© 1984 - 2024 Adrian Tritschler
Reading Tim Bray’s comments on disk throughput on http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/20/2008-Disk-Performance sparked my curiousity, so I installed a copy of bonnie++ …
I seem to have a semi-workable system after I started using the Feisty Fawn update of Ubuntu before it was released.
Finally got around to upgrading the memory of the system from 512M to 1.5G, there are two DDR slots in the motherboard, a single 512M DIMM already present, and the motherboard can support a maximum of 2G, A toss up between 1.5G or 2G, the former won.
1G of DDR 3200 Kingston DIMM for $129 from CPL.
Rather than use vpnc to connect to the Monash VPN, I’ve been wanting for some time to use ssh tunnels.
Following the instructions at http://lunapark6.com/?p=2916 I managed to install and configure the Beryl 3D window manager ontop of Ubuntu.
Followed a suggestion in one of the messages I saw and ran the Ubuntu update-manager with the following:
gksu "update-manager -c"
Recreated my account on DynDNS.com, for some reason the old account (that admittedly I haven’t used for a couple of years) has been deleted.
Seems I’d installed the lokkit firewall a few weeks ago. At the time I thought I’d tested it step-by-step as I implemented it, but it appears that all it was doing was writing the rules, not running them! Firewall rules took effect when I rebooted, and where blocking the vpn protocol.
Ubuntu upgrade yesterday, reboot this morning. Still had the -23 and -25 revision kernels hanging around so I removed them.
Warning: the string include-menu-defs did not occur in template file /etc/X11/twm//system.twmrc-menu
Over and over during the weekend, vpnc would either connect and then seem to hang up a little later, or wouldn’t connect. No log messages in either case, which was very irritating. Is it due to my upgrade to Ubuntu Dapper, or is it something at the server end?
Finally managed to find the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperUpgrades page on how to upgrade the ubuntu system from Breezy to Dapper online, I would have thought it would be easier to locate, but every page I saw seemed to be based on downloading a CD and installing or upgrading that way.
Seems all is not lost. After last ’s stuff-up I was moving file systems from disk partitions into LVM partitions, and scrolling past I saw enormous lists of files in mail folders. Were these the “deleted” mail I thought I’d lost? Turns out they are. I’ve got an “old” cyrus mail folder structure and a “new” one, both under /var/spool/cyrus/mail, but only one of them is being referred to by the IMAP daemon.
Scary stuff. I started out with the intention of moving from a single physical partition of / in /dev/hda1 to an LVM-based system with seperate logical volumes for /home, /var, / and swap, and a physical volume for /boot. Somewhere along the way I blew away the partition table and for a while had an unbootable system.
Learning all about Grub today in connection with administering the SuSE servers, so I decided to replace lilo with grub on my home machine. Have I the courage to reboot to see if I did it correctly?
For some reason the line to include imap in /etc/services had been removed. I guess ubuntu wants me to only use IMAPS. Added:
imap 143/tcp
To /etc/services and restarted cyrus21 and all is well again.
Checking on why something had or hadn’t happened, I realised that some of my system logs were getting very large. Looks as if logrotate hasn’t been running, and probably means that I should have paid more attention to the warning messages that cron sent me.
Two steps forward, one backwards. Typical computer upgrades.
The Debian to Ubuntu upgrade kind-of sort-of maybe mostly partly worked. I’ve been finding things that it didn’t upgrade, and things that it should have upgraded.
pon wouldn’t run, ppp_generic wasn’t loaded. ppp_generic module wouldn’t load, slhc_* symbols not found.
An X11 hang, no keyboard or mouse response, only thing left seemed to be the big red button – or the big black button on the Shuttle.
Rebooted to start 2.6.12-1-686-smp.
The tty /dev/ttyS1 defaults to being unreadable by oww. I need to fix this.
Now have oww running again. Downloaded an updated copy of oww (oww-0.81.7-1.i586.rpm), converted to DEB and installed it.
Moved the weather station from wyvern to fafnir.
At first attempt, oww won’t compile, so I’m using the binary from the old system.
Prompted by a comment at Monash, I had a quick look at /etc/vpnc.conf.
Yet again, problems restarting X after updating the machine. Yet again, had to reconfigure with sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
Nearly fully recovered from the failed experiment into Ubuntu, Debian has finally finished downloading all the packages that it wants to turn the machine back into a Debian “testing” box, and by choosing their 2.6.8-2-686-smp kernel, I’ve got my network card back.
Updates on my progress at getting fafnir converted to ubuntu:
Here we go, head first without first testing the depth! I’ve decided to try and upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu linux. All the arguments that seem to be raised all seem to apply. Debian unstable is too unstable. Debian stable is too old.
Problems with machine hanging with irq errors, and X not running. Reset results in fsck, lost files, long delays. Suspect multi-processor implementation of the kernels I’ve got.
Seem to have SASL working now, and as a result, can deliver mail directly from procmail to the Cyrus IMAP store.
Cyrus v2.1 IMAP is running, but I can’t locally deliver mail into it. Lost in a maze of RTFMs, the cyrus account can invoke cyrdeliver, but my own account cannot. Somewhere the permissions aren’t right.
Tried to get KDE to recognize my camera. Select Canon IXUS 300 on USB through the control centre, no luck, it can’t see the camera. Tried to follow some of the documentation from the gphoto site, but to no avail.
Purchased from Computers and Parts Land ABN 72088991646
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.