pxegrub 'No Ethernet Card Found' error

Some BIOSes are able to load pxegrub but then report 'No Ethernet Card Found' error. I was getting this error on my test machine (ASUS M3N78-VM motherboard with AMIBIOS). I have found a great explanation and solution here:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=377026

You can find pxegrub I have compiled from OpenSolaris sources some time ago here. I have commented out gateA20_set() call in netboot/undi.c file before compiling.

My take on Google server tray

For some time I wanted to have a dedicated test machine at home. I had only few requirements - I wanted a 64-bit CPU, 8GB RAM and network adapter that is using drivers that are present in OpenSolaris and VMware ESXi.

After looking at various dmesg outputs online I have selected ASUS M3N78-VM motherboard. The motherboard is using forcedeth driver on Linux for the network adapter. I knew that OpenSolaris had nge driver and VMware ESXi 3.5 had forcedeth driver for nForce Ethernet adapters so I thought that it was a safe choice. If not supported out of the box the drivers would require very little modification to get them working. The motherboard has an integrated video adapter which is a bonus.

For the CPU I have selected AMD Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition processor. It is obviously a 64-bit CPU and has virtualization extensions. It also comes with a heatsink in
the retail box.

I used Crucial to get 8GB of RAM and Amazon to get a power supply.

I really liked Google's approach to their servers and thought that I could do something similar. I went to a local Ryman stationery store and purchased two transparent document trays. Motherboard fits nicely into one of them. I am using the second one for the HDDs.

Here is the final result:



I had an old drive I was going to use with this machine and I was looking to use PXE boot/USB sticks for OS installations so optical drive was not required. All the parts came down to roughly to £230 with shipping:

AMD Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition: £55
ASUS M3N78-VM: £55
WinPower 600W Power Supply: £19
8GB RAM from Crucial: £80
Transparent document trays from Ryman: £6

Not a lot as for 8GB machine in my opinion :)

IPS repository mirror script

ips-mirror.py is a succesor to my IPS repository mirror script I have put together last year (indiana-discuss thread). I wrote the script in Python this time. It can mirror whole repositories or just parts of them now. It is possible to limit the architecture of the mirrored files now as well. Few interesting use cases:

You can mirror the whole OpenSolaris dev repository if you like. I don't recommend it as there are over 30GB of files to download :). It is doable though:

mkdir $HOME/dev; cd $HOME/dev
ips-mirror.py http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/

After the script has done its job, which can take few days in this case, you want to run pkg.depotd with the --rebuild parameter.

/usr/lib/pkg.depotd -d `pwd` -p 10000 --rebuild

pkg.depotd will generate a catalog from the manifests in the pkg directory and start serving the packages. It will also generate search indexes which can take a while.

Mirroring the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release packages for i386:

ips-mirror.py -r 5.11-0.111 -s -a i386 http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release/

Mirroring the latest OpenSolaris packages for i386 from the dev repository:

ips-mirror.py -l -a i386 http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/

It is also possible to mirror repositories over https with connection specific certificate and the key:

ips-mirror.py -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra/