July 2009 Archives

Sandisk usb sticks are filled with extra software and even extra partitions. Fortunately, they are easy to remove. To remove it and wipe everything clean (and I do mean everything on the drive)

1. Download the U3 Uninstaller (http://u3uninstall.s3.amazonaws.com/U3Uninstall.exe)
2. Install it
3. Run the software, choose remove and wipe clean.

Done! Simple as that

Flashing BIOS should be an easy thing, assuming you have floppy drives in both server and desktop - not to mention still owns disketts. Here is how you flash it with a USB drive instead.

1. Format your USB drive (if you own a sandisk and want to remove the extra partition with the annoying software on it (depending on how good your bios is to boot from USB - this can be a must) view this post
   
2. Download HP Create Boot Utility (Google for sources)
3. Download win98boot.zip (Google for sources)
4. Unpack win98boot.zip to folder win98boot (make sure to retain folder structure)
5. Install HP Create Boot Utility
6. Run HP Create Boot Utility
7. Choose your USB drive
8. Choose "Create Boot disk" from source: <Choose your win98boot folder>
   
9. Download your bios firmware (or unpack the .exe from supermicro, I used a virtual a: drive with paralells to do this: Create the floppy in parallels (win xp), run the supermicro flash .exe, copy the files from a:)
10. Copy all the files into your USB drive
11. Unmount USB
    
12. Put your USB drive in your server
13. Go into BIOS menu, boot options
14. Make sure your USB drive is high on the boot priority, I usually use: 1: USB, 2: CD, 3: HDD
15. Exit bios, let the USB drive boot
16. Run "flash <your bios version>.rom". (If you don't have a <your bios version>.rom, you probably have a <your bios version>.zip, use: "unzip <your bios version>.zip"
17. It will flash and restart the server. When it does, remove your USB stick

That's it! It looks like a lot of steps, but most is pretty straight forward.

As I've previous written about I've had problems connecting to my tele2 internet. I've tried changing modem but while it appeared to be working a while, it stopped later on the same week. My second approach was to set DNS and APN manually. Some background:

When I tried to connect I got to "Authenticating" and then it simply timed out. My logs said:

Sun Jul  5 15:12:01 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms-dns1 10.11.12.13> <ms-dns3 10.11.12.14>]
Sun Jul  5 15:12:04 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms-dns1 10.11.12.13> <ms-dns3 10.11.12.14>]
Sun Jul  5 15:12:07 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms-dns1 10.11.12.13> <ms-dns3 10.11.12.14>]
Sun Jul  5 15:12:10 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms-dns1 10.11.12.13> <ms-dns3 10.11.12.14>]
Sun Jul  5 15:12:13 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms-dns1 10.11.12.13> <ms-dns3 10.11.12.14>]
Sun Jul  5 15:12:16 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms-dns1 10.11.12.13> <ms-dns3 10.11.12.14>]

And Launch2Net said that it tried to get TCP/IP settings but timed out. Thus I had a hunch that it was failing to get IP adress and/or DNS. I scrolled through the logs, and found this (from a successfull attempt):

Sat Jul  4 16:10:05 2009 : Could not determine remote IP address: defaulting to 10.64.64.64
Sat Jul  4 16:10:05 2009 : local  IP address 90.130.200.117
Sat Jul  4 16:10:05 2009 : remote IP address 10.64.64.64
Sat Jul  4 16:10:05 2009 : primary   DNS address 130.244.127.161
Sat Jul  4 16:10:05 2009 : secondary DNS address 130.244.127.169

And knowing that tele2s APN was mobileinternet.tele2.se I tried to use a custom configuration with:

APN: mobileinternet.tele2.se
User: <blank>
Pass: <blank>
DNS #1 and #2 as above.

So far so good, I could connect, I got a new IP. My log says:

un Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : ipcp: returning Configure-NAK
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfNak id=0x0 <addr 0.0.0.0>]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : rcvd [IPCP ConfNak id=0x3 <addr 90.130.237.92> <ms-dns1 130.244.127.161> <ms-dns3 130.244.127.169>]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x4 <addr 90.130.237.92> <ms-dns1 130.244.127.161> <ms-dns3 130.244.127.169>]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : ipcp: returning Configure-ACK
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfAck id=0x1]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : rcvd [IPCP ConfAck id=0x4 <addr 90.130.237.92> <ms-dns1 130.244.127.161> <ms-dns3 130.244.127.169>]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : ipcp: up
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : Could not determine remote IP address: defaulting to 10.64.64.64
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : local  IP address 90.130.237.92
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : remote IP address 10.64.64.64
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : primary   DNS address 130.244.127.161
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : secondary DNS address 130.244.127.169

You can see the above call for IP:

Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : rcvd [IPCP ConfNak id=0x3 <addr 90.130.237.92> <ms-dns1 130.244.127.161> <ms-dns3 130.244.127.169>]
Sun Jul  5 15:17:49 2009 : sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x4 <addr 90.130.237.92> <ms-dns1 130.244.127.161> <ms-dns3 130.244.127.169>

Which seems to work much better now, using a fixed DNS. But since I prefer to use OS X native (no third party applications - specially those who cost 80EUR) I opened my Huwaei network settings and added the DNS manually as well. So far so good.

If you've created a new domain using xen-tools you might run into the situation that the console works, but if you SSH in you get:

"PTY allocation request failed on channel 0" and "stdin is not a tty"

You need to install udev. Connect via console (xm console <domain id>) (you can get <domain id> with xm list) and simply run:

apt-get install udev

And restart / stop+start. Problem solved!

PS: Don't forget to apt-get install build-essentials