Dobrica Pavlinušić's Weblog / Blog

If you ever needed to connect to JTAG or SWD on stm32 and tried to search for solutions on Internet, you quickly realized that amount of information is overwhelming. However, fear not. If you have Raspberry Pi and few wires, you are already half-way there.

For me, this whole adventure started when I got non-working sensor which had swd header and blob over chip. This was not my first swd experiment. Thanks to great Hackaday Remoticon 2020 The Hackers Guide to Hardware Debugging by Matthew Alt I had already tried to connect using swd from Raspberry Pi to bluepill (which is stm32f103) so I had some experience with that. Now I also had unknown device so I can try what I can do with it.

For a start, you can notice that device have UART TX and RX pins already soldered, so first step was to connect normal 3.3V serial to those pins and see if we have some output. And I did. I could see that it's contacting sensor chip and trying to initiate NBIoT connection, but fails. So next step was to solder SWD pins, and connect them to Raspberry Pi. For that, I created openocd configuration rpi4-zc-swd.cfg and uncommeted bottom of configuration to get first idea what chip is on the board (since it's covered with blob):

swd newdap chip cpu -enable
dap create chip.dap -chain-position chip.cpu
target create chip.cpu cortex_m -dap chip.dap
init
dap info

I did made some assumptions where, for example that chip is cortex_m, but since it has swd header, there was a good chance it was.

However, since this sensor tries to get measurements in some configurable interval, just connecting using openocd didn't work since sensor after power up and sensor check went into sleep. While I could re-plug sensor repeatably, this is not needed since there is also rst pin (connected to pin 22 on Raspberry pi) which we can toggle from shell using:

raspi-gpio set 22 op
raspi-gpio get 22
raspi-gpio set 22 dl
raspi-gpio get 22
raspi-gpio set 22 dh
raspi-gpio get 22

This woke up sensor again, and I was able to connect to it using openocd and was greeted with following output:

root@rpi4:/home/pi/openocd-rpi2-stm32# openocd -f rpi4-zc-swd.cfg
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.11.0+dev-00062-g6405d35f3-dirty (2021-03-27-16:05)
Licensed under GNU GPL v2
For bug reports, read
        http://openocd.org/doc/doxygen/bugs.html
Info : BCM2835 GPIO JTAG/SWD bitbang driver
Info : clock speed 100 kHz
Info : SWD DPIDR 0x0bc11477
Info : chip.cpu: hardware has 4 breakpoints, 2 watchpoints
Info : starting gdb server for chip.cpu on 3333
Info : Listening on port 3333 for gdb connections
AP ID register 0x04770031
        Type is MEM-AP AHB3
MEM-AP BASE 0xf0000003
        Valid ROM table present
                Component base address 0xf0000000
                Peripheral ID 0x00000a0447
                Designer is 0x0a0, STMicroelectronics
                Part is 0x447, Unrecognized
                Component class is 0x1, ROM table
                MEMTYPE system memory present on bus

So, indeed this was STMicroelectronics chip, but unknown model. However, using Info : SWD DPIDR 0x0bc11477 and googling that I figured out that it's probably STM32L0xx which again made sense.

So I started openocd -f rpi4-zc-swd.cfg -f target/stm32l0_dual_bank.cfg and telnet 4444 to connect to it and I was able to dump flash. However, I had to be quick since sensor will power off itself after 30 seconds or so. Solution was easy, I toggled again rst pin and connected using gdb which stopped cpu and left sensor powered on.

However, all was not good since quick view into 64K dump showed that at end of it there was partial AT command, so dump was not whole. So I opened STM32L0x1 page and since mcu was LQFP 48 with 128k my mcu was STM32L081CB. So I restarted openocd -f rpi4-zc-swd.cfg -f target/stm32l0_dual_bank.cfg and got two flash banks:

> flash banks
#0 : stm32l0.flash (stm32lx) at 0x08000000, size 0x00010000, buswidth 0, chipwidth 0
#1 : stm32l0.flash1 (stm32lx) at 0x08010000, size 0x00010000, buswidth 0, chipwidth 0

So I was able to dump them both and got full firmware. It was also very useful, because at one point I did write flash in gdb instead in telnet 4444 connection and erased one of sensors which I was able to recover using dump which I obtained.

This however, produced another question for me: since flash is same on all sensors, where are setting which can be configured in sensor (and wasn't changed by re-flashing firmware). Since chip also has 6k of eeprom this was logical place to put it. However, openocd doesn't have bult-in support to dump eeprom from those chips. However, I did found post Flashing STM32L15X EEPROM with STLink under Linux which modified openocd to support reading and writing of eeprom back in 2015 but is not part of upstream openocd.

I didn't want to return to openocd from 2015 or port changes to current version, but I didn't have to. Since I was only interested in dumping eeprom I was able to dump it using normal mdw command:

> mdw 0x08080000 1536

1536 is number of 32-bit words in 6k eeprom (1536 * 4 = 6144). And indeed setting which are configurable where stored in eeprom.

This was fun journey into openocd and stm32, so I hope this will help someone to get started. All configuration files are available at https://github.com/dpavlin/openocd-rpi2-stm32.

Several months ago, I got Grove Beginner Kit For Arduino for review. I wanted to see if this board would be good fit for my friends which aren't into electronics to get them started with it.

So, I started with general idea: collect values from sensors, send them to InfluxDB and create graphs using Grafana. In my opinion, showing graphs of values from real world is good way to get started with something which is not possible without little bit of additional hardware, and might be good first project for people who didn't get to try Arduino platform until now.

Kit is somewhat special: out of the box, it comes as single board with all sensors already attached, so to start using it, you just need to connect it to any usb port (it even comes with usb cable for that purpose). It also has plastic stand-offs which will provide isolation of bottom side from surface on which it's placed.

It provides following sensors on board:

Modules	Interface	Pins/Address
LED	Digital	D4
Buzzer	Digital	D5
OLEDDisplay 0.96"	I2C	I2C, 0x78(default)
Button	Digital	D6
Rotary Potentiometer	Analog	A0
Light	Analog	A6
Sound	Analog	A2
Temperature & Humidity Sensor	Digital	D3
Air Pressure Sensor	I2C	I2C, 0x77(default) / 0x76(optional)
3-Axis Accelerator	I2C	I2C, 0x19(default)

So I decided to show temperature, humidity, pressure, light and sound. I also added ability to show measurements on built-in oled display if you press button. Why the button press? In my experience, oled displays are prone to burn-in, and since main usage of this sensor board will be sending data to the cloud, it would be wasteful to destroy oled display which won't be used most of the time.

Programming Arduino sketch was easy using Groove Kit wiki pages which nicely document everything you will need to get you started. However, I noticed that wiki suggest to use Arduino libraries which have Grove in it's name, so I was wondering why is that so. Turns out that DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor and BMP280 temperature and pressure sensor use older version of Adafruit libraries which aren't compatible with latest versions on github. So, I tested latest versions from Adafruit and they work without any problems, just like Grove version. If you are already have them installed, there is no need to install additional Grove versions.

If you deploy sensor like this (probably connected to small Linux single board computer) it would be useful if it would be possible to update software on it witout need to run full Arduino IDE (and keyboard and mouse), so I decided to write a Makefile which uses and installs arduino-cli which is go re-implementation of support which is available in Arduino IDE, but written in go that enables usage from command-line (over ssh for example).

So if you are interested in trying this out, and want to get graphs similar to one above, go to GroveSensor github repository clone it to your Raspberry Pi, issue make to build it and make upload to send it to your board. You will also need to edit influx.sh to point it to your InfluxDB instance, and you can start creating graphs in Grafana. All this will also work on other platforms (like x86, amd64 or aarm64) thanks to arduino-cli install script.

I must admit that Linux administration is getting better with years. I was configuring IPMI serial console on old machines (but with recent Debian) so I decided to find out which is optimal way to configure serial console using systemd.

First, let's inspect ipmi and check it's onfiguration to figure out boudrate for serial port:

root@lib10:~# ipmitool sol info 1
Info: SOL parameter 'Payload Channel (7)' not supported - defaulting to 0x01
Set in progress                 : set-complete
Enabled                         : true
Force Encryption                : true
Force Authentication            : false
Privilege Level                 : ADMINISTRATOR
Character Accumulate Level (ms) : 50
Character Send Threshold        : 220
Retry Count                     : 7
Retry Interval (ms)             : 1000
Volatile Bit Rate (kbps)        : 57.6
Non-Volatile Bit Rate (kbps)    : 57.6
Payload Channel                 : 1 (0x01)
Payload Port                    : 623

Notice that there is 1 after info. This is serial port which is sol console. If you run ipmitool without this parameter or with zero, you will get error:

root@alfa:~# ipmitool sol info 0
Error requesting SOL parameter 'Set In Progress (0)': Invalid data field in request

Don't panic! There is ipmi sol console, but on ttyS1!

To configure serial console for Linux kernel we need to add someting like console=ttyS1,57600 console=tty0 to kernel command-line in grub, and configuring correct serial port and speed:

GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=57600 --unit=1 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

All required changes to default configuration are below:

root@lib10:/etc# git diff
diff --git a/default/grub b/default/grub
index b8a096d..2b855fb 100644
--- a/default/grub
+++ b/default/grub
@@ -6,7 +6,8 @@
 GRUB_DEFAULT=0
 GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2< /dev/null || echo Debian`
-GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="boot=zfs rpool=lib10 bootfs=lib10/ROOT/debian-1"
+# serial console speed from ipmitool sol info 1
+GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=ttyS1,57600 console=tty0 boot=zfs rpool=lib10 bootfs=lib10/ROOT/debian-1"
 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

 # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
@@ -16,6 +17,8 @@ GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

 # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
 #GRUB_TERMINAL=console
+GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
+GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=57600 --unit=1 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

 # The resolution used on graphical terminal
 # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE

So in the end, there is noting to configure on systemd side. If you want to know why, read man 8 systemd-getty-generator

It all started more than a week ago when I was given 10x10 panel of ws2812 leds designed to be broken apart into individual boards. I might have said at that moment: "It is a panel, it's just missing a few wires", and so this story begins...

It took me the whole day to add those few wires and turn it into panel.

I started testing it using Arduino Nano with wrong FastLED example (which supports just 4 ws8212) and wondered why I'm not getting the whole panel to light up. After some sleep, I tried Adafruit example, fixed one broken data out-in wire in middle of panel and I got this:

So, playing video on this panel should be easy now, right?

First, I had to make a choice of platform to drive the panel. While my 10x10 panel with 100 leds needed just 300 bytes for single frame, I didn't want to have a video sending device wired to it. So, esp8266 was logical choice to provide network connectivity to the panel without usb connection (which we still need, but just for power).

At first, I took the Lolin Node MCU clone, which doesn't have 5V broken out (why?), and its VIN pin has a diode between USB 5V pin and VIN, and diode voltage drop is enough to make ws2812 dark all the time.
Switching to Weemos D1 mini did help there, but what to run on it? I found some examples that where too clever for me (for 8x8 panel, they use jpeg and just decode single 8x8 block to show it which won't work for my 10x10 panel).
After a bit of googling, it seems to me that https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED project is somewhat of Tasmota for WS2812 on ESP8266, so I decided to use it. While it's not designed to support WS2812 matrix but simple stripes, it has UDP realtime control which enables it to send 302 byte UDP packet (300 bytes of RGB data and two byte header).

So I started writing scripts which are at https://github.com/dpavlin/WLED-video to first convert video to raw frames using something as simple as ff2rgb.sh:

dpavlin@nuc:/nuc/esp8266/WLED-video$ cat ff2rgb.sh
#!/bin/sh -xe

f=$1

test ! -d $f.rgb && mkdir $f.rgb || rm -v $f.rgb/*.png
ffmpeg -i $f -vf scale=10x10 $f.rgb/%03d.png
ls $f.rgb/*.png | xargs -i convert {} -rotate 180 -gamma 0.3 -depth 8 {}.rgb

To send frames I wrote simple send.pl script. I would have loved to be able to use bash udp support or some standard utility (like netcat or socat) to send frames, but null values in data didn't work well with shell pipes and I wasn't able to make it work.
I also figured out that I have to modify gamma values for my frames so that colors are somewhat more correct (I had flame video which had blue hues on it without gamma correction). This is somewhat strange because WLED does have gamma correction for colors turned on, but it doesn't help and turning it off also doesn't help. So, gamma correction in pre-processing it is...

And since I already had perl script to send UDP packets, I decided to open ffmpeg from it and make single script ff2wled.pl which sends video to panel like this:

dpavlin@nuc:/nuc/esp8266/WLED-video$ ./ff2wled.pl rick.gif

Was it all worth it? Honestly, no. The panel is small enough that video playback is really too much for such small resolution and it would be so much easier to buy ready-made panel with more leds. But, I did learn a few tricks with ffmpeg, and hopefully somebody else will benefit from this post.

Last weekend I had pleasure to attend BalCCon 2k19 and present my talk So, is Android a Linux? which is embedded below. It was great conference and I hope that my talk gave some food for though and hints how to run Linux on Android devices.

I don't have TV remote. I did get one, but as soon as I installed TV I realized that it's quite annoying to find remote to turn TV on when I sit with my wireless keyboard (computer is the only device connected to TV). So, I added keyboard shortcut using xbindkeys, addad IR led to Raspberry Pi, configured lirc and was happy about it. And then, buster with kernel 4.19 came and everything changed.

Send IR to TV

Upgrade to 4.19 kernel should be easy, only thing you have to do (if your IR sending diode is on pin 18) is to enable new overlay:

# pwm works only on 18
dtoverlay=pwm-ir-tx,gpio_pin=18

This does not work reliably for me on Raspberry Pi 1. My TV detect roughly every third key press and this makes command-line TV remote solution useless because you can use TV menus to setup picture any more.

So, I had to do something. Getting up and pressing button on TV is not something that I can live with after having this automation working for year (and TV remote was missing by now). But, I had all required components.

Few weeks ago, I removed IR send/receive board from RMmini 3 and documented it's pinout:

I was also in the middle of flashing Sonoff-Tasmota to bunch of Tackin plugs so it seemed like logical step to flash Tasmota to NodeMCU board, connect RMmini 3 IR board to it and give it a try. And I'm glad I did.

I used to have http server (simple perl script) running on Raspberry Pi which used irsend to send IR codes. From xbindkey perspective, my configuration used curl and all I had to do to get IR working again was changing my script to use mosquitto instead of irsend:

mosquitto_pub -h rpi2 -q 2 -t cmnd/ir/IRSend -m '{"protocol": "NEC","bits": 32, "data": 0x20DF10EF}'

At this point I realized that I can put this into .xbindkeyrc and contact esp8266 directly. This didn't work... You can't have double quotes in commands which are executed and I had to put it into shell script and call that.

And to my amazement, there was noticeable difference in response time of TV. In retrospect, this seemed obvious because my TV nuc is much faster than Raspberry Pi, but this was probably the most unexpected benefit of this upgrade.

When I said that you have to connect IR receiver and sender on NodeMCU pins, you have to take care not to hit pins that have special purpose on power-up. For example, if you connect something that will pull to ground on powerup (IR led for example) to gpio0 esp8266 will stay in boot loader mode. gpio2 and gpio16 are led pins on nodemcu board, so don't use them (and define them as Led1i and Led2i in configuration).

Having LEDs configured in tasmota allows me to extend my shell script and blink led after IR code has been sent:

dpavlin@nuc:~$ cat tv-on.sh 
#!/bin/sh
mosquitto_pub -h rpi2 -q 2 -t cmnd/ir/IRSend -m '{"protocol": "NEC","bits": 32, "data": 0x20DF10EF}'
mosquitto_pub -h rpi2 -q 2 -t cmnd/ir/LedPower -m 1
mosquitto_pub -h rpi2 -q 2 -t cmnd/ir/LedPower -m 0

Send IR to HVAC

By pure luck, just a few days latter, my friend wanted to control his ACs from computer. Again tasmota came to the rescue. Since HVAC support in tasmota will increase firmware size over 512Kb (which breaks OTA upgrade on 1Mb modules) it's not compiled in by default. However, you can edit sonoff/my_user_config.h and uncomment it:

    #define USE_IR_HVAC                          // Support for HVAC systems using IR (+3k5 code)
    #define USE_IR_HVAC_TOSHIBA                  // Support IRhvac Toshiba protocol
    #define USE_IR_HVAC_MITSUBISHI               // Support IRhvac Mitsubischi protocol
    #define USE_IR_HVAC_LG                       // Support IRhvac LG protocol
    #define USE_IR_HVAC_FUJITSU                  // Support IRhvac Fujitsu protocol
    #define USE_IR_HVAC_MIDEA                    // Support IRhvac Midea/Komeco protocol

However, if you want to keep OTA update working, you will also have to turn off some other configuration options (I don't use Domoticz or Home Assistant) to keep firmware size below 512Kb.

To create IR sender, I decided to add IR LED, transistor and resistor to existing ESP-01 module with DHT11 board (which has 3.3v regulator on it) according to the following DaveCAD(tm) drawing:

If you are wondering why I'm connecting IR led to RX pin (gpio3), it's because gpio0 is special, gpio2 is already used for dht11 and TX (which is gpio1) is also special. Since we don't need serial, using single pin left RX saves the day. And this is the picture of the first prototype (on which I tried all pins until I settled on RX):

With all this in place and quick re-flash, we where than able to issue commands like this to control AC:

mosquitto_pub -h rpi2 -t 'cmnd/ir/irhvac' -m '{ "Vendor": "Mitsubishi", "Power": 1, "Mode":"Cold", "Temp": 25}'

mosquitto_pub -h rpi2 -t 'cmnd/ir/irhvac' -m '{ "Vendor": "Mitsubishi", "Power": 0}'

So, with all this, I hope that you don't have any excuse not to control your IR devices from a command-line.

Update: Just to make sure that you don't think this is my best soldering ever here is also picture of 4 more modules which will be distributed to my friends.

Is it possible to take obsolete Android device and port it to mainline kernel with Debian? (make RaspberryPi-like device)

Our top-of-switch rack decides to die randomly from time to time. It was somewhat inconvenient since it also killed most of our infrastructure including primary and secondary DNS so I needed a solution quickly. Since different rack is still on the network, I should be able to hack something and finally connect my Arduino knowledge and sysadmin realm, right? Think of it as power cycle watchdog based on network state.

First thing was to figure out what was happening with the switch. It seemed like it was still working (LEDs did blink), but only thing that helped was power cycle. So as a first strep, I connected serial console (using RS-232 extension cable) to on-board serial port (since it doesn't seem to work using cheap CH340 based USB serial dongles) and I didn't expect this:

0x37491a0 (bcmCNTR.0): memPartAlloc: block too big 6184 bytes (0x10 aligned) in partition 0x30f6d88
0x3cd6bd0 (bcmCNTR.1): memPartAlloc: block too big 6184 bytes (0x10 aligned) in partition 0x30f6d88
0x6024c00 (simPts_task): memPartAlloc: block too big 1576 bytes (0x10 aligned) in partition 0x30f6d88
0x6024c00 (simPts_task): memPartAlloc: block too big 1576 bytes (0x10 aligned) in partition 0x30f6d88

When I google messages like this I get two types of answers:

1. beginner questions about VxWorks which summ up to: you have memory leak
2. errors from switches with boardcomm chipset from various vendors

There is basically no solution. We are running latest firmware, and internet doesn't have any idea what to do.
Serial console did emit a lot of messages, but didn't respond to input at all. I would at last expect that watchdog timer in the switch will reset it once it manages to fragment it's own memory so much that it has stopped forwarding packets, oh well.... What else can I do?

IEC power cable with relay

I wanted something what I can plug in between the existing switch with IEC power connector with USB on the other end that can be plugged into any USB port for control.

Since this is 220V project (and my first important one), I tried to do it as safe as possible.

• I started with a power cable, that I cut in half and put ferrules on all wires to be sure that connectors will grip those wires well.
• Then I replaced the power plug with IEC connector so it's can be inserted in any power cable. In this case, we soldered wires ends, since ferrules where too big to fit into connector housing. We did wrap a wire around a screw in a connector correctly, so tightening the screw will not displace the wire.
• Finally I connected cheap 10A 250VAC relay which should be enough for fully loaded 48 port gigabit network switch that draws round 80W.
• To make sure that rest of the system can't just power cycle device connected at any time, I connected live wire through normally closed pins on a relay. This means that this cable should work as-is (without powering it at all) and when powered, since board has pull-up resistor on the relay to VCC, the relay will be in the same sate, passing power to device.
• Finally I checked all three power cable wires with multi-meter and got around 0.2 ohms which mans that whole thing works for now.

At this point we should note that this relay board has only three pins (IN, GND and VCC) and has no optical isolation to 220V side. Since isolation would require us to provide additional power supply for 220V side, it was acceptable a risk.

Putting it into a box

I really wanted to somehow fix wires and protect the bottom of the relay board (which has 220V on it) from shorting to something, so I used an old box from a dairy product and created a housing for electronics.

If you look carefully, you will notice that I had to cut the case all the way through to pass through the power cable (that has a zip-tie on inside to prevent it from pulling out). The Case will be fixed using hot glue and a lid, so this won't be a problem.
Warning and label on the lid is also nice touch, and shouldn't be skipped when creating a thing which you won't be only user of.

Arduino software

You will also notice that relay is connected to A7, which didn't work out. Let me explain:
The idea is to use Arduino default pin state (INPUT) as a state in which the pin will stay most of the time. This makes pin floating, and we can inspect pull-up on relay board and report if we see it. When we want to activate the relay, we'll flip pin to output, pull it down, and activate the relay.
Code is available at https://github.com/dpavlin/Arduino-projects/blob/nuc/power_cycle/power_cycle.ino and it can't be much simpler:

/*
 * power cycle switch
 * 
 * relay is connected across 5V relay through normally closed pins so that failure of arduino doesn't kill power to switch.
 * to activate relay on this board, signal pin has to be pulled to ground.and coil draw is 76 mA when active
 * board has pull up on input pin to it's vcc
*/

#define RELAY_PIN 2

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);

  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);

  pinMode(RELAY_PIN, INPUT); // don't modify pin state
  Serial.print("Relay pin on reset: ");
  Serial.println(digitalRead(RELAY_PIN));
}

void loop() {
  if ( Serial.available() ) {
    char c = Serial.read();
    if ( c == '0' ) {
      Serial.print("L");
      pinMode(RELAY_PIN, OUTPUT);
      digitalWrite(RELAY_PIN, LOW); // activate relay

      digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); // led on
    } else if ( c == '1' ) {
      Serial.print("H");
      pinMode(RELAY_PIN, INPUT);

      digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); // led off
    } else {
      Serial.print(c);
    }
  }
}

Simple is good: I toyed with idea of automatically releasing the relay from Arduino code, and when I started to implement timeout configuration on Arduino side, I remembered what this will be plugged into random server USB port, without avrdude and any handy way to update firmware on it, so I decided to just leave simplest possible commands:

• 1 - ON (outputs H) - power on, default
• 0 - OFF (outputs L) - power off, relay active

Hot glue galore

Then, I applied liberal amount of hot-glue to fix power cables and board in place. It worked out pretty well. You will also notice that the relay pin has moved to D2.

Installation

And here it is, installed between existing switch power cable and switch, connected to only USB port still available in rack which is still on network.

cron and serial port

Idea is simple: we'll use cron to ping primary and secondary DNS IP addresses and if any of these fail, we'll send 0 to turn power off, wait 3 seconds, and send 1 to turn power back on.
Implementation, however, is full of quirks, mostly because we don't want to depend on additional utilities installed, and we need to wait for Arduino to reset after connecting to serial port (and to give it time to display value of relay pin) before we start turning power off.

#!/bin/sh -e

ping -q -c 5 193.198.212.8 > /dev/shm/ping && ping -q -c 5 193.198.213.8 >> /dev/shm/ping || (

test -e /dev/shm/reset && exit 0 # reset just once
cp /dev/shm/ping /dev/shm/reset  # store failed ping

date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S
cat /dev/shm/ping

dev=/dev/ttyUSB0

trap "exit" INT TERM
trap "kill 0" EXIT

stty -F $dev speed 115200 raw
cat < $dev &
(
        echo
        sleep 3 # wait for reset and startup message
        echo 0  # off
        sleep 3
        echo 1  # on
        sleep 1
) | cat > $dev

kill $!

) # ping subshell

It's started from crontab with user which has dialout group membership so he can open /dev/ttyUSB0:

dpavlin@ceph04:~$ ls -al /dev/ttyUSB0 
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 0 Dec 28 01:44 /dev/ttyUSB0
dpavlin@ceph04:~$ id
uid=1001(dpavlin) gid=1001(dpavlin) groups=1001(dpavlin),20(dialout),27(sudo)
dpavlin@ceph04:~$ crontab -l | tail -1
*/1 *  *   *   *     /home/dpavlin/sw-lib-srv-power-cycle.sh

This will execute script every minute. This allows us to detect error within minute. However, switch boot takes 50s, so we can't just run this script every minute, because it will result in constant switch power cycles. But since we are resetting switch just once this is not a problem.

With this in place, your network switch will not force you to walk to it so you can power cycle it any more. :-)
And it's interesting combination of sysadmin skills and electronics which might be helpful to someone.

remote access

If we want to access our servers while switch doesn't work, it's always useful to create few shell scripts on remote nodes which will capture IP addresses and commands which you will need to execute to recover your network.

dpavlin@data:~/ffzg$ cat ceph04-switch-relay.sh 
#!/bin/sh -xe

ssh 193.198.212.46 microcom -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 115200

dpavlin@data:~/ffzg$ cat r1u32-sw-rack3.sh 

#!/bin/sh

ssh 193.198.212.43 microcom -p /dev/ttyS1 -s 9600

This week I learned valuable lesson: if you are using MIPS from 2008 in your RAID controller, you can't really expect it to be faster than more modern Intel CPU when doing RAID 10 on disks.

It all started with failure of SSD in our bcache setup which sits on top of MegaRAID RAID10 array. Since this required me take one of ganeti nodes down, it was also a good opportunity to add one more disk (we where running 6 disks and one SSD) and switch to software md RAID10 so we can use all 7 disks in RAID10. In this process, I did some benchmarking and was shocked with results.

First, let's see original MegaRAID configuration:

# lsblk --scsi -m
NAME HCTL       TYPE VENDOR   MODEL             REV TRAN NAME   SIZE OWNER GROUP MODE
sda  0:0:6:0    disk ATA      WDC WD1002FBYS-1 0C12      sda  931.5G root  disk  brw-rw----
sdb  0:0:7:0    disk ATA      INTEL SSDSC2BW24 DC32      sdb  223.6G root  disk  brw-rw----
sdc  0:2:0:0    disk DELL     PERC H310        2.12      sdc    2.7T root  disk  brw-rw----
# hdparm -tT /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing cached reads:   13920 MB in  1.99 seconds = 6981.76 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1356 MB in  3.00 seconds = 451.81 MB/sec

and let's compare that with JBOD disks on controller and creating md array:

# hdparm -Tt /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
 Timing cached reads:   13826 MB in  1.99 seconds = 6935.19 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 1888 MB in  3.01 seconds = 628.05 MB/sec

So, TL;DR is that you are throwing away disk performance if you are using hardware RAID. You didn't expect that? I didn't. In retrospect it's logical that newish Intel CPU can process data much faster than slowish MIPS on RAID controller, but on the other hand only difference is RAID overhead because same controller is still handling disks with software raid.

I also wrote document with a lot of console output and commands to type if you want to do the same: https://github.com/ffzg/gnt-info/blob/master/doc/megaraid-to-md.txt

Today I was explaining xclip utility and found this useful snippet which I wrote back in 2011 that allows you to edit browser textarea in terminal using vi with syntax highlighting.

#!/bin/sh

# workflow:
# 1. focus textarea in browser you want to edit
# 2. press ctrl+a then ctrl+c
# 3. switch to terminal and start this script with optional extensioni for highlight: xclip-vi html
# 4. edit file in vi, and save it
# 5. switch back to browser, and press ctrl+v in already selected textarea

ext=$1
test -z "$ext" && ext=txt

xclip -out > /tmp/$$.$ext && vi /tmp/$$.$ext && xclip -in -selection clipboard < /tmp/$$.$ext

xclip-vi.sh github gist