Wednesday, October 18, 2006

NFS issue

After some delay I'm back again. I've compiled and installed a new (2.6.19-rc2) kernel. After reboot it works correctly. Almost. One exception occured, nfs remote mounted filesystem with home dirs is still mounting read only even if it is tell to mount it read-write.

I tried to find out the reason and with some help from nfs folks I investigated, that homes and user directories are mounted from same disk partition with one substantial difference: there is a read-only protection of exported /usr and true rw access for /home dirs.

The new code sets first mount options even to the second, third etc. mountpoint if they are on the same disk part on the server. The caveat is, that this is visible only in /proc/mounts, not in /etc/mtab (what mount outputs).

This disk partition is ugly for this purpose, because subtree checking has to be enabled due to security (otherwise anybody has access to mentioned /usr part), but it's not so good option for so much changing files, which surely are in home directories.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

My family's health

I've just returned from floorball and my ankle is slightly twisted. The pain has gone, however it will hurt for a month or so. Ouch.

Despite it isn't the worst thing. My nephew caught a cold and has to be at home instead of learning in the school. He is interested in the school-life so much – his first year and he is ill, bad luck.

Nevertheless, there is even worse thing to write. My second nephew is with his mother, my sister, in the hospital. He fell down from his bike, stops breathe and nobody was able to wake him up for a short while. This had happened some times before this accident, but he had woken himself after being in syncope for a while. This simply happens to some children, they are so angry because of the fall, so they don't breathe and faint, then the brain starts to control the heart and lungs properly again. My sister had this syndrome when she was a child. Genes.

His parents decided to do something and he is connected to some devices (such as EKG, EEG et al.) and has to be there till Thursday.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Music player

Today (according to the last post) I've decided to use something other than bmpx. For some hours I've used xmms, but it sucks. No support of gnome. I remembered, that I'd read about some server/daemon music player on Jan Kasprzak's blog long long time ago. But what was the player's name? I had no clue.

I tried to go through his blog again with nothing in return. Suddenly, the idea came. Use google, dude! Yup, it gave me a good result of that what I wanted (using "site:" notation). Music Player Daemon. I grabbed a last version and made rpm packages with some .spec parts from livna orginal srpms.

Now I use it and I'm totally happy. It sits on tcp port 6600 and the protocol is text-based. Everybody might write his own client – there are many clients to choose from. I personally use mpc in text mode (and for key-bindings) and gmpc in gnome graphics. I'm going to write dbus client, but I have to wait for listen interface, that would be implemented shortly.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Bmpx is a piece of shit?

I have been using xmms, then bmp, then bmpx. xmms was the best, but is intended for old libraries (I prefer gtk+) and is not-mondern-designed (old libraries, plugins, no dbus et al). bmp was not so bad, but it's discontinued. I decided to try something new some time ago, so I chose bmp-successor: bmpx. It uses gtk2, dbus and hal libs, perfect.

Version 0.2x is poor comparing by functionality, but works. I hoped they will improve this in next releases and will continue in winamp-styled player – very bad hope. What the hell did they do in the 0.3x series? Non-stability, slowness, absolutely no options, stupid library, no shuffle, no repeat, no more dbus control (such in 0.2x versions), no winamp-style, there is just simple window with 6 tabs (library, radios, play queue); blaaah. What is the player like this for? They change all including appearance and functionality in the player per release – they may do that yet another time and they'll loose everybody, who use it for the time being.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Filesystem crash

On one of my boxes ext3 filesystem went down during updating system by yum. This appeared in log:

EXT3-fs error (device hda2): ext3_free_blocks_sb: \
bit already cleared for block 747938
Aborting journal on device hda2.
ext3_abort called.
...

with further info including – it was remounted to read-only mode and was slightly inconsistent. I reported this (a little bit freaky) to lkml and rebooted to correct the filesystem.

I tried to boot to single user mode, but fedora was (properly) faster and tried to check the root before I was able to log in. In spite of that it cannot correct it, so it gave me a shell to do-it-on-your-own. Ok, I ran fsck on root partition, it found some bad links, orphaned entries and block mismatches. Fsck was able to correct all those errors, then I checked S.M.A.R.T. output (with nothing suspicious) and rebooted.

Second phase of recovery began now. Rpm database and updated files needed to be corrected. Only 10 packages (including glibc libraries) were updated and the last one (the most affected) was gnome-vfs2. I removed all updated packages (there were both updated version and old versions) and verified if installed packages were allright, some was, some wasn't. Doesn't matter, I updated it again by yum, this time it went through successfully. Next nice experience :) – it works for now (not first, not last crash, since I use a -mm tree).

P.S. Jiri Kosina wrote on lkml list that he expereinced similar problems, so we will see if this is bug or not.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Linux is like a wigwam. No windows(TM), no gates, apache inside.

I had to repost this ;).