UNIX Administratosphere

How much memory is in this machine?

It would seem that answering this question ought to be easy; it is - but every system has the answer in a different place. Most put an answer of some sort into kernel messages reported by dmesg (AIX apparently does not).

Most systems have a program for system inventory which reports a variety of things, including memory.

Rather than go into great detail about each one, we’ll just put these out there for all of you to reference. Each environment has multiple commands that give available memory; each command is listed below.

Without further ado, here are a few answers to this burning question:

Solaris

1. dmesg | grep mem
2. prtdiag | grep Memory
3. prtconf -v | grep Memory

AIX

1. bootinfo -r
2. lsattr -E1 sys0 -a realmem
3. getconf REAL_MEMORY

HPUX

1. dmesg | grep Physical
2. /opt/ignite/bin/print_manifest | grep Memory
3. machinfo | grep Memory

Linux

1. dmesg | grep Memory
2. grep -i memtotal /proc/meminfo
3. free

OpenVMS

1. show mem /page

Update:

FreeBSD

1. dmesg | grep memory
2. grep memory /var/run/dmesg.boot
3. sysctl -a | grep mem

I’ve been seriously considering the fitPC for my own purposes. Currently, the DHCP server (ISC) and the web proxy (Squid) in my home network are two separate servers running versions of Red Hat or CentOS. Both are slimline computers, but otherwise are standard in their configuration: standard hard drives, standard motherboards, etc. I think it might be safe to assume that this also means standard power consumption (200-250 watts, I’m guessing).

Along with the wattage is the noise as well. With the two servers and two desktops running (and a rackmountable switch), that is a lot of fans and a lot of noise (more than non-techies would realize!).  That’s four computers with 200-250 watts each (high estimate) - for 800-1000 watts of power consumption.

This doesn’t even take into account what it would be like with the Sun SparcStation 20 or the UltraEnterprise 1 started up - I shudder to think how much power they take up (and I know how noisy they are….).

A 5-watt computer with no fan (silence!) would be very nice. The things that are most appealing about the 5-watt fitPC are the silence, the minimal power drain, and the standard configuration. Many computers that fall into this category are in fact, embedded systems - small memory, small flash drives, and so on - often with specialized software (even if it is open source).

The fitPC is a standard system, so it will run anything that will run on an Intel 586-based system.

The company is in Israel, and until recently was the only source for their product. They appear to have been overwhelmed with orders sometime in November, but are going as fast as they can.  I’ve no idea if they are backed up now or not. They’ve also introduced resellers apparently: System Industrie Electronic AG in Austria, Anders Electronics in the United Kingdom, and CompuLab Embedded Systems in the United States.  None of the resellers has the fitPC listed as available, but presumably if you contact the right people from their list, everything will be just fine.

They have a set of forums that are excellent, and serve as an excellent resource for purchasers and owners of fitPC systems.

One of the questions that comes up on the forums is: Does the fitPC work well with X where X is:

• FreeBSD (only if USB installation is fixed)
• FreeDOS (unanswered so far)
• CentOS (one successful report)
• Ubuntu Server (still trying)
• PCLinuxOS (just fine!)
• Windows 2003 Server (not too badly)

It comes with either Windows XP or Ubuntu (an optimized Gentoo is also available). The listed cost is $285 US.

Setting up OPIE (One-time Passwords In Everything) in OpenSUSE was easy: there is a opie RPM in the standard repository, and it installs cleanly and easily.  Then it is just a matter of initializing the database and modifying the PAM configuration to match.  Then each user is added to the database (/etc/opiekeys) one at a time.  I’ll describe the exact process on OpenSUSE at a later time.

Insufferingly, it appears that Fedora (and Red Hat) do not offer any form of one-time passwords anywhere - and certainly not OPIE.  RPMs for opie are exclusively for OpenSUSE and for the Polish PLD distribution (both of which seem to have everything).  How extremely frustrating!  This sounds like a good time to switch my home system from Fedora 5 to OpenSUSE 10.3.

OpenSUSE has supported LVM, XFS, KDE, and many other technologies when Red Hat staunchly refused to.  Even now, OpenSUSE support for all of these is much more integrated and time-tested than Red Hat’s.

Lest I sound like I hate Red Hat - I don’t - and that’s what makes it so frustrating.  Grrr….

The search for one-time passwords for HP-UX and for OpenVMS was even more fruitless.  HP-UX apparently has a third party skey package available; OpenVMS has nothing - though it could be added through programming the ACME interface (which provides similar capabilities to PAM - though perhaps not as flexible).

It looks like the BSDs aren’t a lot better: FreeBSD has OPIE built into the core (with a full section on OPIE in the FreeBSD Handbook on it); NetBSD and OpenBSD do not appear to have it (!).

Looks like my settling in to FreeBSD and OpenSUSE has paid off.  I don’t even need to suggest Debian - Debian has everything - and OPIE is no exception.  And of course, Ubuntu follows suit as well.

When you use Synergy, it connects one computer (and desktop) to another. Your mouse will flow seamlessly from one desktop to the next. A number of desktops can be combined, although programs remain confined to their desktops.

Synergy is different from multiscreen desktops - a standard multiscreen desktop stretches a single operating system environment across multiple screens or displays. In most normal cases, this is what would be preferred for normal users. However, if you are using multiple systems for different purposes, you can concatenate separate displays together.

When you move your mouse from one desktop (Mac OS X, for instance) to another, it is like moving from one computer to the next. In some ways, it is like a multi-screen software KVM (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) switch. The server runs on the system with the keyboard and mouse, and the clients run on other systems. Each system has its own monitor, and can be placed (virtually) anywhere through proper configuration of the server. For example, the screens could be placed one on top of the other, or side by side. If one display is disconnected, then it will be skipped. For example, if there are three screens in a row, and the middle one loses connection to the server, then it will be skipped over as the mouse moves from one system to the other.

Recently, I had the server running on Mac OS X, a client on Fedora Core 5, and a client under Solaris 8. The mouse could then be moved to the left side of the Mac OS X display, and it would appear on the right on the Fedora Core 5 display. Continuing to move the mouse, it would eventually wind up on the Solaris 8 display. The only drawbacks are the network delay and differing mouse speeds. I’ve grown addicted to it - try it today!

I was asked this question recently. Everyone likely has an answer: Red Hat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Solaris… My answer surprised the questioner: UNIX and UNIX-workalikes. This includes FreeBSD… and Red Hat… and Solaris… and HP-UX… and AIX… and so forth. When I first became interested in UNIX, not one of the aforementioned products existed. First UNIX system I got my hands on briefly was Eunice (look it up and the next (a few years later) was Microport System V (for the IBM AT).

Perhaps you might think Solaris is better than Linux - or NetBSD is better than OpenBSD. I suggest it doesn’t matter. Each UNIX (or UNIX-like) environment has its pluses and minuses. Individual choices are personal and enterprise choices are practical - in either case, which is truly better doesn’t matter.

If your enterprise is using Oracle, for example, the choice of which UNIX system you use is dramatically reduced: which system will Oracle support? You won’t be using Oracle on FreeBSD unless you forgo the Oracle maintenance contract. Choices like this continually appear in the enterprise. Perhaps the new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has everything you want - but Oracle doesn’t yet support that version.

Alternately, which system you use for your own desktop is a personal choice. Which one is “better” is which one feels better to you. UNIX is, at its heart, unified - that is, it is a single environment - but it provides a wide choice of user interfaces, user programs, and even technical items such as filesystems and virtual memory management schemes. Use whichever one seems better.

What do I use on my personal desktop? Mac OS X. However, in line with the ideas posited above, I’ve just expanded my “desktop” with Synergy, linking my “other” desktop (first Fedora Core 5, now BeleniX with OpenSolaris core) to my Mac OS X desktop. More about Synergy later.

So next time someone tells you what their favorite operating environment is - why not find out what it is they’re so excited about? You might find something exciting yourself.

Lifehacker has an article on a product called the decTop. It is billed as a Internet-browsing appliance, but is apparently a complete (and upgradable) computer as well. Sounds like the perfect hacker computer.

It does seem to be slowish by modern standards, and if my experience with 128M is any indication, it won’t run the most current distributions. There are some excellent discussions on how to install Ubuntu 6.06 onto it: one from Jonathon Scott and one from Ray over at Librenix. Juan Romero Pardines from the NetBSD Project has put NetBSD onto the decTop. Someone else put AstLinux onto a decTop - and added great pictures of the internals as well.

Over at Docunext there is a great series on the decTop, including pictures of the guts and of the locked drive (apparently no longer locked in current versions). There is also a set of tips on getting Debian to work on the decTop, as well as the author’s experiences in running the decTop on solar power.

The system advertises an ethernet connection, but it is, in fact, an USB-ethernet dongle. This fact combined with the USB-1.1 means that the ethernet connection is very, very slow. Everything hooks into the USB ports, including keyboard and mouse as well as the Ethernet connection. These two facts appear to be some of the worst drawbacks of the device.

There also appears to be no wireless support at all - the Internet browsing devices I’ve seen all use wireless connectivity as their main connection method - so this appears to be more of a desktop device, rather than a portable device. It is fanless, which means near absolute quiet. Who knows, maybe they’d make a good cluster (heh).

I must admit, when I first heard the name, I thought it might be a minature of one of these instead. Silly me.