 Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port NIC - quiescent during tests Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port NIC - direct connect to B Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit NIC PCI Express - unused Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit NIC PCI Express - main network B: Tyan S2882 Thunder K8S pro, dual Opteron 242, 8 GB memory, fast SCSI local disks, SUSE 9.2 Intel EtherExpress PRO/100 S Server Adapter - unused. Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5704 Gigabit NIC - direct connect to A. Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5704 Gigabit NIC - main network. C: Intel D925 / P4-3600, 2 GB memory, SATA local disk, SUSE 9.3, Intel 82547EI Gigabit NIC - main network While the test is running, 'vmstat 1' on B shows lines like: procs -----------memory------------ -swap --io- --system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 1 0 30716 2616544 42620 4389496 0 0 0 0 5698 4616 0 5 95 0 while on C it shows: 1 0 23820 737800 322640 372736 0 0 0 0 9311 12258 1 7 93 0 So C is managing nearly twice as many interrupts and three times as many context switches per second as B. On quiet systems, nttcp shows very similar transmit (910 Mbps) rates from both B and C to A. The receive rate to C (930 Mbps) is a bit better than to B (840 Mbps). But I don't think there's anything wrong with the basic network. Any ideas on how to improve B's performance would be very welcome. Thanks, Dave

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Sound problem in 10.1 - no sound in Cedega or in Firefox with embedded flash etc.
by Clayton 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

I've already posted this over at the Transgaming forums (for the Cedega part)... thought I'd try here too since there may be someone here who can help. Basically I have sound working perfectly for most things. I can play videos, listen to music etc. KDE system sounds are all there... everything works... almost. It fails in two places. I get no sound at all in Cedega and no sound in Firefox with Flash stuff. In Cedega - it did work at one point in SUSE10.1. I did have sound. Then I reinstalled 10.1 (other reasons) and sound no longer works in Cedega. I've tried all the obvious things... checking volume settings in games, system volumes, changed from ALSA to OSS and back in Cedega. Nothing helps. This is especially frustrating since sound was working with Cedega on this hardware at one point (with 10.1). In Firefox, I do not have any sound in Flash apps. If I open the same page with Opera... it works fine. Same goes for Konqueror... Flash in Konq gives me sound. So... Flash is working... it's just some stupid thing in Firefox... I assume. So... anyone have any tips/clues etc for what I can do to get sound working in these two places? Hardware: AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ Soundblaster Live24 2GB RAM nVidia 6600GT Software SUSE10.1 (32 bit install) Kernel is 2.6.16.13-4-smp (32 bit) C.

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Re: [opensuse] Why Red Hat will go bust because of Ubuntu
by Shane A Broomhall (AUST) 03 Aug '06

03 Aug '06

> > > >>technical illiterates including very senior corporate management which > >>make decisions of the type the new corporate computer system will be > >>Windows because I purchased one of those damn SuSE box distribution sets > >>and it crashed my computer causing me to have to take my computer to a > >>computer shop which took 2 weeks which cost the company 1 million US > >>dollars and almost got me fired. Fortunately I was able to convene the > >>Senior VP that my computer crashed cause my dog pissed on it. I am damn > >>mad and I will fire anyone who even suggest that trash is usable trash. > >>Not in my division. Get Microsoft and get it installed correctly because > >>it work and that Linux trash does not. > >> Having had a look at this before, and not meaning to cause any offense. I am on this list to increase my knowledge about linux, in particular SUSE, be it the open or the comercial versions. Having read, and digested, then pondered further, the statement above has made me very curious, about how putting a version of an operating system on a computer, and then having it crash could affect your production network, assuming it was your production network and cost your company a million. Did you have a test environment ? What did the pc do when installed with linux that was so bad that it cost so much ? Why did you have a dog in the area to blame ? Cheers Shane. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help(a)opensuse.org

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