As announced in the previous article, we now have a company blog. Best thing for you to do is
to monitor blog.bytemine.net as well as my private website. :)
I will keep this blog alive for a month, so that people have a chance of adjusting their feedreader.
Afterwards it will just redirect to my private site.
well, it was just a matter of time. Just like every-other cool-hyped .COM company we just had to launch our own blog. You should point your feedreader over to http://blog.bytemine.net/, unless you can live without the technical ramblings from us ;)
No, seriously. We will be publishing various technical things related to what we do over at bytemine as well as announcements and alike.
I am not sure, on how I will continue with this blog. For now, I suggest keeping it in your feedreader as well.
While updating machines at our colocation in Frankfurt last friday, Bernd and I hit a pretty harsh bug. Because of changes in the disklabel code, the disklabel of our main customer mailserver got updated by the OpenBSD kernel upon booting with the new OpenBSD kernel. After updating all packages and configurations on the machine we gave the server another reboot. Next the machine got stuck in the first-stage bootloader, complaining that there is no OS to boot.
Quite baffled, we booted bsd.rd kernel just to see that there is no disklabel present. Now, usually you have backups of /var/backups, where OpenBSD keeps informations like this around. Of course, these files were not in the backup (time to blush on my part). Thanks to a hint from Henning from OpenBSD, we tried out scan_ffs(8). Since scan_ffs is not present in the ramdisk kernels, we compiled it statically and placed in on a USB stick. scan_ffs(8) scans a disk and outputs the partitions it finds. With a bit of thinking, we could then create a disklabel with the correct data. Once we had /var mounted, we could use the saved disklabel there to make sure the label is correct.
The manpage for scan_ffs(8) contains the following advise:
The basic operation of this program is as follows:
1. Panic. You usually do so anyways, so you might as well get it over
with. Just don’t do anything stupid. Panic away from your machine.
Then relax, and see if the steps below won’t help you out.
Very true. While we did not panic, the best thing todo in such situations is to think and evaluate your options and possible recovery methods and don’t be quick on trying to fix it, likely you will make it worse ;)
Thanks scan_ffs!
so, the only thing that is missing from the new soekris stuff we expected to be available in April are the SATA kits. Since today,we can actually ship the net5501-60 as well as the kerberos.si 19″ cases. For the dual cases, you can actually load them up with two 5501 plus two lan1621. Makes seven ethernet ports each :) Quite nice.
I will post pictures tomorrow. happy ordering!
Finally we started to ship the new Soekris modell, net5501-70, with the small configuration modell, net5501-60 being on the horizon (not yet available). The new modell is quite a change from the 4801 line, more ram, four ethernet ports (yet still missing gigabit ethernet), way bigger cpu and crypto hardware.
Soon we will have rackmount cases for the new modell as well, currently only the standard case is available for ordering. Since Soekris still has issues with the SATA port and the current version of the Bios, there is no SATA Kit available for ordering as well.
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