Weblogs for ajt
At the moment I'm back on line at home. It's amazing how much you miss not being on-line. Traditional media like the wireless* and TV are only so useful, plus their science and technology coverage is utterly dire...
Anyhow we signed for the new house, and the solicitor will do the contract exchange dance next week (we hope) with completion following a few weeks or so later. Then we'll be off-line again while BT drag their feet on that move...
* Yes I know wireless is a very old word for radio, but I think it's a nicer sounding word.
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We moved house this month and we're still off-line at home. That means I can only email and do web stuff from work, which is much more limited and I don't do as much.
If all all goes well my ISP will hook us up again with ADSL just in time for the next move into the house we intend to buy. Joy of joys! Once we own our own home it's time to get structured CAT-6 installed throughout and build a proper mini-server room...
We're in France at the in-laws. Today I'm installing Debian Lenny onto my mother-in-law-(equivalent)'s Asus notebook.
The first problem was getting the new RAM I bought for her into the unit. There are three possible holes in the base and non of them are marked, but I was lucky and guessed the right one first time. The first DIMM went in okay, the second needed re-seating and some coersion to stay in place and be detected by the BIOS.
The second problem was that the Asus's ACPI BIOS was rubbish and the Debian installer stopped dead in the water. I added acpi=off pci=nommconf and the installer is running happily at the moment. It's pulling most of the files it needs off the 5.0.3 DVD, the rest directly off the fr.debian.org mirror, 14 minutes to go....
I decided to get my self a new notebook. Novatech do a V13 unit (Clevo W83T) unit for £340 and it comes naked, so no Windows tax to pay.
It doesn't have a CD/DVD drive so I have to boot it some other way to get the installer going. I tried to PXE boot it, and that works but the Lenny or Squeeze kernels doesn't have the drivers for the JMC25X ethernet card it has so that's not much use at the moment...
I tried an external USB/IDE hard disk. That has loads of space on it but GRUB fails with a Geom problem.
I can get it to boot okay with an ext2 formatted USB key with extlinux, however that kenel panics when it can't find a root filesystem...
I tried a FAT formatted USB key that I used on my dad's Viglen last year and that just gives a blank screen.
I must be doing something silly....
My plan to swap my old Red Hat 7 box from the physical server to the VMware system was accelerated today when the box lost a disk. I was able to swap the virtual system in to live by a quick IP address change and then starting the last few services on it. The business was happy with that.
The only problem was that I had some data on the old box that I wanted back that wasn't on the VM system. The /var partition was dead so I booted the box with a Debian Live disk and ran fsck a few times to fix the partition up. I then copied the data off that I wanted (wiki data) and shut the box down.
We'll keep the box around for spare parts until the rest of the Compaq boxes can be migrated off physical systems on the VMware farm.
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At work we have a set of servers running Red Hat Linux 7.x on elderly Compaq hardware. A few weeks ago the production machine stopped without warning or explanation. I still don't know why it failed but a very serious worry is that if any of them fail because of mechanical problems we could be in trouble...
In theory as they are x86 boxes the Windows team can host them on their VMware farm (yes it's ironic that it's based on Linux but there you go...). The problem is that there isn't a simple point-and-drool solution for this and the Windows guys don't do Linux anyway. After the failure, the plan to migrate the boxes off old physical systems and onto new virtual systems received extra impetus.
Most of this week I've been trying to peel the data off a Red Hat Linux 7.1 system (2.4 kernel and lilo boot) and paste it into a VMware container (different SCSI system). There have been many false dawns and errors on my part, but in the end it wasn't actually that bad.
The first stage was to boot the VMware container up with a Debian GNU/Linux live system. I did consider something based on a 2.4 kernel, but they were missing the LSI SCSI drivers and so I just used what I knew best. I then used QtParted to lay out a file system that would work - and made sure I'd introduced no ext2 features that the 2.4 kernel's filesystem couldn't cope with.
Next I mounted the filesystems onto Debian and used rsync and ssh to copy the data, links, and /dev/ nodes from the old system to the new one. It's not pretty or elegant but it does actually work.
I then chroot'd into the new root file system, installed grub and ran grub-install. I had to rebuild the initrd to remove the Compaq SCSI controller card and add the LSI one. The /etc/fstab and a few other files were tweaked and I was done.
Reboot and hey presto it all works.
Well actually it didn't work the first time at all, I made lots of errors on the way, but in principle when I'd done all the right bits in the right order it did work first time. Deleting the /initrd directory was my daftest trick - Red Hat 7 needs it to pivot the root filesystem over at boot...!
It was frustrating at times, but with Google's help and a lot of patience (VMware is very slow) I got it all working. Now all we have to do is pivot the old and new system and we're done...
At my last LUG meeting I distributed a veritable mountain of APress books for review. The first ones are in and up on the LUG web site: www.hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BookReviews. This is excellent news. So far we have had:
Two down, only 17 to go...!
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While I was away on holiday lots of changes arrived in Debian Sid. Over the weekend I updated all my Sid virtual machines to see what was going on. Looks like GRUB has finally been replaced by GRUB2, a new kernel has arrived and the boot sequence has evolved.
I normally check what is going on in Sid, so I'm not surprised when they happen in testing. Being on holiday means everything happened at the same time for me. At least things are mostly running okay now on both my testing and Sid systems.
- New version of KDE - very cool, pretty usable now
- New version of X and new nvidia drivers (well legacy ones)
- GRUB to GRUB2 transition, still gfxpayload issues but works fine
- Lots of new stuff and changes...
- I'm even trying out a new light weight browser called Arora - very nice and fast
Last Saturday we had a Hants-LUG meeting at IBM. It went very well, it's nice to have a meeting in a magnificent Auditorium where Spitfires were once built... I hope we can go back soon and often, if we can pair it with Southampton University our regular meeting venue, that would be great. For the past few years we have not had a venue to pair with Southampton, meaning we have been sharing with Surrey. It's not that I dislike Surrey, it's just not as convenient for many of the members as a meeting in Hampshire.
It's also nice to see our meeting being blogged elsewhere in very favourable terms: eightbar co uk.
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Fresh back from my summer holidays, I've had a real treat on my Debian Squeeze box. KDE 4.2 has upgraded to version 4.3.
Debian decided not to release Lenny with KDE4 and some people complained that Debian was being "old fashioned" and too conservative again. However I think time has shown that Debian was right, KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were okay for developers to play with but they were not usable for end-users.
KDE 4.2 arrived in testing a while ago and I thought it was fantastic but it still clearly wasn't ready for the "big time", with lots of visual artefacts and on my system all the fancy stuff didn't work at all with my old Nvidia FX graphics card. KDE 4.3 turned up last night - wow ! - what a change. It's faster than 4.2, it's more stable than 4.2 and lots of features now work properly. Many thanks to the KDE and Debian/KDE teams.
I owe someone a pint of decent ale or cider. Well probably quite a few people actually...
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