lathiat's blog


Avahi is now 3 years old...
Posted 2 days, 21 hours ago

I just noticed that as of a few days ago (22nd August) - Avahi is now 3 years old.

Heres my original release announcement:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/avahi/2005-August/000227.html

That's a crazy amount of time, since then I presented at Linux.conf.au 2006 and GUADEC 2007 (Birmingham) as well as some presentations at GNOME mini-confs and the like.

Fun and games... also for anyone following this blog, I regularly twitter as lathiat
http://twitter.com/lathiat

Feel free to follow me, but it tends to be more personal stuff rather than Tech/Open-Source related

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Macbook broken. again.
Posted on 04/28/2008

Dear World,

Please remind me why I bought a mac?

Love,
Trent

[i was typing away the other day and *blip* my backlight stopped working, permanently, seriously, wtf.]

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Traveling to sydney...
Posted on 04/15/2008

Howdy all,

I will be traveling to Sydney on Sunday the 20th and 21st - if you're in sydney and want to catch up for a beer or something let me know.

Only timeslot will be Sunday (20th) afternoon as I fly out Monday night (21st)

- lathiat

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Joining sun...
Posted on 04/14/2008

As most of you reading this are likely aware, I work as a Support Engineer for MySQL AB - which was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.

If you have been living under some variety of rock-like object, you can see the press release here:
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun/



As part of that, as of this month I now work for Sun Microsystems Australia.


Trent Lloyd
MySQL Support Engineer
Sun Microsystems


However I am really doing the same job I was before.. so far the acquisition seems to have gone fairly positively. I was a little concerned about some of the employment/IP restrictions that our new fangled contracts bring but in the end I was able to sort out enough to satisfy me.

I am still working from Home, and there are no plans (at least for me) to move around within Sun - I plan to continue my role as MySQL Support Engineer.

I really hope this acquisition is beneficial for MySQL in the long run.. there are potential ups and downs but so far for me the experience has been very positive and the Sun team have been very welcoming.

The MySQL Users Conference is upon us this week, which means there will likely to be some interesting announcements from various MySQL-related companies as tends to be the case around major conferences (there are already some talk of a new product from "Kickfire" that sounds interesting, albeit sketchy at this stage)

In more personal news, they sold the house I am renting so I have to move. For more amusement Aleesha is over-seas until after I have to move so I have to move before she gets back, oh well. I applied for a house today and the Property Manager seemed very enthusiastic so I guess thats a good sign.

It's a very nice 3x2 townhouse:
http://gallery.mac.com/lathiat#100525&bgcolor=black&view=grid

It's also only a couple hundred meters from the local telephone exchange, so ADSL2+ speeds should be fairly flat (24/1 M) which will be nice :)

To follow me closer, check out my twitter: twitter.com/lathiat

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I update twitter more...
Posted on 04/14/2008

Howdy all,

I know there are some followers of my blog.. and I know I don't update it very much (sorry!)

However I update my twitter quite regularly, so check out http://twitter.com/lathiat (you can subscribe as an RSS if you want)

Trent

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Returning home for surprises...
Posted on 02/05/2008

Back home in Perth from Linux.conf.au... couple surprises when I got in.

First up, I made Qantas Silver Frequent flyer. This is mainly a yay for the priority check-in - and I get 1 free Qantas club invitation.

Had I thought about it when I started travelling, and taken Qantas the whole time I probably would have been gold by now but I took 2 big european trips on emirates.. and a whole stack of Virgin Blue domestic. Oh well.

Secondly, I left my air conditioner on.. It's a crappy old wall unit and it has apparently continually frozen and unfrozen up over the week and theres a nice trail of water down the wall onto my mattress which is very damp and has several water stain marks. Obviously been through the cycle a few times. It also managed to eat a bit into the plasterboard under it. -woops-. When I got in it was frozen solid out the filter and nearly out the plastic grating.

Note to self: check this in future.

And last but not least, its too damn hot in Perth.

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Poker
Posted on 02/03/2008

While I'm in Melbourne for linux.conf.au (which finished yesterday), I thought I'd head down to the Crown Poker Room to get some action.

Unfortunately I missed the Aussie Millions by a couple of weeks, but I did run into one of the final tablist while there. He made alot of money.

I set myself a limit of $300.. so first I tackled the Sunday $100 ($85+$15) NLHE tournament. I didn't fair so well.. I got up in chips early (doubled up).. had a really unfortunate hand..

I was dealt [Kd] exposed, next card was [Ac] and my redealt card was [6s]. I elected to fold and out flopped [Kh][Kc][3d] - I was not happy! I definitely would have been in with [Kd][As] and my trips would have more than likely got me a healthy stack. D'oh.

I endeed up going out just before level 4 with my [Kh][As] vs [Jh][10s]. The flop was a blank and a [10c] came on the river sealing my fate.

From then I moved onto the $2/$3 NLHE. I bought in for $100 and about an hour later was up to $254 and cashed out when my seat in a $50 Sit'n'Go came up.

I didn't do too well in the Sit'n'Go either.. busted out in 6th place calling all-in with my [As][10s] against my offenders [Ah][Ac]. The aces held up.

Then I nearly left.. but decided to head back to the $2/$3 NLHE cash game again for $100. Only about 30 minutes in I was up to $306. At this point although I felt guilty leaving the table a couple hands after winning an $80 or so pot; but I knew it was starting to go to my head and I'd loste up and likely lose it all and probably more back. So I left, $210 up for the day.

Not a bad effort! Tournaments bad.. cash games good.. probably a bit lucky but the tables were quite soft, very often folding to reraises or calling down with bugger all.

Woo!

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MacBook even more broken than I thought... Asus EeePC is good...
Posted on 01/31/2008

So having taken my MacBook to the apple store on Tuesday, they replaced the logic board and subsequently found out that not only was the logic board toast, so is the hard drive.

How the hell did I manage that?

So anyway, being 10AM Tuesday morning, and a talk to give at 1:30PM - I cruised down to Myer (by way of a $6 taxi, didn't realise how close it was) and bought an Asus EeePC.

I then rewrote the talk in <2 hours and did it. It was a bit of a rush job but it worked OK.

I'm fairly impressed by the EeePC.. it's got 4G flash, 512MB ram, Webcam.. and comes with a pre-installed and customized Xandros-based OS. It has all the good utils.. Pidgin, Firefox, Skype, Openoffice, etc... although I hope to install Ubuntu on it later.

It did manage to compile a kernel in <hour earlier.. so its not *that* slow.. altho the kernel was a little minimalistic with the features needed for it.

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MacBook broken
Posted on 01/28/2008

I've really hit a wall with my MacBook.

it has stopped booting after a kernel panic, which was caused by unplugging a Sony Ericsson phone that was just charging.

I can't even boot a cd or into firewire target mode.

This is the 3rd trip now I have had something go wrong with it, dammit. I think life is telling me to go back to a PC and ubuntu!

I guess its
kindof poetic my MacBook running macosx broke at Linux.conf.au.

Posted from my iPod touch.

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Linux.conf.au - Sunday, 27th January
Posted on 01/27/2008

Well, I made it through my first day in Melbourne for linux.conf.au 2008

Due to horrible travel planning, I arrived in Melbourne at 6am but was unable to check-in to Trinity College until 1PM. Thus I had to wast a couple hours then met some of the organisers and helped shuffle boxes of conference bags out of one room, into cars to then be unpacked down at the venue.

Following that I spent some time folding up t-shirts and finally I was able to register and check in at the college.

Having taken the midnight flight over, I hadn't slept and so I carked it from 4PM to 8PM. This is going to really throw my sleeping out! But oh well..

Following on from my lazing, I located the Trinity common area, with semi-working wireless (some rogue client is handing out DHCP leases that are useless, so you have to refresh 30 times)

So far I have ran into lots of people I know from work and past LCAs.. I'll certainly miss some but they include.. Stuart Young, Stuart Smith, Colin Charles, Giuseppe Maxia, James Iseppi, Arjen Lentz, Joel Stanley, Leon Brooks, Donna Benjamin, Daniel Stone, Grant Diffey, Michael Kedzierski(sp?), Ryan Verner, Tim Ansell.. there are a few people who escape me at the moment!

As wireless is only available in the common area, my 2GB of 3G data with three is certainly proving helpful :)

Until tomorrow... (or well, today)

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Linux.conf.au 2008
Posted on 01/26/2008

Heading off shortly to Linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, Victoria.

I've got the red-eye, so I'll be landing in at 6AM Melbourne time - for any other LCAers i'll be staying at the Trinity college.

I'm giving a talk at the MySQL Mini-conf @ 1:30PM on Tuesday - it will be about my experiences as a MySQL Support Engineer and the common sorts of problems that people run into and how to avoid them!

Should be a good week for the conference, and maybe I can lose^H^H^H^Hwin a few dollars at the Crown with my handy dandy poker skills :)

Anyone up for a game? Unfortunately I've misplaced my small, portable and travel-friendly chipset - I really must find that.

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Cupertino, CA
Posted on 08/18/2007

Thanks to work, I spent this week in Cupertino, CA. Having never been anywhere in the USA before, it was somewhat exciting to be staying literally up the road from the Apple Campus.


Me @ 1 Infinite Loop

I was also able to goto Google in Mountain View, to attend the Silicon Valley MySQL Users Group at the Visitors Center. Unfortunately I didn't come accross any large google logos to take my photo with, but I did find building number 42



I also spotted the offices of Symantec, Trend Micro, Packeteer, Solid, Microsoft, Borland and MySQL (Surprise!) along the way. Certainly "exciting" for someone thats never been to the bay area.

I had hoped to make it up to San Francisco, and do a little site-seeing of the Golden Gate Bridge and some other stuff, but was too tired to do it this afternoon, and I am attending BarCampBlock today in Palo Alto from early until I fly out tonight - so unfortunately I am going to miss out this trip. Hopefully work will send me back this way again sometime next year.

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GUADEC 2007
Posted on 07/25/2007

So, thanks to GUADEC 2007 kindly accepting my talk & paying for my travel expenses, and I had a good time.

I think my Avahi talk went well... we had a good 15+ minute talk about future possibilities, which is what I was hoping.
Lennart's Pulseaudio talk was also very good, it has advanced quite some since his talk @ LCA so it's good to see progress.

I got to meet Sjoerd, and generally the entire Collabora team which was pretty cool - I've fixed some bugs in Avahi so they can progress with the Salut support for OLPC which is good.

I have uploaded my photo collection to flickr, so you can check them out here.

Heres some of my favourites..

I managed to crash the in-flight entertainment system, apparently it uses svgalib..


I love these power transformers that point out all sides, as much as I'm sure they are safe, it just irk's me slightly ;)


Primitive mapping technology...


Walkabout - the Australian Bar - Dude in a kangaroo suit


Me with an iFailPhone


Dress code... no football tops.... exceed england.


www.wtfisthisgame.com


All in all, it was a good trip :) 

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Trent Lloyd, Support Engineer, MySQL AB
Posted on 05/26/2007

Just over 18 months ago, I started working at HostAway, initially starting out doing some casual 2-week phone support they needed at the time, my role became permanent and I quickly expanded into both Network & Systems Administration (while still doing a lot of day to day customer support, small organizations tend to demand wider skill ranges :)

None the less I felt, for various reasons, it was time to move on.  As such, I have just completed my first week working MySQL AB as a Support Engineer.

The job is home based, and I am currently working the hours of 5AM-1PM local time.  Now you may think "wow, you're crazy" for working those hours, but I have discovered that so far I am actually quite enjoying it, I feel I am getting a lot more out of my day at the moment because I seem more awake longer, getting up earlier in the day (Usually about 4:30AM).

I do have the option to start working at 7AM on most days, and given I have no travel time this doesn't put me very far behind a "normal" job as far as messing up the daily schedule.

Being a free software 'person', working for a company with heavy involvement in the free software world is pretty exciting for me.  I guess time will tell how it goes, but if this week is anything to go by I think I should be happy in the long term.

In other news, I have discovered that listening to Weird Al Yankovic continually is horrible for your sanity, mostly because he picks alot of very catchy songs to parody, which proceed to persistently circle around inside my head for the next week...

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The bird that really likes my carport..
Posted on 03/20/2007

So yesterday I came home to this bird, in my carport



From some googling I *think* it is a pigeon, maybe a dove, but I didnt' check very hard, so I'm far from even moderately sure :)  The tag on it's foot says "AUST 2006" and some other stuff I couldn't make out.

It was there all yesterday afternoon, I managed to get quite close to take the above photo, but it did flinch when I tried to get any closer.

This morning, it was still there, and this afternoon when I go thome, it was still there although now its finding its way around the floor.

I do wonder why it likes my carport so much, It doesn't *seem* hurt, and it managed to get up here


So I assume that it can fly somewhat, I guess I'll wait and see if it's there tomorrow... If anyone knows anything feel free to leave a comment :)

I turned on the sprinklers and it was right at the very edge of the big double door out to the world drinking the water splashing in, so it's not stuck in or anything.

Weird!

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Dear world,
Posted on 03/13/2007

[for the freedom lovers out there, this it totally and completely unrelated to anything freedom :)]

how the hell did I just lose the following poker hand

I pull pocket sixes, and then flop Ace-6-Ace, i.e. 6's full of Ace's full house, after some serious betting and deceiving I go all in.

HAND

(my hand, circled in black - 6H, 6C, 6S, AH, AS, opponents hand - circled in Red, AH, AD, AH, AS, 6S)
He beat me with 4 of a kind aces.

Opponent Before:


Opponent After:


Note the completely evil look on his face! A conspiracy I tell you...

This after a long string of really stupid pair and occasionally two-pair wins, sheesh!

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GNOME in Jericho
Posted on 03/10/2007

Watching Jericho S01E14, noticed this...



Looks suspiciously like GNOME 1.4 to me :)

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Avahi Scalability: "Is it good or is it bad?"
Posted on 02/28/2007

Lennart rightfully pointed out that I didn't really make any conclusion as to the results of my little test, the reason for this is really, "I'm not sure"

Certainly, It seems to be OK, the number of transmitted packets by my rough calculation, make sense, I would be interested to see what the realistic practical throughput of multicast on wireless is when you have many hosts transmitting at once, I know in 802.11b multicast is transmitted at "basic rate" of 1 or 2 mbit (or so I beleive), I'm not sure if 802.11g changes this.

My generally quick gut feeling is "I think this would work" (on wireless), I have no doubt this is fine on a wired network.

More testing to be done...

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Some random non-scientific Avahi "scaling" figures
Posted on 02/27/2007

Talking to sjoerd and others on IRC, (for the benefit of the OLPC project), I decided to attempt to get some kind of an idea of the amount of traffic Avahi generates on a large network.

I booted up 80 UMLs, running 2.6.20.2, on my AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ (O/C to 2.5GHz per core), with 2GB of ram.

Each was running with 16M ram, a base debian etch install with Avahi 0.6.16.

Interestingly with 80 VMs running my memory usage looked like this:
Mem: 2076124k total, 2012064k used, 64060k free, 18436k buffers
Swap: 996020k total, 8k used, 996012k free, 1476504k cached


I configured a 'UML Switch' with a tap device on the host attached (tun1) and told each VM to come up and use avahi-autoipd to obtain a link-local IP.

I had each VM set to advertise 3 services, via the static service advertisement files


plus it was configured with Avahi defaults so it would announce a workstation service (the default 'ssh' service was however NOT present) and the magic services that indicate what kind of services are being announced

So I started Wireshark and IPTRAF and started booting 80 VMs, at a pace of 1 every 10 seconds, after roughly 10-15 minutes the following numbers of packets were seen on the host tun1 interface

704 UDP (56.3%)
390 ARP (21.2%)
156 OTHER (12.5%)

The ARPs are for avahi-autoipd and the UDP packets are for avahi-daemon to speak mDNS, iptraf reported

Incoming Bytes: 417,391

I then gave my local machine an IP which bumped the packet count to 712, 395 and 157.

I then started 'avahi-browse _activity._tcp', this would result in 2 services from each machine being returned, following that tidying up the packet count was at

935 UDP
Incoming Bytes: 496,901
Outgoing Bytes: 28,787 (30 packets according to iptraf)

Now this *really* gave me machine a heart attack, as many 'linux' processes we're eating 20% CPU as possible, and took a good 10+ seconds for my machine to start responding again, I suspect if i was running the SKAS3 patch it might be a little less harsh.

I then after cancelling that, run avahi-browse -r _activity._tcp which causes Avahi to resolve each of the services, following that run

UDP 1287
Incoming Bytes: 570,000 packets 1384
Outgoing Bytes: 185,000 packets 227

In this case most of the services were cached and I just had to resolve each one.

I forgot to watch for traffic counts, so I re-ran the above test and iptraf claimed 165kbits/second at peak for 1 5 second interval. In this time I noticed a bunch of the service resolution queries timed out, I suspect this may have to do with it causing my machine to lock hard for a bit while it does it's magic... ;)

So that's the end of my very simple basic run of basically doing some real (rather than theoretical) tests of the number of packets seen flying around with 80 hosts on a network with Avahi with a few services, and the impact of people running a browse/resolve on a popular service type.

I'm going to try comandeer some more hardware to run some faster tests and collect some more useful data.

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Mmmm, DRM...
Posted on 01/04/2007

So I was fiddling around with my new phone (Sony Ericcson k800i) and I noticed I could play videos as a ringtone, I was interesting how that worked...

So I downloaded a Music Video of "The Veronicas - When it all falls apart" from the Three Music store, which is at a cost of $3.00 (Which, BTW, came down at 30K/s, not bad for mobile data...)

Once my phone had downloaded it, I had two options "View" (which works fine) and the other was "Ringtone", having selected this the phone stated "This video is restricted against that kind of use"

Sigh.

I wonder what three would say if I asked for a refund ;)

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DOA - Dead or Alive (The Movie): Featuring: Partial linux source
Posted on 12/02/2006

I was watching the movie "Dead or Alive" this afternoon, and I was curious to see the source code scrolling past was from the linux kernel



Interestingly they have blotched out bits and pieces, notably the copyright declaration. They also appear to lack the ability to render tabs.

You can compare to arch/alpha/kernel/err_impl.h (taken from Ubuntu's linux-source-2.6.19), I'll include the excerpt pictured above here:


*
* linux/arch/alpha/kernel/err_impl.h
*
* Copyright (C) 2000 Jeff Wiedemeier (Compaq Computer Corporation)
*
* Contains declarations and macros to support Alpha error handling
* implementations.
*/

union el_timestamp;
struct el_subpacket;
struct ev7_lf_subpackets;

struct el_subpacket_annotation {
struct el_subpacket_annotation *next;
u16 class;
u16 type;
u16 revision;
char *description;
char **annotation;
};


I'm not sure how legal or anything this is, but interesting none the less...

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Avahi in RHEL5
Posted on 11/28/2006

I was toying with the Beta of Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5)

Turns out, it installs Avahi by default, woo hoo :)

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Slightly more impressed...
Posted on 11/28/2006

I received the call from Deborah this morning, she took all my details and found the answers and gave me a call back *within an hour*, saying that unfortunately what I wanted to do was not supported, but included some recommended hardware and organised a trial GFS license.

I also received an e-mail from Iain Gray, Vice President, Global Support Services offering to help sort out my issue if it was not resolved today.

Come on RedHat, thats a little better!

edit: Sorry Iain, spelt your name incorrectly :~

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Redhat Support...
Posted on 11/28/2006

... not impressed...

I called their "Pre-sales Technical Support" line because I am interested in determining if I can use a Dell Powervault 220S in shared SCSI mode with GFS/Redhat Cluster Suite, which I want to purchase in addition to our RHEL4 AS subscriptions (hence Pre-sales)

So I went to redhat.com, found the appropriate (conveniently US Toll-Free Number, available from FreeWorldDialup) and called it.

After a few minute wait, I was answered by somebody, gave them my current account number, and asked my question, he had a lookup on the Hardware Compatability guide and found it was certified for Redhat Enterprise 2.1 but nothing later. So he said he'd find somebody more technical to attempt to answer my question.

After being on hold for about 8 minutes, somebody else answered my call, as if I was a new caller (had no idea what I needed), so I re-explained my various details and problem, and he apologised for being transferred around so he went to lookup the supposedly original person that could help me.

A few minutes later, I got transferred again to a new person, who this time, already had my username, etc, who eventually explained (and being rather confused about the whole thing) that I needed to speak to the representative for my area (Australia, but apparently in Singapore as Singapore supports Australia), gave me her name and e-mail and that she would call tomorrow (It was midnight here) -- but that she wasn't technical but should be able to co-ordinate for me to speak to the right person.

So 25 minutes and 4 people later... I'm still at least 1 more person away from someone technical that can answer my query, not overly impressed... I could understand if I had to be called back later by someone technical who could actually figure out what I wanted to know (as it was somewhat in-depth), but I shouldn't have to speak to 5 people... :(

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Fast PCI-X Sata2 Card (Silicon Image 3124 / sata_sil24) + Ubuntu
Posted on 11/16/2006

A little under 6 months ago I was hunting for a PCI-X Sata card for Bur.st so we could run 4 drives at a reasonably fast speed

At that time I discovered an Addonics controller based on the Silicon Image 3124 / sata_sil24 chipset

This turned out to be quite good, it only gained support in 2.6.16 but the driver is solid and I was able to read from all 4 drives at once, totally overing 240M/s (contrary to the sata_sil / Silicon Image 3114 driver that is far worse)

I believe I paid ~$150 at the time, I was recently in search of another card both for work and for a new file server I am building at home.

I was goign to get the Addonics, but the best I can find is $169 at bits.com.au which was a little bit too much for my personal budget (although would proabably suit works budget fine)

trs80 discovered a card by Skymaster at the auspcmarket store for $104.50 including delivery (within australia)

This card arrived today and I installed it in an Intel SR2400 here and its working great, I'm using it in non-raid mode with the standard linux driver from 2.6.17 with Ubuntu Edgy --- however the sata_sil24 driver is not included on the CD, so to use it you need to

0) Start the ubuntu installer, get the network going and get up to the stage it says "can't find driver for your hard drive"
1) Unpack a copy of the linux-2.6.17-generic image for i386 or amd64, and grab the sata_sil24.ko file
2) use "wget" from the console on the ubuntu installer to get it onto the machine
3) Move it into /lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/volatile
4) run 'depmod -a'
5) Click the 'continue without hard drive option' and it will then find it
6) WHen the install is done, jump onto the console again, if /target is still mounted (if not mount it)
7) chroot /target
8) edit /etc/initramfs/modules and add "sata_sil24" to the bottom, add this to /etc/modules as well
9) run update-initramfs -u
10) exit the chroot, finish the install

I'm currently getting 140M/s sequential read from the start, while in the middle of a software raid5 rebuild, so it looks to be a good card and a viable option -- there is also a PCI version (obviously wont be as fast) for those wanting a decent chipset that has linux support but only on PCI.

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