The thing works nicely, it accepts laptop & desktop SATA drives and clones with one button push.

It cloned a 160GB deathstar in about an hour, which isn’t bad for that junky of a drive. I just wish it had a secure erase function…

Here’s my process:

Verify Anonymous CVS Connectivity

First, you must verify that you can connect to the anoncvs server. You can find instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook for this process.

One thing you should probably be aware of is that there are a very limited number of anoncvs mirrors, which is why I chose the .tw one.

Prepare Your Ports Tree

You need to be sure that you have an updated portsdb installed so portdowngrade is able to find the matching ports with a search.

portsdb -u

Installing & Using portdowngrade

cd /usr/ports/*/portdowngrade && make DEFAULT_CVS_SERVER=\":pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.tw.freebsd.org:/home/ncvs\" install clean

Note that you may replace the server name with whichever mirror you chose in the earlier step.

Once installed, you may now downgrade the port using:

portdowngrade devel/bugzilla

for instance. From here the documentation will be more than enough to show you how to get the downgraded port checked out and installed.

The Missing Step: Making portupgrade Ignore the Port!

This is easy as pie, but there are two ways to do it. I chose to do both.

Option 1: Edit the pkgtools.conf file

Usually located in /usr/local/etc/, pkgtools.conf will allow you to specify an additional port in the HOLD_PKGS array like such:

HOLD_PKGS = [
    'bsdpan-*',
    'devel/bugzilla*'
]

Option 2: +IGNOREME

Creating a +IGNOREME file in the package directory will stop both portaudit and portmaster from upgrading the port.

touch /var/db/pkg/bugzilla/+IGNOREME

To fix it, you just need to go in the config editor and set

mail.server.default.use_condstore

to false, supposedly.

ATX Power Supply Test

If you’ve tried to install the vSphere client on Windows 7, you’ve undoubtedly come across errors like the following:

Error parsing the server "192.168.2.2" "clients.xml" file.
Login will continue, contact your system administrator.

and

The type initializer for 'VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy' threw an exception.

Although Windows 7 is fully released now, nobody seems to feel like supporting it. Though, I guess Microsoft did kindof rush it out the door… Anyway, there’s a nice PowerShell script out there that allows you to fix this stupidity. After browsing the VMWare community, I came across this URL:

http://www.tinyint.com/index.php/2009/09/04/vsphere-client-on-windows-7/

I followed the instructions and now everything is working the way it should be. Maybe VMWare could just… do this for you ?

There’s a way more updated version of the iSCSI Initiator on the developer’s public FTP site.

ftp://ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/users/danny/freebsd/

With this version I’m now seeing acceptable IO (around 65MB/s reads/writes) after setting tags=256 in iscsi.conf.

All credits to the developer.

Because I’m in the US, I have fairly bad connectivity to that site. I’ve mirrored it here:

http://uminac.com/mirror/ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/users/danny/freebsd/

It turns out that when you use the native client you’re required to make some security concessions. The LDAP client’s config files exist only to tell it what server to initially try to connect to. The server it initially connects to MUST allow non-TLS queries to get some session information from the directory. The session information has to be in a specific form, and contain specific information.

I don’t have time for a proper tutorial right now, but I will post the document Sun sent to me.

Using Sun’s native LDAP client or OpenLDAP’s client to query an OpenLDAP server on Solaris 10

As A Target (Server)

The only available iSCSI target software in FreeBSD is the /net/iscsi-target port. This is the iSCSI target from OpenBSD and is absolutely not suitable for production use (or even most non-production uses).

Problems I’ve come across:

• Does not support CHAP.
• Will not allow multiple connections to the same target (LUN). This is useful in the case of VMWare ESX/ESXi.
• Cannot rehash configuration file. If you add/remove a target you must restart the daemon completely, ending all current connections.

As An Initiator (Client)

The iSCSI initiator in FreeBSD 7.2 (currently) suffers from many issues. These issues prevent it from being suitable for production use. There is, however, a newer version of the iscsi_initiator kernel module shipping in 8.0-BETA1 and the -current branch (HEAD). By nature these versions of the FreeBSD operating system are not suitable for production use.

Problems I’ve come across in FreeBSD 7.2:

• No official documentation. While it is a simple configuration, you have to find procedures strewn about the web.
• Poor performance without tags tweak. I achieved no better than 2MB/s transfer rate without setting tags = 256 in iscsi.conf.
• No rc scripts. Devices must be attached after boot by admin or cron.
• System lockups under loads. Copying files to the iSCSI array via gigabit has repeatedly locked the system up. To test I copied the files from a local disk to the array and had the same result.

Problems I’ve come across in FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2:

• It includes an updated version, but it just flat out doesn’t work. When attaching the target with iscontrol -n targetname the iscontrol process hangs forever and cannot be killed with a -9.
• Still no rc scripts of any kind.

Comments are welcome.

options iscsi_initiator

connected to the iSCSI target across the LAN, then I used:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/testiscsi/file.out bs=65536

to test the speeds after mounting it. I observed horrific speeds (in the range of 300-500KB/s).

To make a long story short, I discovered that using the extra Intel NIC I put in the system’s PCI slots fixed the problem. So I tried to upgrade firmware, but they all seem to be up to date. Looks like I’ll be disabling them in the BIOS and ordering some more Intel cards.

Damn Dell for putting those crappy Broadcoms in there.

In a recent battle at work I put a Cisco 2960G up against a Dell PowerConnect 5424. The PowerConnects aren’t bad… They’re cheap, gigabit, and Layer-2. Anyway, I quickly found out that unless you use GVRP, the Dell cannot learn what VLANs are out there. You have to specify allowed VLANS specifically on both ends of a trunk.

The Cisco 2960G doesn’t support GVRP, and VTP is proprietary, so I was forced to use this method.

On the Cisco:

switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan add 2,100,101
switchport nonegotiate

On the Dell:

switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan add 2,100,101