February 2012 - luv-main

No Victoria in Debian testing?
by Graeme Cross 23 Feb '12

23 Feb '12

Hi all. Has anyone done a recent install from a Debian testing/wheezy ISO and found that Victoria has disappeared? I am in the process of doing one at the moment, using the text installer, and Victoria is not listed as a timezone option (see the attached screenshot). I selected "Australia" as the country earlier in the install, and there is no scrolling option for this dialog box (ie. Victoria is not hiding at the end of a scrolling list of states & territories). This install is with the most recent build of the testing netinst.iso (from 22 Feb, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/) Has anyone else observed this or have I screwed up the install process somehow? I thought I would ask here before reporting it as a bug. Thanks Graeme

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Re: tcp load balancer
by Russell Coker 22 Feb '12

22 Feb '12

On Sat, 3 Sep 2011, Russell Sim <russell.sim(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 02, 2011 at 10:41:30AM +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote: > > Is that what haproxy is for? (I haven't used it myself, but it sounds > > close.) > > i have used haproxy, for http load balancing and my uni was using it for > LDAP load balancing, until one of the ldap servers started having > problems and haproxy was unable to detect the problems, so for a few > months ldap queries worked half of the time. So just be aware that > HAProxy might not understand there is a problem if your backends don't > behave correctly. Thanks for the suggestion, haproxy is now working well for me. I'm using it for SpamAssassin and the spamc client seems to recognise errors in the protocol. This combined with a round-robin configuration of haproxy should mean that if one of the spamd servers goes down then I get 1/4 of the incoming mail attempts deferred with a 45x code. This won't stop the system being usable but I will have to improve my monitoring to catch this. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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telstra website
by Brian May 19 Feb '12

19 Feb '12

Just trying out Telstra NextG and seeing if it resolves some of the problems I had with Three (e.g. high network charges when roaming on to Telstra). On of the first observations is that the website seems to be incompatible with Firefox, Chromium, and Android browser; in all three environments clicking the next button does nothing: https://www.my.telstra.com.au/myaccount/register Wish I could say I was surprised, but then my nose would start growing :-) Are there any workarounds? Besides get IE on a Windows box, which I assume should work? Then again, looking at the HTML, not sure how this should work under IE either, so maybe classing this as a Linux accessibility issue might be wrong? Unless there is some JavaScript that is suppose to alter this HTML to something that works. <a class="btn_blue submit" href="javascript:void(0)">Next ></a> Thanks -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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btrfs -- what happens when a checksum fails on a single disk?
by Toby Corkindale 17 Feb '12

17 Feb '12

btrfs -- if you have your data stored multiply (ie. raid mirror) then if one copy goes bad, it'll resync it from the other copy. That's all well and good. Can you explain the failure modes for when a block checksum fails when you have data on a single disk? (I gather that there are both block and extent checksums, but correct me if I'm wrong) Essentially I was wondering whether you'd lose an entire file (or extent of a file) if the checksum fails, or whether you could still access the rest of the file but with just one block missing in the event of a bad sector. Cheers, Toby

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List Issues
by Andrew McGlashan 17 Feb '12

17 Feb '12

Hmmm, Strangely this list will not give a "list copy" to those that are otherwise addressed in the to or cc headers. I am seeing every email I send come back via the list okay, but those sent to me AND the list are only arriving to me as non list copies -- in this situation I would expect two emails, but I'm only getting the non-list one. I know that Google has some "issues" with sending list copies of emails to the original sender (perhaps they have changed this). Can the list manager software that LUV uses please ALSO send list copies? I don't mind getting multiple emails and for filing purposes I want ALL emails to the list to arrive with the appropriate List-Id header. Thanks. -- Kind Regards AndrewM Andrew McGlashan Broadband Solutions now including VoIP Current Land Line No: 03 9012 2102 Mobile: 04 2574 1827 Fax: 03 9012 2178 National No: 1300 85 3804 Affinity Vision Australia Pty Ltd http://www.affinityvision.com.au http://adsl2choice.net.au In Case of Emergency -- http://www.affinityvision.com.au/ice.html

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Re: RAID-1 synchronisation
by Tim Connors 15 Feb '12

15 Feb '12

On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Daniel Pittman wrote: > > btw, when btrfs is stable/production-system-ready then the authors are > > correct - fsck won't be necessary. same as it isn't necessary on ZFS. > > they both do (or will do in the case of btrfs) continuous consistency > > checking and file-level checksumming. and the btrfs authors are right to > > focus on improving btrfs itself rather than getting too side-tracked by > > an fsck tool. > > Very much the XFS model, then. You might have an external tool that > will check or repair it, but the basic model is that the in-tree code > gets it right through everything going wrong. Just in case anyone is under the mistaken impression that ZFS is reliable and self repairing (well, I guess it is, technically), here is a status update from an Scary Devil Monastery oldtimer: Aaaaaarrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh!!!! I just lost 3 websites on my big server! Power crashed this afternoon. They were all in a ZFS file system, /z1/blogspace, but now /z1/blogspace is EMPTY! I had built them and got the blogging software running, but power failed before I could get them backed up. I wonder what else I have lost ... . (Yes, I am surprised that such an oldtimer isn't making automated backups twice a day, but he always did seem better with big-iron than these little itty bitty solaris boxen) Me, I stick with ext3/ext4 with certain "features" turned off, because they're filesystems I've never lost anything important on, unlike many others. Actually, that reminds me. This thread is hilarious - particularly Chris Mason's reply 3rd down: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/23709 People doing fsync() (and worse, the people insisting you need to use it otherwise you're a data hater) are probably making their data more fragile. xfs? fragile. ext4 without barriers? Probably just fine, thanks very much! I can't tell any difference between speed of filesystems in practice anyway. -- Tim Connors

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btrfs and per-file COW and compression
by Chris Samuel 15 Feb '12

15 Feb '12

Hi folks, IIRC some people on luv-main have had issues using VM's with btrfs due to poor performance with its COW behaviour. Now COW is something you can disable either per mount or per-file but there wasn't really a good utility to do it per-file (a patch has been sent for chattr/lsattr but not yet merged apparently). However, a program called fileflags has been posted to linux-btrfs that lets you enable/disable both COW and compression on a per-file basis: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/15737 Be interesting to know if it does help people! cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC This email may come with a PGP signature as a file. Do not panic. For more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPGP

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Trouble with a mini-pcie wireless card
by Toby Corkindale 14 Feb '12

14 Feb '12

I built a new mini PC recently, but have had some trouble with the wifi on it. (Asus E45M1-I motherboard) The motherboard has a mini-PCIe slot which contains an Atheros Azurewave wifi card. (it comes out of the factory with this card) I can't detect the wifi card at all in Ubuntu 11.10 - it doesn't even seem to show up in the results from the lspci command. I can't see anything in the EFI BIOS about enabling or disabling the wifi nor the PCIe slots. I eventually caved and installed Windows 7 and I can't seem to see the wifi card there either, even with the official drivers installed. So I'm thinking it's not a Linux issue, but I wondered if the collective wisdom here has any ideas what the problem could be? My thoughts so far are: a) The mini-PCIe slot is broken. b) The mini-PCIe wifi card is broken. c) There's some kind of hardware "disable wifi" switch hiding on the board that I can't find :/ d) There's some kind of software "Disable wifi" feature that needs to be toggled somehow, but I have no idea where to find. What I've tried: * Removing the mini-PCIe card and reinserting it. I don't have a spare half-length mini-PCIe card lying around to swap in, nor anything else to test the wifi card in, which makes it hard. :/ (They're only $10 on ebay, so if there are no good suggestions I'll just buy one and give it a shot and at least discover if the slot works.) Do you know if mini-PCIe slots are physically compatible with real PCIe slots? Unlikely, but thought I'd ask, in case I can jam the mini board into a full slot in my desktop..

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Thunderbird problem
by Peter Ross 14 Feb '12

14 Feb '12

Hi all, sometimes (infrequent) I am using Thunderbird to send e-mail folders from one user to another. At the moment it stops after a while, with this message: The connection was refused when attempting to contact live.mozillamessaging.com. What the hack?? The setup was pristine, accounts are internal ones.. the Thunderbird does not have any messaging configured (AFAIK). Why does Thunderbird want to connect to that server? How do I stop it? Thanks for answers Peter

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cron
by Tim Connors 14 Feb '12

14 Feb '12

For such a critical system component, why is cron so devilishly stupid? 1) Hour and minute are backwards. I get bitten by this all the time, particularly on days when I had to get up too early to do software patching on a few dozen servers. 2) For that matter, all the other time fields are backwards too. Must have been written by an American. In the rest of the sane world, we start with least significant and then work out way up to most significant (or the reverse). Not go backwards and forward all over the shop. 3) All the time fields are ANDed. Except day and month. So debian needs this hack to run mdadm check on first sunday of the month: 57 0 * * 0 root if [ -x /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray ] && [ $(date +\%d) -le 7 ]; then /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray --cron --all --idle --quiet; fi instead of this: 57 0 1-7 * 0 root if [ -x /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray ] ; then /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray --cron --all --idle --quiet; fi You have to go to extra effort to make it this bad. Why would you possibly want the date field to be ORed with the day of week? Was vixie on powerful drugs at the time? 4) "cron reads the crontab file(s) every minute to see whether there have been changes. Therefore, any change to its schedule will take effect within one minute." No, it reads the cron files every minute, and then applies the new schedule the next minute? Ie, there's always a minimum of a 1 minute delay to a schedule update, and up to 2 minutes. Why? Why would it not just read the new times, and if there's an entry for the current minute, act upon it instead of checking whether there was a job due the next minute to apply in the next minute? Again, this requires special kind of bodgery to get wrong. Unfortunately, this crappy behaviour is well embedded in the standard operation of cron, and can't be changed because it would break the expected broken behaviour. Can we define a new standard is-not-quite-cron? This rant brought to you by yet another "/tmp/crontab.uPh6Gi/crontab":24: bad hour errors in crontab file, can't install. Do you want to retry the same edit? (y/n)" -- Tim Connors

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