Finally the XServe ClusterNode runs Linux!

Yes, it does. I now have two partitions: One running the experimental Gentoo ppc64 port, and another one running the overly-conservative Debian woody ppc32. The plan is to boot into Gentoo, and run publicly-accessible production services within the Debian woody chroot.

So how did I make it? Well, I gave up on the idea that the usual installation process of any distribution would work. So instead of trying to fix up whatever goes wrong in the installation scripts, I just escaped to a shell ASAP, run mac-fdisk, mkfs.ext3, extracted the stage3.tar.gz and did the rest of the Gentoo install.

Debian was then installed using the convenient debootstrap tool.

One of the major remaining questions is however: Does the Apple XServe Hardware give you anything similar to Sun boxes, where you could just send break over the serial line and get into OpenFirmware? This is very convenient for remotely resetting machines without any local 'reset-staff' present.

After some chatting with Benjamin Herrenschmidt, apparently nobody is working on getting fan rpm/speed/temperature control implemented on the XServe so far. Well, as it's a rack-mounted machine sitting in some hosting center I don't really care about the noise anyway.

More interestingly, the Apple KeyLargo2 based machines have a Hardware Watchdog. Driver Source code is available within the public part of the Darwin kernel, so it should be easy to implement a Linux driver for this. Maybe I'll find some time to dive into this.

Database Design + Content for GPL-Violations

In order to keep track about the gpl violations that I am encountering myself or that are reported by fellow users, I really need some semi-automatic system to keep track of this.

Being a RDBMS geek in my former life, I designed a SQL-based data model to cope with the individual objects such as vendors, products, product-firmware-versions, violations, settlements, compensations, comments, documents, contracts, ...

It all turned out to be more complex than I thought initially. But I think it was really worth the effort.

This database is for strictly internal use, since there is a lot of confidential information in there. However, according flags indicating the public/private nature of the data records are included in the data model. At some later point I might extract the public information to create some web pages at www.gpl-violations.org.

It's main target is to allow me keep track with what's going on, and also keep track about what has been verified where, if for new upcoming firmware images the source code was made available, if the source was complete, ...

I've already filled in lots of the existing data I have, but it's far from being complete. This needs some more time of filling in data records.

And yes, I built some simple forms using GNU Enterprise Designer and Forms. It's still in 0.x stage, but usable for easy tasks.

IPv6 packet filter benchmarking

It seems like a German university is currently doing feature analysis and benchmarking of IPv6 packet filters. Coincidentally, I'm going to near that university next week anyway, so I'll stop over for a short visit and help them with their ip6tables evaluation setup.

I would be very interested to see some numbers on ip6tables... as we just discovered at the networking conference in Portland, nobody seems to be doing benchmarking / profiling on the Linux IPv6 code so far.