July 2012 - luv-main - example.com

Universe repository on Ubuntu
by Chandra Amarasingham 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

Hi, Does know of an official note on how software ends up in the universe repository on ubuntu. Given it's community maintained and not officially supported, is it considered safe enough for production use....safe in the sense of being free of malevolent elements. Stability is not an issue. Regards Chandra

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IOgear network attached USB hub
by Keith Bainbridge 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

G'day All, Anybody had any experience with either of these: IOGear Wireless 4-Port USB Sharing Station IOGear 4-Port USB Sharing Hub Both come with installation CD which raises concerns. Or any suggestions on similar devices? Thanks Keith Bainbridge PO Box 324 BELMONT Vic 3216 Australia +61 (0)408 522 706 keith.bainbridge.3216(a)gmail.com

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Urgent / Important: Is "Computer Science" Science?
by Donna Benjamin 25 Jul '12

25 Jul '12

Hi all, Submissions regarding the Draft Senior Science Australian Curriculum close **tomorrow**. This article in today's age made me think... http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/science-subject-comes-under-fir… Hang on - Where's computer science? Oh that's right it doesn't exist in the brave new world of the new Australian Curriculum. It's a general capability (ICT) or a "Technology" along with design, woodworking, cooking and agriculture - in a strand called "Digital Technologies" I've been to a couple of Google sponsored workshops advocating for the promotion and redevelopment of computer science in high school. #CS4HS So I have some thoughts on this. Perhaps you do too? You have less than 24 hours to make a submission with your thoughts. The draft curriculum is here: http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Info+Sheet+-+Draft+Senior +Secondary+Science+FINAL.pdf (and hopefully attached) Email submissions to Science(a)acara.edu.au Make sure to use this cover sheet http://consultation.australiancurriculum.edu.au/Static/docs/Senior% 20Secondary/Senior%20Secondary%20feedback%20cover%20sheet.docx docx ? Oh no. Ok. I will attempt to attach it converted to odt. More info here: http://consultation.australiancurriculum.edu.au/ please redistribute or agitate, as you see fit. cheers Donna -- Donna Benjamin - Executive Director Creative Contingencies - http://cc.com.au ph +61 3 9326 9985 - mob +61 418 310 414

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dev block physical block size
by Colin Fee 24 Jul '12

24 Jul '12

A colleague has asked if there is any utility, application, or command to show a disks physical block size. He's particularly interested in interrogating a drive to see if it's an Advanced Format drive i.e. with native 4096 byte sectors or 512e sectors etc. -- Colin Fee tfeccles(a)gmail.com

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dumping data from gdb
by Russell Coker 24 Jul '12

24 Jul '12

I have a multi-threaded program that has just SEGV'd. I want to extract a chunk of data from the program to run in a test program to try and reproduce the problem. Is there a way of telling gdb to dump a chunk of data to a file? The data in question is a regular C string. I tried using p fopen() but it seems that you can't do that sort of thing in a multi-threaded program. p open() fails and I can't work out why. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Increasing capacity on ZFS
by Brett Pemberton 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

Hi, I've begun testing/commissioning a new storage server at home, trying to make it expandable in the future, as 3tb drives become cheaper. I decided to give ZFS on FreeBSD a try, and this is what I'm on now, however the issues I'm having apply equally to zfsonlinux/ZFS using FUSE, so I'm hoping to grab some help here. I knew upfront that you can't add devices to a zpool, so to make this expandable, I took the approach of maxing out my case hard drive space, with the plan of simply replacing the drives with bigger capacity as they fail, or as new drives become cheap. My current system has 2 x 64GB SSDs for OS, and a ZIL (mirrored) and started with 8 x 500gb drives. A mix of PATA and SATA, which isn't ideal, but is what I had spare. Yesterday I did a replace of one of the 500gb drives with a 1.5TB drive I also had spare. The issue I've hit is that although the zpool has seen an increase in capacity, the zfs filesystem has not. Googling and IRC have been unable to help with this, so running it by LUV, considering this portion of the system is OS independent. My relevant history lines are: 2012-07-17.20:04:15 zpool create -f storage raidz ada0 ada1 ada4 ada5 ada6 ada7 ada8 ada9 2012-07-17.20:04:41 zfs create storage/tbla 2012-07-17.20:04:52 zfs set sharenfs=on storage/tbla 2012-07-17.20:04:59 zfs set atime=off storage/tbla 2012-07-17.20:05:15 zpool add -f storage log mirror/gm0s2a 2012-07-17.20:19:27 zfs sharenfs=-maproot=0:0 storage/tbla 2012-07-21.13:33:29 zpool offline storage ada8 ... reboot, replace drive ... 2012-07-21.15:20:40 zpool replace storage 5231172179341362844 ada8 2012-07-21.16:06:17 zpool set autoexpand=on storage ... ^^^ note that this was run while the resilver was in operation ... 2012-07-21.16:46:16 zpool export storage 2012-07-21.16:46:34 zpool import storage 2012-07-21.16:54:02 zpool set autoexpand=off storage 2012-07-21.16:54:07 zpool set autoexpand=on storage 2012-07-21.17:34:12 zpool scrub storage [root@swamp /usr/home/brett]# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT storage 3.62T 701G 2.94T 18% 1.00x ONLINE - Before the replace, storage was showing 3.1T size, I believe. So it jumped by 500gb, which seems about right. [root@swamp /usr/home/brett]# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT storage 609G 2.51T 50.4K /storage storage/tbla 609G 2.51T 609G /storage/tbla [root@swamp /usr/home/brett]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/mirror/gm0s1a 18G 3.1G 14G 18% / devfs 1.0k 1.0k 0B 100% /dev storage 2.5T 50k 2.5T 0% /storage storage/tbla 3.1T 609G 2.5T 19% /storage/tbla I'm also slightly confused as to why storage shows a size of 2.5T, while storage/tbla has 3.1. And clearly neither has the 3.62 which is in the zpool. Can anyone explain this to me? Note that this is still in testing phase, so I'm happy to start from scratch, destroy the FS and try again with all 500gb drives, then do the replace again, if I missed a step somehow. It's more important to me that I get the procedure correct, so that once this is production, I know what's going on. cheers, / Brett

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converting to BTRFS
by Russell Coker 22 Jul '12

22 Jul '12

I've got some filesystems I want to convert to BTRFS. I recall someone saying that BTRFS had some issue with lots of symlinks, I have a filesystem with 200G of data in 1,400,000 Inodes that's used by "cp -rl" copies of an rsync backup - would this be an issue? Also how much space should there be available for a conversion from Ext4 to BTRFS? Obviously the default of two copies of metadata gives the potential for a conversion to run out of disk space. What happens when btrfs-convert finds that it doesn't have enough disk space, can it be relied on to give a result of either an Ext4 or a BTRFS filesystem that is correct and contains all the data? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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OLPC laptop to give away
by Geoff Crompton 21 Jul '12

21 Jul '12

At the Brisbane linux conf I one an OLPC laptop in the photo competition. I haven't really done anything with it, and now that I'm moving house, I'd like to pass it on to someone who can make better use of it. Any takers? Cheers, Geoff Crompton

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Notes from "LaTeX and typesetting" talk
by Jason White 19 Jul '12

19 Jul '12

The notes and references from my talk at yesterday's Luv meeting are available at http://jasonjgw.net/latex-presentation/ and you will find a list of references at http://jasonjgw.net/latex-presentation/latex-references.html A few people asked about these after the talk, thus I am posting details here. As an additional note, if you want word-by-word diffs of revisions of a TeX document in Git, use the --word-diff option of git diff, after adding the following line to your .gitattributes file (creating that file in the top-level repository directory if required). *.tex diff=tex See the gitattributes(5) manual page and the git-diff(1) manual page for details of word diffs, including colour highlighting support.

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Re: Any USB 3G broadband usable under Linux?
by Tony Langdon 17 Jul '12

17 Jul '12

At 11:41 AM 7/16/2012, Brian May wrote: >On 15 July 2012 21:16, James Harper <james.harper(a)bendigoit.com.au> wrote: > > I'm all for Microsoft bashing, but if you are implying that > Windows doesn't support IPv6 then you are very wrong. In fact > you'll have trouble with some of their server software if you disable IPv6. > >Lots of people still use Windows XP, which doesn't have built in IPv6 >support. I believe there is an add-on that provides IPv6 support, >however this was the first attempt Microsoft made, and as a result not >recommended for serious use. Or so I have read. You can run IPv6 on XP by issuing the command: ipv6 install However, as you say, it's not a production quality stack, though it does work fine for everyday end user purposes (I've used it extensively). Configuration is not done by the control panel, you need to use special commands and/or registry tweaks. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com

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