Update: Thanks to an anonymous commenter I can confirm that with the release of Debian Squeeze 6.0.7, released 2013-02-27, the Debian Installer package uses a back ported version of hpsa to detect controllers not supported by cciss. The remainder of this post is left for historical reference.
TL;DR Build the hpsa Driver From Source and Deploy in D-I
Symptom:
Can't Detect CD-ROM and/or RAID Disks on HP Gen8 Hardware
My team was attempting to install Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.5 (squeeze) on a brand new HP DL360 Gen8 server with a P420 RAID controller and much to our chagrin it couldn't even detect the CD-ROM drive let alone the RAID sets.
Solution:
Build hpsa.ko From Source
Point your favorite browser over here and grab the 3.0.0-8 (or newer YMMV) release and make sure you have bzip2 installed with ye olde apt-get install bzip2. You'll need that for the next step. I've assumed you downloaded the driver into the ~/Downloads directory.
I prepare the directory:
$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
$ tar -xjf ~/Downloads/hpsa-3.0.0-8.tar.bz2
$ cd hpsa/drivers/scsi
To build the hpsa driver you need to edit the hpsa_kernel_compat.h file and remove the comment block corresponding to the OS you wish to build the driver for. There's just one little problem; there's no block for Debian GNU/Linux. Fear NOT! The kernel that ships with Debian 6 is a 2.6.32 kernel. This is the same basic kernel as shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1. So just uncomment the following line:
#define SLES11sp1
If you've got gcc installed and the linux-headers package you can just save the hpsa_kernel_compat.h file and type make. This will build the hpsa.ko file that you so desperately need. Now copy that file onto some removable media and go attach it to your Gen8 server.
Installing hpsa.ko During Installation
Now go ahead and boot any of the Debian 6 installation media(netinst.iso, businesscard.iso, cd1.iso or dvd1.iso). Once d-i is loaded you will be greeted by the message that the CD-ROM device couldn't be detected. This is where the new driver comes into play.
Switch over to the second console with ALT+F2, press enter and now insert your removable media if you haven't already. I'm going to use the device name of usbdevice in place of the likely /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 that your removable disk will be recognized as.
Perform the following incantation:
$ mkdir /mnt/usb
$ mount /dev/usbdevice /mnt/usb
$ cp /mnt/usb/hpsa.ko /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/scsi
$ depmod -a
$ modprobe hpsa
To confirm you see the disks, simply use the dmesg command. You should now have access to all the devices connected to your HP Gen8 server. This has only been tested with the P420 controller. It's possible that your Gen8 may have a different controller. If so these instructions are worth a shot if you need to access the controller using the hpsa driver.
Switch back over to the d-i terminal, ALT+F1, and detect the CD-ROM drive again. If all went well you can begin installing Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.X (squeeze) on your shiny new server.
Happy Hacking!
Monday, August 20, 2012
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Up to Some Good: 3D Printing FTW!
In the Beginning:
In November of 2010 a bag of parts showed up on the door step. These parts were printed for Free Geek Arkansas and came with a challenge attached. Build a RepRap Prusa Mendel. For our group of hackers and builders this was a welcome surprise and quite the call to arms.It took us a long time to come to grips with the design and source a lot of the materials needed. We recruited members of the Free Geek community to assist in the building of the machine and bode our time until we had all the components in order.
Learning To Build
For someone not very mechanically inclined like myself it was rather intimidating getting just a bag of printed parts in the mail. While I've studied this technology for a long time (over 10 years of wishing) I was not in a position to envision the finished product from what came in the mail.I learned quickly that pictures and video helped me very little in this endeavor. Most likely due to my lack of mechanical skills (which are much better now). I had no basis for reasoning about how things fit together and why they are put together in this way. Luckily the RepRap community is quite good at helping newbies get a handle on their machines. Unfortunately this comes with a barrier of language that can be cumbersome to deal with. In the end even newbie builders can interface with the community and get help.
You can find me(most work days) and many others on #reprap on irc.freenode.net for ideas/suggestions and general help getting your machine off the ground. You can also ask for parts there and get pointers to better techniques than you might find on the wiki(this is being addressed as I type). Really and truely the best help you can get is from people in your community. Find a hacker space or a Free Geek and reach out if you're interested in this technology. Our build time lag is not the same as others. We have had time commitment issues, parts issues and monetary issues. The economy hasn't been particularly kind to any of us in the last several years and complicated the building of this machine.
Take Your Vitamins and Buy Them!
Working on the RepRap has been a journey full of surprises. Did you know it's better to tear down ten HP LaserJet 4p machines than to buy smooth rod? In the end we still had to buy some 8mm smooth rod from China, but only the longest rods needed for the machine. Thanks to the recycling efforts of Free Geek Arkansas and its regular volunteer staff we were able to build this machine out of almost entirely recycled parts.We were able to buy the required threaded rods at the local Lowe's and these should be available for cheap at any local hardware stores. Avoid Fastenal if you can. If money is no object then by all means use them. I have nothing against Fastenal, however parts from them are rather expensive and it appears this is mostly due to the downfall of steel manufacturing in the United States. We only export scrap metal now and import MOST steel products used here now. This makes things cost more if you want anything approaching local sourcing of materials.
For motors, you can find them everywhere.
OMFG! There's More, But the Printer is Gone!
This post was supposed to encompass much more than getting the parts. I wanted to add more notes on the adventures of getting the printer up and running and little tweaks that have been done to the printer to customize it to Free Geek Arkansas' needs. Long story short, we got the printer working really really well. It has been demoed during summer outdoors in Fayetteville, Arkansas (90+ degrees F) and got a great reception from the community at large.
The unfortunate thing is the printer was stolen by a (possibly) disgruntled ex-volunteer. This has left me and the rest of the 3D printing gang slack jawed. We are completely gob smacked and printer #2 is in the works. I'll likely publish a follow up to this post detailing what it looks like the second time around.
I apologize if the post jumps from explanatory to a screeching halt in 0.1 seconds. Look forward to the next installment where we cover implementation issues and customizations that we think are must haves for RepRap Prusa Mendels that need to work long hours.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
UPDATED: FireFox 9.0.1 Font CSS Bug Strictness
Today I got a nice surprise at work this morning. One of my teammates got the FireFox 9.0.1 (Windows) update pushed to them yesterday and it broke an internal mediawiki site. Thinking this must be a bug in the CSS of our mediawiki skin I dove into explore the issue. This is not my CSS code so I was naturally suspicious and couldn't wait to rub it in to another colleague (author of said CSS) when I found his hideously stupid bug....
Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to do a little chiding, because the problem, it turns out, is with the CSS parser in the FireFox 9.0.1 update. The CSS parser in FireFox 9.0.1 doesn't handle the font stack correctly.
Honestly that's being far too generous. This bug breaks font attributes in CSS, okay not all font attributes in CSS just the ones you want to override. It does NOT allow overriding of previous settings at ALL in the font attributes.
UPDATE: There was a helpful soul on the forum that gave me a gentle shove towards the CSS documentation found here and it illuminated the bug in the CSS below. While it worked in previous versions of FireFox, it probably shouldn't have. I've preserved the original example for others to see the issue. I've made the example a little more copy & paste friendly.
Take this BUGGY example:
<style>
#p-wrapper p {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 125%;
}
#p-inner p {
font-size: 95%;
}
</style>
<div class="p-wrapper"><p>Some Wrapper Text</p>
<div class="p-inner"><p>Some inner text</p></div>
</div>
Whatsupposed used to happen with the above snippet is that the font-size would change from 125% when in the p-wrapper class(can you spot the bug yet?), unless you happen to be in the p-inner class(there's that word again) in which case the font-size should change to 95%. In FireFox 9.0.1 this does not happen. Instead the first value for font-size wins. There's no cascading at all. It really makes the CSS engine in FireFox 9.0.1 look more like SS. And that is to be expected. That code has a bug. The # at the beginning of p-wrapper and p-inner define an id selector. What I need is a class selector. FireFox 9.0 became strict in this respect and now you must actually write VALID CSS(what a concept) like the following:
<style>
.p-wrapper p {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 125%;
}
.p-inner p {
font-size: 95%;
}
</style>
<div class="p-wrapper"><p>Some Wrapper Text</p>
<div class="p-inner"><p>Some inner text</p></div>
</div>
There is still a CSS bug in FireFox 9, but it does not appear to be mine. My bug appears to be non-standard and almost flatly invalid CSS. The good thing to come out of this episode is that I now get to harass the colleague for the sloppy code. YAY!!! However, now I have to fix up the CSS in the mediawiki skin.... BOO!!!
If you find any mistakes or errors in this post please drop a note.
Happy Hacking!!
UPDATE: There was a helpful soul on the forum that gave me a gentle shove towards the CSS documentation found here and it illuminated the bug in the CSS below. While it worked in previous versions of FireFox, it probably shouldn't have. I've preserved the original example for others to see the issue. I've made the example a little more copy & paste friendly.
Take this BUGGY example:
<style>
#p-wrapper p {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 125%;
}
#p-inner p {
font-size: 95%;
}
</style>
<div class="p-wrapper"><p>Some Wrapper Text</p>
<div class="p-inner"><p>Some inner text</p></div>
</div>
What
<style>
.p-wrapper p {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 125%;
}
.p-inner p {
font-size: 95%;
}
</style>
<div class="p-wrapper"><p>Some Wrapper Text</p>
<div class="p-inner"><p>Some inner text</p></div>
</div>
There is still a CSS bug in FireFox 9, but it does not appear to be mine. My bug appears to be non-standard and almost flatly invalid CSS. The good thing to come out of this episode is that I now get to harass the colleague for the sloppy code. YAY!!! However, now I have to fix up the CSS in the mediawiki skin.... BOO!!!
If you find any mistakes or errors in this post please drop a note.
Happy Hacking!!
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Haskell Platform in OpenSUSE 12.1
OpenSUSE does not ship with any support for Haskell in it's main package repositories. You can however add them using the OpenSUSE Build Service or OBS.
The best I can tell there is an existing group working on Haskell packaging for OpenSUSE. Search for Haskell on the OBS site and you'll likely run across the repository devel:languages:haskell. The first thing I noticed about this project is that there aren't any builds for OpenSUSE 12.1. After some hunting I ran across the sub-projects and found the 2010.2 haskell-platform available for 12.1. Huzzzah!
A quick little recipe like the following allowed me to add this repository:
Make sure you accept the key from the new repository so you can install signed packages and check their signatures correctly.
Now to install the 2010.2 haskell-platform for OpenSUSE 12.1 you just need to install all the packages from the new repository in zypper.
By using --from in the zypper command line it will only select packages from the specified repository, but will use all configured repositories to do dependency lookup.
After requesting the install via zypper you should get a screen like the following:
Answer yes to the prompt and, depending on your internet speed, you should have a haskell platform to kick around in a few minutes.
Hope this helps someone... The packaging for haskell in OpenSUSE is pretty bad. Debian based distros do it a little bit better by providing a haskell-platform virtual package that has all the componenets a dependencies. Since the packaging in OpenSUSE is done via the OBS and not in the main repositories this isn't likely to get better.
Also as of this writing there are no haskell-platform releases newer than 2010.2 available on the OBS. Due to the quick development of ghc, this can be limiting on the Haskell developer who needs access to features like Data Parallel Haskell or Safe Haskell systems. For users on OpenSUSE that want these features, I encourage you to install the above platform and immediately go build ghc from source code, use the instructions here.
Happy Haskelling!
The best I can tell there is an existing group working on Haskell packaging for OpenSUSE. Search for Haskell on the OBS site and you'll likely run across the repository devel:languages:haskell. The first thing I noticed about this project is that there aren't any builds for OpenSUSE 12.1. After some hunting I ran across the sub-projects and found the 2010.2 haskell-platform available for 12.1. Huzzzah!
A quick little recipe like the following allowed me to add this repository:
$ sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/haskell:/platform-2010.2/openSUSE_12.1/devel\:languages\:haskell\:platform-2010.2.repo
$ sudo zypper refresh
Make sure you accept the key from the new repository so you can install signed packages and check their signatures correctly.
Now to install the 2010.2 haskell-platform for OpenSUSE 12.1 you just need to install all the packages from the new repository in zypper.
sudo zypper install --from devel_languages_haskell_platform-2010.2 '*'
By using --from in the zypper command line it will only select packages from the specified repository, but will use all configured repositories to do dependency lookup.
After requesting the install via zypper you should get a screen like the following:
The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
alex alex-doc build-compare cabal2spec cabal-install ghc ghc-cgi ghc-cgi-devel ghc-cgi-prof ghc-dataenc
ghc-dataenc-devel ghc-dataenc-prof ghc-deepseq ghc-deepseq-devel ghc-deepseq-prof ghc-doc ghc-fgl
ghc-fgl-devel ghc-fgl-prof ghc-GLUT ghc-GLUT-devel ghc-GLUT-prof ghc-haskell-src ghc-haskell-src-devel
ghc-haskell-src-prof ghc-hscolour ghc-hscolour-devel ghc-hscolour-prof ghc-hslogger ghc-hslogger-devel
ghc-hslogger-prof ghc-html ghc-html-devel ghc-html-prof ghc-HTTP ghc-HTTP-devel ghc-HTTP-prof ghc-libs
ghc-mtl ghc-mtl-devel ghc-mtl-prof ghc-network ghc-network-devel ghc-network-prof ghc-OpenGL
ghc-OpenGL-devel ghc-OpenGL-prof ghc-parallel ghc-parallel-devel ghc-parallel-prof ghc-parsec
ghc-parsec-devel ghc-parsec-prof ghc-prof ghc-QuickCheck ghc-QuickCheck-devel ghc-QuickCheck-prof
ghc-regex-base ghc-regex-base-devel ghc-regex-base-prof ghc-regex-compat ghc-regex-compat-devel
ghc-regex-compat-prof ghc-regex-posix ghc-regex-posix-devel ghc-regex-posix-prof ghc-rpm-macros ghc-stm
ghc-stm-devel ghc-stm-prof ghc-utf8-string ghc-utf8-string-devel ghc-utf8-string-prof ghc-xhtml
ghc-xhtml-devel ghc-xhtml-prof ghc-zlib ghc-zlib-devel ghc-zlib-prof glibc-devel gmp-devel happy happy-doc
hscolour libmp3 linux-glibc-devel zlib-devel
87 new packages to install.
Overall download size: 84.4 MiB. After the operation, additional 858.9 MiB will be used.
Answer yes to the prompt and, depending on your internet speed, you should have a haskell platform to kick around in a few minutes.
Hope this helps someone... The packaging for haskell in OpenSUSE is pretty bad. Debian based distros do it a little bit better by providing a haskell-platform virtual package that has all the componenets a dependencies. Since the packaging in OpenSUSE is done via the OBS and not in the main repositories this isn't likely to get better.
Also as of this writing there are no haskell-platform releases newer than 2010.2 available on the OBS. Due to the quick development of ghc, this can be limiting on the Haskell developer who needs access to features like Data Parallel Haskell or Safe Haskell systems. For users on OpenSUSE that want these features, I encourage you to install the above platform and immediately go build ghc from source code, use the instructions here.
Happy Haskelling!
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