unsigned long geek = random();

Quite a bit of work has been done on NetBSD’s Linux binary compatibility lately. Shared memory support has been improved to such an extent that Oracle 9i will now run on an i386 machine and most tools seem to work. For more information, see Jose Luis Rodriguez Garcia’s document on getting it working.

Hmm… I wonder if it works well enough to try installing SAP R/3 on a NetBSD/i386 machine yet? After all, R/3 works with FreeBSD’s Linux ABI.

After several weeks of meaning to, today I finally got around to trying SAPGUI for Windows (the client application for most SAP solutions) under CrossOver Office 5.0. After a few false starts, I managed to get it to install and run (the installer wouldn’t even start correctly under CrossOver 4.2). Woot! It doesn’t work properly (or even well enough to be usable), but CodeWeavers and the Wine team are making some good progress.

Some tips:

• Install into a Windows 98 bottle. Even though SAPGUI no longer supports Windows 98, when using a Windows 2000 bottle the installer continually reboots the Wine session.
• Install Internet Explorer 6.0 before installing SAPGUI.
• Once SAPGUI is installed, guilogon.exe doesn’t seem to work correctly (possible a Unicode issue) – it runs, but any entries that are added don’t get displayed in the logon pad. In addition, it doesn’t pass parameters to sapgui.exe correctly. The solution is to execute sapgui.exe directly, passing it the server details (for example, sapgui.exe /H/my.sapsystem.com/S/3200).

I used the GA version of CrossOver Office Professional 5.0 on a Debian 3.1 system running kernel 2.6.13. I did the installation from the SAPGUI 6.40 Compilation 3 DVD.

If you’re interested in checking the progress or testing SAPGUI under CrossOver, be sure to check out its entry in their compatibility list.

Logon screen

Easy access

Transaction OS06

Transaction SE38

The IMG

SE38 control shortdump

In the week I got a vodafone Mobile Connect 3G card courtesy of our IT department, who will be paying for the subscription and first 500MiB of traffic. My notebook currently runs Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 with kernel 2.6.13 and I had no difficulty getting the card working. It was simply a matter of making sure my kernel had support for the Option USB card (I have the Option 3G Quadlite card), inserting the card and configuring my PPP connection.

Some useful links:

• vodafone 3G on Linux, which includes Alan Barrett’s info on getting it working under NetBSD.
• MyADSL Linux 3G HOWTO.

Jonathan Hitchcock just pointed me in the direction of Everybody loves Eric Raymond, a weekly comic strip poking fun at RMS, ESR and Linus. It’s pretty funny

There was an interesting thread on the Debian SPARC list this week – from what some are suggesting, sarge (Debian 3.1) may be the last release with 32-bit SPAFC support. I guess it comes as no surprise – sarge can no longer install out the box on sun4c machines (although there are workarounds) and the 2.6 kernel no longer supports SMP on sun4m machines.

It’s rather sad, but at least NetBSD has good 32-bit SPARC support (and supports SMP on 32-bit machines). Interestingly, NetBSD is supporting more legacy SPARC hardware with each release (for example, 3.0 will include almost complete support for the SPARCbook, including power management and accelerated framebuffer console and X11).

It’s with sadness that I report the passing of phantom.eri.uct.ac.za, the first net-connected Linux system that I had an account on The department that used phantom as its mail server decided to move over to the main UCT mail server, resulting in phantom being decomissioned.

From what I’ve been told, phantom began life sometime in 1994 or early 1995 as a small Linux server in the Energy Research Instititute at UCT (now part of the Energy Research Centre). Thanks to Stephen Tjasink, I got an account in mid-1995, if memory serves me correctly. I started using the machine (then a 486/50 with 8M RAM and a 250M disk) for my mail and to host my home page. After a while, I got root and began assisting with the sysadmin tasks (Travers Waker was the official admin in those days). I remember the heady days of converting from aout to ELF, installing perl 5 and rebuilding the NCSA httpd At around this time, phantom slowly started becoming more important, hosting POP accounts for staff in addition to the department website.

In late 1997, some time after Travers left and had been replaced by Edward van Kuik, phantom got a hardware upgrade and became a Pentium MMX 187 (overclocked!) with 128M and 2.5G disk. It was also migrated from Slackware 2.2 to Redhat 4.0.

Edward later left and was replaced by Geoffrey Crowe. I continued to assist with sysadmin tasks and by then the department was using phantom for all its mail. In 1999, Geoffrey’s replacement, Darren Ravens, managed to find money for an additional disk and phantom gained an additional 8.4G and was migrated to Debian.

By 2003, phantom had been upgraded to a 1.7Ghz Celeron with 256M RAM and the following year gained two 80G drives running in a RAID1 array. It also started doing virus scanning of emails and had some pretty good anti-spam measures in place. Sadly, the writing was on the wall when Darren left in late 2004, and phantom was finally decomissioned this week.

With phantom’s demise, so dies my oldest active email address: mj@phantom.eri.uct.ac.za.

Finally got around to updating my Linux Counter registration today. My old user registration hadn’t been updated for ages and hadn’t been migrated to the new database, so I finally updated it today.

FWIW, I’m user #33020, registered 1996-05-30 23:46:25.

Hmm…. Busy trying out w.bloggar to post. Seems quite cute for a Windows app.

Spent part of yesterday and today setting up LVM over RAID1 on the server that hosts my blog (as well as mail for about 30-40 users). Installation was pretty straightforward, although the RAID resync took aaaaages (900-odd minutes!), so I left it running overnight. Haven’t moved anything onto the new array yet – I do most things remotely, so I’ll start start moving the mail spool, etc over before moving the OS over.

Took a bit of fiddling, but finally decided on the following disk layout:

/dev/vg_raid1/home    26213596     32840  26180756   1% /mnt/raid/home
/dev/vg_raid1/usr      4194172    234324   3959848   6% /mnt/raid/usr
/dev/vg_raid1/var      5242716     32840   5209876   1% /mnt/raid/var
/dev/vg_raid1/spool   41941756     32840  41908916   1% /mnt/raid/var/spool

(Note: Everything is mounted on /mnt/raid while I move the data across)

Once the move to the new RAID is done I’m gonna try and move the users over to Cyrus and then upgrade to the 2.6 kernel.