Does this make sense?
It is batizado season, and this year, we're also holding competitive games. I'm hard enough on myself, so I'm not competing. (I will graduate though, if you want to come Oct 2.) Instead I'm in charge ...
It is batizado season, and this year, we're also holding competitive games. I'm hard enough on myself, so I'm not competing. (I will graduate though, if you want to come Oct 2.) Instead I'm in charge ...
Next task: make a bootable USB thumb/stick/drive/thing to rescue a busted machine (In this case, little old Brahms). dkg, as ever, knows what's what and gave me great advice: Bootable USB sticks are just like bootable hard drives for modern computers. Partition them with parted, use mkfs to create a filesystem on them, use grub-install to give them a bootloader, put a kernel and an initial ramfs on them, configure the bootloader to load them, and away you go. He even offered me his filesystem rescue debirf image with the latest 686 kernel from debian unstable.
Okay: so I can play DVDs now, but they're choppy. Meanwhile, Ubuntu's System Monitor shows 2.9 GiB of available memory, though I ought to have 4. The bios shows 4. What gives?
Okay, lazyweb: Why can't I play DVDs and why, when I have installed in my computer two RAM modules of 2GiB each, does my computer have 2.9 GiB of the RAMS? Why? On the DVD end, I have installed one million things and gotten from an error in Totem ("no uri handler implemented for dvd") to Totem quietly crashing when I try to play a DVD. VLC spins the disk and then stops. /var/log/messages shows this after trying to run VLC: Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.901791] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Media region code is mismatched to logical unit region Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906376] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906386] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906397] Info fld=0x98d0 Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906402] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Media region code is mismatched to logical unit region
We've got two packages running, OpenX and Phorum, that seem to make a lot of database connections. Sometimes so many that the whole database runs out of connections. Phorum gets hammered by bots looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code (and sometimes finds them). OpenX is just greedy. Or ...
The Frankenserver must go. Today we were having a little bit of woah with the old Phorum installation. Does seem to get derailed, that one. More on that later: the net result was that Apache was choking to the point where I couldn't even ssh into the machine. I phoned Ye Olde Rackspace, who confirmed Franken's unresponsiveness and had the data center reboot it. And for a split second I was able to get in and run top, which showed me a whole lot of apache processes. More than I've ever seen before. I quit top and tried to stop apache: sudo /etc/init.d/httpd stop That failed the first time but being a persistent sort of woman I tried it again. And then I called Rackspace to find out what they were doing. We have a support contract with them, you see, and I realized that ... 1) I don't want to work at cross purposes with their esteemed technical whiz-kids, and 2) I don't want to do work someone else is already doing. I've got other things to do. Blogs to read. That was a joke, by the way. I don't read blogs at work. Ever. So I get them on the phone and whiz kid one says to me "well, I'm just going to restart apache here and see what that tells us." What restarting apache tells us. And before I could say "hang on" he did. Just in time to snarl my request for the tail of apache's error logs. It just went down hill from there, the upshot being that I mostly resolved the problem despite Rackspace. I'm done paying $350+/month for Rackspace. They aren't earning it. I've been moaning about this server for eons. When last we left off I was contemplating life without a service contract. I can see now that I don't need this service contract. Liberating revelation, that one. Elastic clouds scare me because I don't understand them. Also because I don't think I can have a static IP on a cloud. VPS I understand. So now I'm sketching my new server and workplan. Here's what I think I'm installing:
Forget for a moment that I'm trying to play like I'm more than a tech. Or recall Joanne this morning in the rain in the garden after Lucia and I collected coconut shells to mark out an area to plant her onions in, "so funny, computers seem like the last thing I'd imagine you working on. You're someone who should be working outside! I can't imagine you not working with plants!" If only she knew. So I have a PDF. PDFedit will convert it to a pretty crappy XML document. A round of non-greedy vim searches: :%s:<font .\{-}>::g :%s:</font>::g :%s: bbox=".\{-}"::g Followed by some attention to the numbers: :%s:period:. :g :%s:comma:,:g :%s:zero:0:g :%s:one:8:g :%s:two:2:g :%s:three:3:g :%s:four:4:g :%s:five:5:g :%s:six:6:g :%s:seven:7:g :%s:eight:8:g :%s:nine:9:g (and a bonus to anyone who can tell me how I totally borked my data with the series above ...) got me a really, really simple XML file of "lines" and "words".
Someone (Hsuan, to be precise, but that isn't the point really) came to me recently with a corrupted SD card. Normally, I don't do corrupted SD cards. I so do not want to be that guy that sits there and fixes what is broke. That doesn't appeal to me at all. But when there is a command line involved, or a real mystery ... I can find it hard to resist. You can see why my career as something other than a widget twiddler is not really taking off. The answer, if you like to skip the narrative (hmph) is photorec. Which actually does amazing things for all manner of data recovery. Here's what I had before me: [0 amanda@stillwell CANON_DC]$ find . -type f find: Filesystem loop detected; `./DCIM/101CANON/101CANON' has the same device number and inode as a directory which is 1 level higher in the filesystem hierarchy. So whatever, PhotoRec. Great. But people always want to know why. I do. So why? Why? David Henry, who I do not know, and yet kind of do know (the internet is sneaky that way) had a pretty good explanation, which I can't really improve on: I was long puzzled by filesystem stuff, until I realized much is done by elves!
Worth trying: sar -q for a rundown of queue lengths and load averages. Also pstree and I need to sort out what this: I reniced the gzip process with a low priority level to reduce the load it's putting on your server. I'd recommend running these scripts with a +19 ...
OpenOffice has a database app. It has come a long (long, long) way over the last few years but uff is it ever just not there yet. I do need the query browser. Things you can't do with OOo Base include add a fulltext index. Not with the ...
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