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avoid-fsck (for ext on LVM)
by twb＠cyber.com.au 30 Nov '12

30 Nov '12

A couple of times recently the issue of ext's periodic fscks came up. The first inspired me to write a script; in the latter I included it. At that time some silliness in LVM and udev made it too noisy to run from cron, these issues appear to be fixed in the version below. (Apologies for the new thread; ICBF looking up the original.) #!/bin/bash ## e2fsck is usually triggers after enough mounts, or enough time ## without a fsck. For always-on servers, the latter usually means ## that after an outage, you have to wait a few hours for the fscks to ## finish before normal operation resumes. This is especially ## annoying as it cannot be skipped on Ubuntu 10.04 servers. ## ## Instead we make an LVM snapshot of each ext LV, and if *that* fscks ## OK, we conclude that there were no errors and we set the snapshot's ## origin to indicate that a fsck has taken place. set -eEu set -o pipefail trap 'echo >&2 "$0: unknown error"' ERR # Silently succeed if the necessary tools aren't available, as that # strongly indicates this script is not needed on this host. { which lvs && which tune2fs; } &>/dev/null || exit 0 # When run via vixie (ISC) cron, for some reason, fd 17 is open. # LVM (stupidly) complains about this, and can't be silenced. # The workaround is to close this fd. exec 17<&- # Output of e2fsck is desirable iff e2fsck had a genuine issue. It # may be arbitrarily long, so a temporary file is more appropriate # than a simple bash variable. f="`mktemp -t avoid-fsck.XXXXXX`" trap 'rm -f "$f"' EXIT lvs --noheadings --separator , --options lv_name,vg_name,origin | while IFS="$IFS," read lv vg origin do # Skip snapshots. test -z "$origin" || continue # Skip non-ext LVs. tune2fs -l "/dev/$vg/$lv" &>/dev/null || continue # Cleanup any mess left over from a previous run. test ! -e "/dev/$vg/fsck_$lv" || >/dev/null lvremove -f "/dev/$vg/fsck_$lv" sleep 1 # wait a bit and hope udev catches up # NB: 4G should be plenty of space for the COW, since we are only # going to keep it around long enough to do a fsck. >/dev/null lvcreate --snapshot "/dev/$vg/$lv" --name "fsck_$lv" --size 4G sleep 1 # wait a bit and hope udev catches up if nice ionice -c3 e2fsck -p "/dev/$vg/fsck_$lv" >"$f" || test $? -eq 1 -o $? -eq 4 -o $? -eq 5 # Ignore "safe" statuses. then >/dev/null tune2fs -C0 -Tnow "/dev/$vg/$lv" else >&2 echo "e2fsck -p /dev/$vg/fsck_$lv failed" >&2 cat "$f" fi sleep 1 # wait a bit and hope udev catches up >/dev/null lvremove -f "/dev/$vg/fsck_$lv" done

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CloneZilla difficulties
by Andrew Greig 28 Nov '12

28 Nov '12

Hi all, I have 2 x identical Lenovo IdeaPads each 160Gb storage. I have downloaded and burned the CD iso of Clonezilla. I set up the source with a fixed IP of 192.168.0.44 and the target with 192.168.0.55 have CloneZilla running on each machine and ran the command line as root ocs-onthefly -s 192.168.0.44 -t sda from the receiving machine. The clone failed with the line "Failed to create the partition table on the target device: /dev/sda ! Program terminated !!" I have Googled for help and tried blitzing the MBR. I could try blitzing the whole target drive, ie delete the partions already present. Would that be helpful? Thanks Andrew Greig

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Limiting a Postfix smtpd
by Russell Coker 25 Nov '12

25 Nov '12

I just had a spammer take over an account which is allowed to send mail via one of my servers. I ran the lock account script but it kept on going. It seems that if a SASL authenticated user doesn't close the session then Postfix doesn't notice that the account is no longer valid and keeps allowing mail through! How can I solve this? Apart from restarting Postfix whenever I lock an account. Is there some way of limiting how many messages a smtpd process will accept before it exits? I'd like to force it to exit after processing 10 or 20 messages so that SASL authentication has to be completed again for the next 10 or 20 messages. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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best filesystem for Apple Timemachine backups
by cory seligman 24 Nov '12

24 Nov '12

Hi all, I'm setting up an ubuntu NAS box that will primarily be used an a timemachine backup server for two Macs. Following this guide: http://www.mydigitalhome.net.au/2011/10/using-ubuntu-as-a-time-machine-serv… worked on my test box, but I'm looking for advice as to which filesystem would be best to use. anyone got any helpful hints? thanks, Cory

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System start up times
by Lindsay Sprinter 23 Nov '12

23 Nov '12

Just though I would put this as a comparison, as it does not concern Gnome at all I have put it on a different thread. A comparison of startup times for various software and hardware configs in the end would probably be usefull........... Anyway......... System Xaser6 MB ASUS P6X58D Premium CPU I7 960 at 3.2ghz (not overclocked) memory 3 x 4 gig modules (cat /proc/meminfo reports MemTotal: 12461480 kB) Harddisks WD 160g cavair blue, WD 1Tb Cavair black, home drive is a 160g seagate. Kernel Linux version 2.6.39.1 custom compiled 32 bit Linux distribution Debian 6.0x 32 bit with all current updates Windomanager good old fvwm, with a somewhat modified "fvwm-dorothy" config (Note 1) Shell access in X is by mrxvt System has no external network access, ie a standalone system, Debian being configured to disable all external access's such as DNS look ups. Boot time from LILO prompt, 18 secs X system startup using startx 3 secs Note 1: The "fvwm-dorothy" config is a highly graphical config for fvwm that is quite widely variable and quite good looking and I use my own backgrounds dsplayed with qiv. One can easily change the graphics to suit ones mood. I have altered some of the functions, keyboard and mouse bindings to suit myself. Note 2: Just in case, fvwm is one of the older windowmangers and has had some bad press in more recent times as it requires a good deal of work on the text based config file, it being one of the most configurable windowmangers on the planet, both graphicly and in behaiour and operation. One can get it to do and behave in almost any way as long as one is willing to put the work into the config file. Its sort of the unix command line of the windowmanagers, not really for the average joe looking for an easy life. Lindsay

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Gnome-shell very slow on boot
by Daniel Dalton 23 Nov '12

23 Nov '12

Hi everyone, I've been experiencing a bit of an annoying problem lately, and was wondering if anyone else has ran into anything similar, and possibly found a solution. I'm running debian testing with gnome 3.4. The first time I start my GUI on a particular boot be it at boot up via gdm, invoking the gdm init script manually by hand after logging into the console or by using startx it takes an incredibly long time for the gnome-shell to load and become ready. I have auto-log in enabled and it takes about 50-60 seconds from the point I start gdm or startx until the gui is ready to use. I'm using a core I5 2.4 GHZ machine with 4 GB of ram so there is a bit of power. I presumed it should probably be quicker than this. Or is gnome-shell just really slow? I've also tried disabling different apps which I thought might be causing problems such as network-manager, but it really didn't change anything. I've also tried creating a fresh user account to see if there is any difference, but it took just as long. Finally, I looked through my syslog and /var/log/messages, but nothing particularly obvious appeared to me. So is this normal behaviour for gnome-shell? Otherwise any ideas where I should continue to investigate would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Daniel

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Geelong Open Source Meet Thurs 29th November 6pm
by Kathy Reid 22 Nov '12

22 Nov '12

Hi everyone, There's been some interest in a Geelong group meeting face to face, which is fantastic. The lovely people at the Uni have been kind enough to give us a room (without charge yay!) for the evening, so you're all warmly invited to meet, catch up and share your favourite open source and Linux news, stories and opinions. Three people have confirmed so far (thanks for confirming) so if you're coming please let me know so that beer and pizza can be specced appropriately :-) Not being a beer drinker (blasphemy I hear you cry!), your recommendations are sought. Pizza preferences or unpreferences also sought. Unfortunately no-one's volunteered to present (yet), so if anyone would like to take the floor please just sing out. It's a nice presentation space, with VGA connectors, dual projectors etc. You're welcome to bring hardware or show and tell with you (like Raspberry Pis etc), soldering kit might be pushing it, but let's see how we go! WHERE Deakin University Waterfront Room AD5.004, Central Geelong WHEN Thursday 29th November 6pm (for a 6.30pm start) till around 8pm or until we're bored WHAT Beer and pizza. Let Kathy know if you have special requirements. Presentations (hopefully) or just meeting face to face. HOW TO GET THERE This Google Map best explains how to get there. Use the Cunningham Street entrance to get to room AD5.004. https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=201841023461449781249.0004cf10bb40a532… If you can't get into the building, ring Kathy on 0418 130 636.

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Network traffic log analysis
by DanyJ 22 Nov '12

22 Nov '12

Hello LUVers I have been experiencing an increase of about 5x factor in my outgoing network traffic for a while -at least last week - I cannot explain that change in activity,configuration etc... (It does peak to much higher level at a specific time, but I have worked out why that was so.. a overgrown backup file that was being transfered daily) So I need to find out what that traffic is. What is a recommended log analysers to help me quickly here? Want it to tell me how much data is being transfered by which protocol Or any recommended procedure to identify that traffic? Any ideas please? Its a Ubuntu 10.04 server, running Apache, Postfix and related stuff (Spamassassin, Amavisd etc) (I had varnish on it, but I turned it off) Cheers Daniel.

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ARM v6 (Raspberry Pi) vs ARM v7 (BeagleBone)
by Toby Corkindale 21 Nov '12

21 Nov '12

Synopsis: ARM v6 CPUs are significantly slower than ARMv7 CPUs at the same clock speed, at least when running Debian (armhf) on them. I know it's a rather naive benchmark, but I tried running a tiny Perl program to find all the prime numbers under 100,000 on both the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone. They're both 700 MHz ARM CPUs, but the Raspberry runs on the older v6 spec CPU. Surprisingly, this seems to make a huge difference to performance. My desktop (3GHz i7) - 3.3 seconds BeagleBone (720 MHz ARMv7)- 68 seconds Raspberry Pi (700 MHz ARMv6) - 125 seconds I thought I'd try it quickly in Scala, but it seems the JVM isn't very well optimised on ARM yet :( So I tried it with just doing primes to 10,000 instead. Desktop - 0.33 s Beagle - 19 s (zero) / 34 s (jamvm) Raspberry - 58 s (jamvm) / 79 s (zero) It's curious to note that the best JVM varies between the architectures; Zero was a lot faster than JamVM on the Beagle, but it was a lot slower on Raspberry Pi. (for this naive benchmark) Does anyone know why that is, or if there's any way to get better jvm performance?

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Data exchange between Linux and iPad
by Peter Ross 20 Nov '12

20 Nov '12

Hi, my daughter has a new iPad now, it is a requirement at the college she goes. Great, that fossil does not even know what to to with a USB stick? Any workarounds? I guess I could put the data on the Linux side under a webserver's root. Other ways? Does Apple still supports Apple File Server (would be netatalk on the Linux side?) I really hate computers that are just made with $$ in the eyes, without any intention to provide a good product to the customers. Compared to the iPad, the Android based ZaTab is much friendlier to its environment. A fortnight ago I had four kids, aged 9 to 12, at home. The played using three tablets (2 ZaTabs, 1 iPad) and they did not care at all which brand it was - it looked so similar they did not notice. Regards Peter

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