My post “Debian Lenny PXE Installation on Dell PowerEdge 1950/2950 servers: bnx2 annoyances” got some attention and several people used the resulted initrd images. My intention with that post was to show anyone how they can easily build their own updated initrd and use it to successfully install Dell PE 1950/2950 (or other systems that have bnx2 based nic’s). Apparently several people used the images I’ve made available for download and when lenny was updated to 5.0.1 the images stopped working because of the kernel upgrade in the installer. Several people send me notices that this is no longer working and I promptly build updated images for i386 and amd64. I would like to thank to all the people to contact me about this and specially to Alexander Grümmer that showed me that my previous post was not clear enough with the commands needed to rebuild your own initrd. This post will show a full copy and paste type of commands for doing this. Read the rest of this entry »

Debian Lenny installer brings in several improvements over the old stable Etch version, but for us this has been a big disappointment. Basically as I mentioned in an older post “bnx2 missing from stock Debian 2.6.24 etchnhalf kernel“, starting with kernel 2.6.24, the debian team removed the bnx2 kernel module out of the kernel due to license restrictions placed on the firmware. I am a long time debian fan and I can fully understand the reason why they have done that, but still, if you have several hundred servers that use the Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC (that uses the bnx2 module) then you have a problem. This post is intended to show how we solved this problem and hopefully help others in the same situation.

As I mentioned we have many Dell PE1950 and PE2950 servers and we deploy all new servers using PXE boot install and use preseeding to setup basic configurations (custom partitions, apt mirrors, etc.). This worked fine for some years now with debian Etch; let’s see what happens with lenny installer: after the initial pxe boot, the installation halts with this error:
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For the first time in the history of debian stable releases, a new kernel was included in the stable branch in what was called “Etch and a half” project. This happened from the desire to support hardware that requires updated drivers. This allows an ‘official’ way to upgrade your 2.6.18 debian etch kernel to a more recent one 2.6.24 without doing a manual compile or some use some backported packages. Still if you are not very careful this upgrade can cause problems and this post will show how you can loose your network connectivity if your system is using a bnx2 based driver.
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In this post I will present a little story of what happened to me today. As I was working to upgrade the kernel on one server (remote of course), something very funny (at least if I look at it now) happened. When upgrading a kernel on a remote server there is always a chance (even if you are very experienced and done this several times, still there is a small chance) that something will not work as expected and when rebooting the system to no have it back online. Even though I have a good experience on doing this and I can’t remember since I have ‘lost’ a system when upgrading its kernel, I am always very careful when doing this.

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If you want to look what is inside of an initrd file (don’t ask me why I needed this ), here you can find some information on how you can do that. Depending on what kernel you are using you might encounter various initrd type of files. Read the rest of this entry »

Most recent linux distributions (CentOS 4, Fedora 3+, RHE 4, etc) are NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) based. If you want to check if your system is NPTL based, or only if you want to find out what version it is present in your kernel, you can use the following command:

getconf GNU_LIBPTHREAD_VERSION

Sample results:
On a Debian Etch system:

getconf GNU_LIBPTHREAD_VERSION
NPTL 2.3.6

On a RHEL4 system:

getconf GNU_LIBPTHREAD_VERSION
NPTL 2.3.4

For a detailed description on NPTL you can check wikipedia.