Life with Linux

Just recently updated my machines from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. No major issues but the yum cache information got a bit mixed up, so to make sure I had the correct information I did the following, as root:


yum clean all
yum makecache


After this, when I ran the command yum update I got a bunch of new updates to be installed, including the Firefox 3.5 update from the beta 4.

Vmware Virtualization Forum Dublin 2009. Overall rate: 8/10. Recommended. Will return next year if possible. http://bit.ly/nDwFq

Discovered Twitter a few months ago and I'm fascinated. What a great and simple idea! The amount of stuff you can say with 140 characters. And by the way, they settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the messages.

One way of testing the speed of your network connection is to use netcat and pv (adapted from a post by Shawn Willden)

On Ubuntu/Debian you can install netcat and pv by doing:


sudo apt-get install pv
sudo apt-get install netcat (could be already installed)


After the installation, on machine A run:

netcat -ulp 5000 > /dev/null

This sets up a UDP listener on port 5000 and directs the output to /dev/null. Use UDP for this to avoid the overhead of TCP.

On machine B, run:

pv < /dev/zero | nc -u <ip_or_hostname_of_machine_A> 5000

where "ip_or_hostname_of_machine_A" is the hostname or IP address of the listening machine A.

This will start a stream of zero-filled packets across the network to machine A, and pv will print out an ongoing report on the speed at which the zeros are flowing.

Let it run for a while and watch the performance.

For a Gigabit network the numbers you're getting should be over 100 MB/s. The theoretical limit on a Gig-E network is around 119 MBps.

Do the same thing without the "-u" options to test TCP performance. It'll be lower, but should still be knocking on 100 MBps. To get it closer to the UDP performance, you may want to look into turning on jumbo frames.

I installed VMware Server Console 1.0.6 on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy and received the
following error:


/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)


Removing /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1 solved the problem.

sudo rm /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1

Thanks Rich Renomeron for the tip!