DIY Avocent / Cyclades DB9/RJ45 serial console adapters

Sunday, 04. 20. 2008  –  Category: all, stash

These are quite pricey if you buy them pre-made. Depending on how fast you can make them up you can save money.

The self-wire kits I found have the RJ45 connections fixed but let you decide the DB9 pin assigments. The Avocent needs a crossover which means the wiring isn’t one to one. It’s detailed here.

So I don’t lose it again:

Colour RJ45 DB9
Blue 1 8
Orange 2 1&6
Black 3 2
Red 4 5
Green 5 7
Yellow 6 3
Brown & White 7&8 4

DB9 pin 9 is unused. No idea how standard the colour / RJ45 assignment is. The merging of brown and white wires, and the splitting of the orange into two pins is the fudge: admittedly I thought I was building straight-through connectors when I set out!

Assembly

Truncated and borked Thunderbird attachments

Friday, 02. 8. 2008  –  Category: all, stash

Fixed thus:

mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks to false

From here. Unsure if the break is local or on the mailserver, a reasonably normal Courier IMAP deal.

ZFS on FreeBSD

Wednesday, 01. 30. 2008  –  Category: all, sw

… rocks! However, some early VM-related kernel panics – kmem_map too small panic – knocked confidence a bit. Seems ZFS really nails the kernel’s memory demands.

Happily “the vm_kern.c.2 patch” (it’s well known!) sorted things. I stressed ZFS-backed IO massively without any further wobbles.

Now I can micro-quota all my jail(8)s with obsession!

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