On Fedora 15 if you can’t login because you get a

gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status code 256 error

login via the text console (ctrl-alt-f2) and make a tmp directory.

cd
mkdir tmp

Building my file sever was a nightmare. Various issues in no particular order.

• VirtualBox causes Solaris host to “pause”
• KVM crashes Linux host when trying to passthrough LSI scsi controller
• ESXI uses a lot of ram
• ESXI requires windows client
• mysql doesn’t work through nis (owner permissions)
• setting up a useful solaris zone is a lot of work
• xen can’t create any vm. XenUnifiedLookupByName error
• rebooting takes several minutes
• ipmi continual ends the session after 60 seconds
• console redirect doesn’t always capture F-keys
• VMWare guest machines can’t boot off of passed through hardware

I recently purchased the hardware for a new server, I’ll get into the details of that in a later post, however I did want to quickly mention a problem I had.

I tried to burn in my S5512WGM2NR motherboard, a Sandy Bridge motherboard from Tyan. It has the the C204 chipset and I’ve got a Xeon e3 1230 with 16 GB of ram (4 x KVR1333D3E9S/4G).

Anyhow, the MemTest from Fedora 15 locked up instantly and the official MemTest from http://www.memtest86.com/ locked up within 60 seconds or whenever you hit a key. I’m now using MemTest86+ from http://www.memtest.org/ and it works great.

tl;dr – Use MemTest86+ from .org not MemTest86 from .com.