Author: tsukasa

The fool's herald.

Short notice: Installing Grub4Dos on USB thumbdrives

USB thumbdrives are great. They are cheap, small devices packed with a lot of storage to carry all your important stuff. They are also great to boot administrative tools like True Image etc.

On themudcrab there is a great article for those who want to boot ISOs directly from a USB thumbdrive.

Unfortunately the article does not describe one major aspect: Making the stick itself bootable.

You need a little bit of extra software here to make it happen, thankfully the download is small and the software is free.

As I wrote, by default most thumbdrives do not have the bootable flag set. Also, they don’t have an MBR written. If you would try to install Grub4DOS on such a thumbdrive it would moan about an invalid partition table and recommend to use the –skip-mbr-check parameter.

That’s where HP’s tool comes in: Pop in your thumbdrive, start the HP tool and format the stick. The tool will write the necessary portions to the MBR, effectively making it possible to boot off the thumbdrive.

Done? Then follow the great guide on themudcrab showing all the necessary steps from now on. It even has the right software set as an example 🙂 .

Pangya! Vista Icon

I dig the Vista icons. Unfortunately not all applications come with nice icons. Pangya, for instance, still has a 32×32 low color icon despite getting constant makeovers, patches and improvements.

Since I had to reinstall Microangelo anyway, I whipped up a nice little icon for Vista users:

pangya_vista_compAs you can see, the icon still is the beloved Dolfini, now in all it’s might and shine. There are quite a lot of sizes packed in the icon, so even when scaling the icon size up, it still looks great.

Download the icon file right here and enjoy 🙂 .

Use Mplayer to watch DVDs, browse menus etc.

One of the weak points of Mplayer always seemed to be the support for DVD menus… or not?

Actually it’s quite easy to watch DVDs and browse menus with Mplayer. All you really need is a version that has dvdnav support enabled.

You can start the DVD the following way:

mplayer dvdnav://0 -dvd-device </dev/dvd | myfile.iso>

Quite easy, isn’t it?

XDCC Browser 4.41, XdccbLister and XCB files

XDCCB is a very nice script for mIRC. It automates the often lengthy process of grabbing files off IRC bots and eases navigation. XDCCB uses a list format with the extension .xcb, for this file format there’s a handy tool to convert text lists, html et cetera into the format XDCCB can process: XdccbLister.

Unfortunately, XdccbLister has long been forgotten and XDCCB development moved on, leading to a discrepancy in file format output. Fortunately, though, the tool is free software so I’ve hacked together a very simple patch that should fix at least the biggest issues.

The patch can be applied against the v.0.5 you can grab at SourceForge. If you don’t want to do that, be it because you don’t have Perl or don’t know how, you can also grab a prebuild executable here.

Jumbo Frames, LACP, NFS

Now that my server is basically up and running for a while it’s time to get the neat stuff running 🙂 .

A to-do item on my list has always been enabling jumbo frames and LACP on my Opensolaris installation. So, let’s get this kicking!

Jumbo frames use a MTU of 9000 instead of 1500. Since I’ve aggregated nge0 and nge1 to aggr1 I can simply set the MTU of the aggr and the corresponding values will automatically be set on nge0 and nge1 (even if you don’t see them 😉 ):

ifconfig aggr1 unplumb
dladm set-linkprop -p mtu=9000 aggr1
ifconfig aggr1 plumb

Sweet stuff! Don’t forget to re-configure the address, netmask and gateway for the link. Now I want to enable LACP so I can make use of the combined throughput of the NICs:

dladm modify-aggr -L passive 1

Let’s check whether everything’s up and running as intended:

tsukasa@filesrv:/$ ifconfig aggr1
aggr1: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 9000 index 2
inet 192.168.X.X netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.X.X
tsukasa@filesrv:/$ dladm show-aggr 1
LINK            POLICY   ADDRPOLICY           LACPACTIVITY  LACPTIMER   FLAGS
aggr1           L4       auto                 passive       short       -----

And indeed, everything went smooth.

Now, even with this boost in performance watching HD video over the network sometimes stuttered with many concurrent connections/operations going up- and downstream at the same time. Also, the Opensolaris 2009.06’s CIFS service has the unpleasant habit of dying and refusing to come up again until I reboot, so I went the easy way and simply enabled NFS for this ZFS system (can we call this a system? Mount? I don’t know…):

zfs set sharenfs=on filesrv/video

I didn’t have to do anything else or specify explicit rw options since I already mapped all the stuff before. Now, the only thing left to do:

mount filesrv:/filesrv/video /home/tsukasa/video -t nfs -o defaults,users,noauto,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr

And guess what, no more problems 🙂 .