The Case of the 500 mile email limit
This actually seems legit to me, in all the particulars. I want it to be true, anyway.
Archive for December, 2008
The case of the 500 mile email limit
Monday, December 15th, 2008Sun collection
Monday, December 15th, 2008So awhile ago, I got greedy and tried to install a 400GB IDE drive in a Sunblade 150 I’d got for cheap. Those of you who are more familiar with that hardware than I was (or am, really), will already be laughing at what a stupid idea that was. For those of you who don’t know, it can only address about 138GB per drive. The math is out there, but basically it’s a limitation of the IDE controller… and doesn’t apply to SCSI and FC drives in any of the Sun boxes, which is probably why this never occurred to me.
So… I backed off that plan and installed a pair of 120GB drives. Now the system won’t boot. And the console is, shall we say, unresponsive. I live a charmed life, I tell ya.
As a result, I have since collected a couple of other old Sun workstations via Ebay and the employee purchase program at work (which are basically “worthless”, like $65), and even an old Pentium 4 for Solaris x86. So I’ve got the gear, but I haven’t had time to continue with any but the most cursory examinations of OpenSolaris. I got 2 of them booted up with ZFS root on fairly recent versions of Nevada. Waiting for the SPARC release of Indiana to be readily available.
In the meantime, I thought I might work on some of my other Solaris related projects.
HWCursor?
Sunday, December 14th, 2008Sometimes I wake up to find that the cursor on my workstation has disappeared. And it doesn’t seem to be simply invisible, it’s actually not interacting with the desktop in any way. I can still see the mouse in the list of enumerated USB devices. Generally the keyboard is still working.
One suggestion I keep running across in my normal google searches is to disable HWCursor in xorg.conf. Messed around with that for a few days.
After a lot of tests, it turns out that killing xscreensaver fixes the problem…. no need to restart X.
Lately, the problem has stopped happening, so I am considering that an update to x11-misc/xscreensaver may have fixed the problem.