Re: [gentoo-user] Bug in run-crons?

[Wols Lists]

On 13/12/2021 22:03, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:

If they are involved multiple times
with the default options I think any attempt to scrub something that
is already being scrubbed is just a no-op.  Obviously if you don't
want all that IO during the day you'll have to do something more
clever - you can instruct it to pause and resume so you could have a
couple of crontab entries and scripts to do just that.



Or, since I am the only user of that system, I could go back to my previous
way: just run the scrub manually every other month or so before I go to bed.
Because then I know that nothing will interfere with it and it won’t
interfere with anything else.


Yup. I was thinking that. The problem with scrubs et al auto-resuming or 
firing at boot is that disk i/o is then knackered for ages, and 
interferes with whatever it is you're actually trying to do :-)


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Can't get rid of preserved libs

[Wols Lists]

On 12/12/2021 05:55, Bryan Gardiner wrote:

I don't really look forward to uninstalling bzip2.  Manually
uninstalling and reinstalling freetype and harfbuzz doesn't fix the
issue.  I am thinking about deleting all of these libraries by hand
and then rebuilding the packages, or perhaps unmerging freetype and
harfbuzz with FEATURES="-preserved-libs".  I'm not sure if this will
clean up all of Portage's metadata about the libraries though.

Any insight into a 'proper' way to fix this would be appreciated.


If you read the messages, it should tell you which program is actually 
pulling freetype and harfbuzz in with the flags you don't want. Are they 
currently installed with the correct flags you want?


If they don't have the flags you want, try to force-emerge them with the 
flags you do want and portage will complain "can't do that because of 
..." That should tell you the problem program. Do an emerge -C on that 
program, re-emerge harfbuzz and freetype with the correct flags, and you 
SHOULD be home and dry ...


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] suggest SSD partitioning

[Wols Lists]

On 10/12/2021 15:16, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
If you can't do that, then it doesn't matter much whether you use a swap 
file or partition. On an SSD, both should perform about the same. On an 
HDD, swap files could run into fragmentation issues if you resize them 
or create them incorrectly. On an SSD, fragmentation doesn't have much 
of an impact. A swap file gives you the option to resize it later on 
without having to do filesystem and partition resizing, so I'd say a 
swap file sounds better.


It very much does matter whether you use a swap file or partition in 
practice. I've just been reading right now a discussion about systemd 
logging and hibernation, and how btrfs handles swap files. It sounds nasty.


If you have a swap file, linux creates an immutable file then uses 
direct disk i/o. There's a LOT of unnecessary crap there that could go 
wrong. Just avoid all that trouble and give yourself a decent swap 
partition. (And if you're running btrfs, a lot of this sounds 
experimental and dangerous ...)


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] LLVM and friends is not compatible.

[Wols Lists]

On 06/12/2021 19:26, Laurence Perkins wrote:

Genkernel is pretty...  special...  It's handy if your system is set up the way 
it expects.  If not, well, then its utility drops off quickly.

 From what you're describing, my suggestion would be to simply only use it for initramfs 
generation and do the kernel make yourself.  That shouldn't "stomp all over" 
anything except maybe a previous initramfs for the same kernel.


:-)

That's exactly what I was doing !!!

I roll my own kernel, make install quite happily shoves it in whatever 
/boot it finds.


If I tell genkernel to create an initramfs, provided I let it stomp all 
over the LIVE /boot, it works fine. As soon as I try and stop it, by 
saying "don't automount /boot", or "don't actually install the 
initramfs", all hell breaks loose.


In the past, genkernel's always worked fine for me. That's why I use it 
- dracut looks a lot more complicated ... but when genkernel throws a 
hissy fit and craps all over my system because I won't let it do what IT 
thinks is best, then it makes you want to dump the lot.


What else in gentoo has the same craptastic logic? --keep-going is the 
same - it doesn't do what it says ...


Oh well, if SourceMage works for me, then I'll probably dual-boot for a 
while and we'll see what happens ...


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] LLVM and friends is not compatible.

[Wols Lists]

On 06/12/2021 17:51, Laurence Perkins wrote:

Source Mage is a spinoff of Sourceror and is kind of the opposite of Gentoo.


Well, I read the philosophy thing where it said it wasn't comparable 
with gentoo ...


Gentoo is a source-based distro for people who want things to mostly just work 
like with the binary distros, but also want to do customizations and 
optimizations easily.


Unfortunately, I can be a bit gruff and not suffer fools gladly. Having 
had a run in with the bug-wranglers over an issue that completely 
screwed up my boot (nothing to do with gentoo, admittedly), but that 
exposed idiotic decisions / other bugs in genkernel, I think I want to 
look elsewhere.


Let's take a 2x2 truth table - do I have a boot partition, do I have 
"automount boot" switched on. Three of the four options stomp all over 
the live boot partition. The fourth fatal errors with "wah wah why won't 
you let me stomp all over your live boot partition".


The REASON I don't want it stomping all over that partition is the last 
time a distro (SUSE) did it, it completely trashed my boot leading to 
several hours debugging and messing about in the systemd rescue shell to 
get it bootable again. If anybody is going to trash my live boot, I'd 
rather it was me, not an Artificial Stupidity software manager.


The wranglers' solution was simply to "use the no-install option" - 
except that that promptly crashed with "can't find input files". Huh? 
Changing the OUTPUT destination makes the INPUT files disappear? wtf?


Source Mage is a distro for Linux From Scratch folks who are tired of maintaining their 
own package manager.  They don't change*anything*  from upstream in their packages, 
(which makes it really easy to keep "updated" on their end) but the package 
manager does have a lot of nice features for easily storing whatever patches and 
configuration changes you choose to make in order to get it running on your system.


Well, if I have to get into maintaining emerge to get it to behave 
sensibly, I might as well try somewhere else and see if it's an 
improvement.


If you've always wanted to try LFS but tracking package files and patches and 
configs and so-forth seemed daunting then it's definitely an awesome set of 
tools.

Otherwise it's kind of a lot of work...

Well, given that I've got oodles of space (just added 3TB to my mirror 
to give myself a 5TB raid-5 /home lvm, along with 1TB root/ lvm, I've 
got plenty of space to play with distros. And I was shocked - 32GB of 
DD4 was just over £100, so my new system now has 11TB of hard drive, 
32GB of RAM, and a hefty 4-core Ryzen processor :-)


And the bits from shop screw-up mean the new raid testbed I'm building 
will be a reasonably hefty system too - 4x1TB drives for hammering with 
raid, 3TB backup drive, 16GB ram - just the thing for learning to kernel 
program :-)


And seeing as I won't care about trashing it by mistake, I'll be playing 
with KVM, and all those other fancy technologies to try and run multiple 
distros stacked on top of each other :-)


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] /boot/grub and grub2 directories

[Wols Lists]

On 04/12/2021 15:53, Dale wrote:

While I'm at it.  When the grub package upgrades, should I reinstall
with grub-install to update what is on the drive or is it safe to just
leave it as is?  I seem to recall a upgrade to grub a while back.  It
just dawned on me that while the package is updated, what is installed
on the hard drive boot part with grub-install is still the original from
ages ago when I first built this rig.  Thoughts??


I don't think I've ever updated what's in the mbr. It doesn't really 
matter in that it just hands over to the real linux and root. I think it 
would be rather hard to compromise, and anyway if anything has got so 
far as to tamper with your boot, I think the game is over anyway.


Most changes of any consequence will be to the user-space code anyway, 
not the actual boot stuff.


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Switching from eudev to udev, disaster.

[Wols Lists]

On 30/11/2021 04:47, Dale wrote:

Now if I can figure out how to reset the list of /dev/sd* names that are
lurking about and inconsistent, that would be like striking gold.  Every
time I hook up my external drive, it gets a different sd* name.  It does
the same on the SD cards from my trail cameras too but I can auto mount
those.


ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid

That's a bunch of symlinks. The uuid part is guaranteed to be 
consistent, and the link points to the correct sdXn.


Try using that instead, and see if it works. It's supposed to ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel upgrade breaks virtualbox

[Wols Lists]

On 28/11/2021 07:50, Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Sun, 28 Nov 2021 00:11:57 +, Wols Lists wrote:


Strange. try: emerge virtualbox-modules

That should be rebuild after everuy kernel upgrade and that happens
normally with emerge @module-rebuild
   

"nothing to rebuild"


emerge pkg should always emerge it, whether it is installed or not. Have
you added anything to EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS to alter this behaviour?


That *could* alter it, yes. That I think *would* alter it, no.

--buildpkg --deep --newuse --oneshot --usepkg


Comment that line out, and it works! I'll need to remember that.

Thanks. But why?

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel upgrade breaks virtualbox

[Wols Lists]

On 27/11/2021 22:15, Kees wrote:

 >The docu says "emerge @module-rebuild".


 >Both of these terminate with "nothing to rebuild".


Strange. try: emerge virtualbox-modules

That should be rebuild after everuy kernel upgrade and that happens 
normally with emerge @module-rebuild



"nothing to rebuild"

It always USED to work ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel upgrade breaks virtualbox

[Wols Lists]

On 27/11/2021 13:03, Jeremy Hendricks wrote:
I’d recommend emerging Virtualbox again. It should just work with emerge 
@module-rebuild unless Virtualbox isn’t compatible with the newer 
version of kernel.


HOW !?!?

The problem is that they are already installed, so any attempt to emerge 
them fails with "nothing to emerge".


Unless I do an "emerge -C", but that of course will then break the old 
kernel (assuming I might want to go back to it ...)


Cheers,
Wol


On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 8:00 AM Wols Lists <mailto:antli...@youngman.org.uk>> wrote:


On 27/11/2021 12:41, Peter Humphrey wrote:
 > On Saturday, 27 November 2021 12:29:10 GMT Wols Lists wrote:
 >> Simple problem, after a kernel upgrade, virtualbox no longer
works. This
 >> is to be expected, of course, BUT ...
 >>
 >> How do I fix it !!!
 >>
 >> What I always did on my old system was to re-emerge the modules.
 >>
 >> The docu says "emerge @module-rebuild".
 >>
 >> Both of these terminate with "nothing to rebuild".
 >>
 >> What else can I do?
 >
 > You could try 'emerge @x11-module-rebuild'.
 >
Same result - nothing to rebuild :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel upgrade breaks virtualbox

[Wols Lists]

On 27/11/2021 12:41, Peter Humphrey wrote:

On Saturday, 27 November 2021 12:29:10 GMT Wols Lists wrote:

Simple problem, after a kernel upgrade, virtualbox no longer works. This
is to be expected, of course, BUT ...

How do I fix it !!!

What I always did on my old system was to re-emerge the modules.

The docu says "emerge @module-rebuild".

Both of these terminate with "nothing to rebuild".

What else can I do?


You could try 'emerge @x11-module-rebuild'.


Same result - nothing to rebuild :-(

Cheers,
Wol

[gentoo-user] Kernel upgrade breaks virtualbox

[Wols Lists]

Simple problem, after a kernel upgrade, virtualbox no longer works. This 
is to be expected, of course, BUT ...


How do I fix it !!!

What I always did on my old system was to re-emerge the modules.

The docu says "emerge @module-rebuild".

Both of these terminate with "nothing to rebuild".

What else can I do?

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Any decent alternative to Thunderbird?

[Wols Lists]

On 17/11/2021 11:55, Róbert Čerňanský wrote:

On Sun, 14 Nov 2021 15:39:14 -0800
Jigme Datse  wrote:


I'm using Claws Mail though I'm not sure if it is a valid answer, I do
know that it's the answer I have decided on.  Yes, Thunderbird is
still installed, but I don't have a clue when I last used it.  The
last time, was when I wanted to see if things in Thunderbird were
working better (for a specific message) than in Claws Mail.  And no,
not really. Though it may have been useful for that specific message.


+1 for Claws Mail; and it does run on Windows.

I'll have to try Claws - my make.conf includes -gtk -gnome, so Evolution 
isn't a very good fit ...


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Why does genkernel mess about with mounts, when make install doesn't?

[Wols Lists]

On 13/11/2021 00:36, Jack wrote:

On 2021.11.12 18:34, Wol wrote:
I've just been swearing blue murder because when I run "make install" 
it puts the kernel in /boot.


But when I run genkernel it mounts a completely different boot, sticks 
the initramfs in there, and then unmounts it.


Which means when grub-mkconfig comes along, there's no initramfs and 
my grub.cfg gets screwed.


WHY!!!
Check the genkernel config file carefully for relevant options.  I use 
genkernel, and it installs into the existing, mounted /boot and doesn't 
mess with it.


Thanks. I've managed to find genkernel.conf (I sort of expect to find 
gentoo config files in /???/portage, dunno why :-)


And yes, BY DEFAULT it looks for a boot partition, mounts and uses it!

I think this is the collision between someone who uses tools for 
everything (it makes it easy for them), someone who doesn't use the 
tools for anything (it's irrelevant), and someone who uses some of the 
tools and it messes them up completely. "A little knowledge is a 
dangerous thing".


Likewise genkernel assumes you're building the current kernel. I like to 
get the kernel built and booting before I eselect it into default 
status. That's screwed me over a couple of times.


The reason for this slightly odd config is that I have multiple root 
vg's over raid, so I need just the one boot directory/partition. But if 
I let a distro (any distro) mess about in there, it basically fucks up 
the boot. SUSE had a go, pointed all of my kernels at the SUSE vg, and 
forgot to tell grub about md or lvm. Whoops! Stil, it taught me a lot 
about how to use the systemd recovery console ...


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Package management, depclean and new installs

[Wols Lists]

On 05/10/2021 00:44, Peter Humphrey wrote:

On Tuesday, 5 October 2021 00:11:42 BST Neil Bothwick wrote:


When I checked it in the past

rm -fr /usr/src/linux-version
emerge -C gentoo-sources-version

was significantly faster than

emerge -C gentoo-sources-version
rm -fr /usr/src/linux-version


Yes, it would be. The first way, portage just scans the list of files and tries
to delete what isn't there; the second way it actually has to delete real
files.


I doubt that's the problem. After all, rm has to delete the files too.

I guess portage scans the files and looks up whether it can delete them 
or not. If you've deleted them already, that step no longer happens ...


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Package management, depclean and new installs

[Wols Lists]

On 04/10/2021 07:13, Miles Malone wrote:

I would strongly, STRONGLY discourage you from creating your own meta
package.  There are very few meta packages in the tree (in the scheme
of things) for very good reasons, they take one hell of a lot of
maintenance.  They're really only there for things like kde, where you
might just want a bare bones kde environment, or you might be
expecting the full-fat desktop environment with all the side packages
you'd get if you were using a distro that gave you no option out of
the box.

If you really want to group a bunch of packages into a set that gets
emerged with one command, I would do exactly that: create a custom
set.  Similar to @world, @system, @security, etc.  You can do that
quite easily, see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Package_sets .

But really there's not a lot of use cases for it, mostly if you use a
package and it's not just a dep of something (or several things) you
should just have it in your world file, *for most people's use cases*.
Going through your world file and cleaning out cruft is a part of
regular gentoo maintenance, should be done at a minimum annually imo.
Much like cleaning out distfiles and whatnot (see eclean, from
app-portage/gentoolkit.  And, indeed, pretty much every other useful
utility in gentoolkit.  Also flaggie for use-flag management.)

Yup. Emerge the packages you want, let portage take care of the rest. 
And I've recently joined the group who let emerge default to --oneshot, 
and use --select if I want to keep it ... :-)


And do learn how to use package.use. Don't clutter your make.conf with 
loads of flags you don't understand (or want), just to get packages to 
emerge. I use autounmask-write if I need to, then I DON'T let etc-update 
update some huge package.use file. I just rename the new bunch of flags 
into package.use/what-ive-just-emerged.date. That way, if I know I still 
want that program, I let the file accumulate cruft :-), and if I'm 
wondering what the hell it is or it looks outdated as heck, I just 
carefully delete them one by one, and see what happens.


One last tip for a newbie - have you already got X, harfbuzz, and 
freetype installed? If not, squirrel this info away until you need it - 
harfbuzz often won't install because freetype isn't there. But freetype 
won't install because harfbuzz isn't there! Find out what's pulling them 
both in, do an emerge -C on that, then install either harfbuzz or 
freetype with USE="-theother". Then an emerge --update should clean up 
the mess :-)


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS suggestions for home user

[Wols Lists]

On 01/10/2021 17:08, Mark Knecht wrote:

This old machine is now about 10 years old. It's a big Cooler Master
case, 6 or 8 removable drive bays, heavy. It collects dust and
sometimes the fans are quite noisy. If I was going this direction
I think I'd have to tear the whole thing down, redo the case fans at
least. If I did all that then I think I'd use it for the new machine,
but you do have a point.


Okay, get your new disk drive, stick it in your old server, put btrfs on 
it, learn to play with the backups etc. You can hoover out the inside at 
the same time, and possibly replace the fans - they might be noisy 
because the bearings are shot.


There's no reason why your backup drive has to be in a different machine 
(other than the physical safety of it being separate), so play with it 
as part of your current machine. Learn btrfs, learn rsync, learn all 
that stuff.


(Your case sounds a bit like the N300 I've just bought. I want to put a 
whole load of 1TB drives in it as a raid testbed - you might have 
noticed my name on the raid wiki :-)


The other thing, if you are interested and happy with just one disk not 
raid, look at getting one of these HOST MANAGED shingled drives, and use 
a log-structured file system. Again, I don't know anything about these 
other than what they are, but for backups it should be a good and 
reasonably cheap solution.


If you want to go down the pi route, I think you can get little cases, 
and I've got a USB thingy into which you can plug two drives. But at 
about £30-40 each, that's $100 for hardware over and above your drive. 
I'd recycle the old machine :-)


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] NAS suggestions for home user

[Wols Lists]

On 30/09/21 22:50, Mark Knecht wrote:
> I'm in the study phase on some sort of NAS backup system for my home.
> I'll be building (or buying) a new desktop/server machine in the next
> few months - my i980 machine doesn't have the right instruction set for
> running Tensorflow anymore - so I want to figure out backups before I
> put together the new machine.

Okay, your NAS box is going to be shut down most of the time? Why not
re-purpose your old box as the NAS? If it was running a lot, I'd be
concerned about the power consumption,but here it sounds okay.
> 
> I have about $400 credit at NewEgg and would like to keep my additional
> costs on the NAS down to about $100-$200. I expect the new machine to
> probably be 4TB RAID but it would be quite a while before that gets
> filled up.

If that includes buying new drives, you're pushing your luck here ... a
new "suitable for raid" 4TB drive will probably blow that budget in one hit!
> 
> What do I need to be thinking about? Do I need 8TB in the NAS box?

Ummm... I'd be inclined to buy a single 8TB drive. It's not much more
than the 4TB - I'd suggest suggest Seagate Ironwolf. The Tosh N300s
aren't bad afaik, but I've no personal experience. You could get a WD
Red Pro, but do NOT get a plain Red, and given the way they've mucked
people about I personally wouldn't get a WD.

> Are 2 or 4 bay NAS boxes generally RAID? I do backups today about once a week.
> I do not currently keep any snapshots.

2-bay will be mirrored, 4-bay is normally raid-5

> I just back up files so over time
> the backup carries a lot of stuff that I don't need anymore and I have
> to go clean it up if I run out of space.

Get that 8TB Ironwolf/N300, format it btrfs (it pains me to say that
:-), and set up your backup to do an "in place" rsync then snapshot the
volume.

That way, each backup will be an incremental, but the snapshot will give
you a full backup. Think of it like git, it will store the current
state, with diffs so you can checkout any previous state if you want.

Just MAKE SURE the drive never actually fills up - btrfs has an
appalling rep for surviving a disk full with snapshots.

If you need more space you can then think about getting a second (and
third, and fourth) 8TB drive and going to raid or just adding them to
the btrfs. Again, just remember that, at the moment, btrfs parity raid
also has a pretty appalling rap. Mirroring is fine.
> 
> The NAS would be turned off most of the time. If I need to use it I'll
> just power it up.
> 
> I've been looking at a few software solutions based on another thread
> here but so far nothing has excited me so recommendations for what makes
> sense for high reliability home backup is of great interest, especially
> if it helps me somehow in cleaning up the backups after deleting stuff
> on my main machine on purpose and therefore not needing it on the backup.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Take a read of the raid wiki -
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

In particular the overview section. My current (new) setup is ext4, over
lvm, over mirror raid, over dm-integrity, over two IronWolves. I'm
planning to add a Barracuda and go raid-5, but not without a solid
backup first !!!

Make sure you read the warnings, and the timeout mismatch section! It
talks about Barracudas, and WD Reds!

On a different topic, I don't know anything about it but some file
systems do block level de-duplication - zfs I believe for one. That way,
you can create your backups in dated directories, and the filesystem
will store each duplicated file only once, without you having to worry
apart from maybe having to trigger a manual de-duplicate once in a
while. But with 8TB that won't be often.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] How to compress lots of tarballs

[Wols Lists]

On 29/09/2021 21:58, Dale wrote:
Since the drive also uses LVM, someone mentioned using snapshots. 


Me?


Still
not real clear on those even tho I've read a bit about them.  Some of
the backup technics are confusing to me.  I get plain files, even
incremental to a extent but some of the new stuff just muddies the water.


An LVM snapshot creates a "copy on write" image. I'm just beginning to 
dig into it myself, but I agree it's a bit confusing.


I really need to just build a file server, RAID or something.  :/


Once you've got your logical volume, what I think you do is ask yourself 
how much has changed since the last backup. Then create a snapshot with 
enough space to hold that, before you do an "in place" rsync.


That updates only the stuff that has changed, moving the original data 
into the backup snapshot you've just made.


If you need to restore, you can just mount the backup, and copy stuff 
out of it.


That way, you've now got two full backups, but the old backup is 
actually just storing a diff from the new one - a bit like git actually 
only stores the latest and diffs, recreating older versions on demand.


From what I gather, you can also revert, which just merges the snapshot 
back in deleting all the new stuff.


The one worry, as far as I can tell, is that if a snapshot overflows it 
just gets dropped and lost, so sizing is crucial. Although if you're 
backing up, you may be able to over-provision, and then shrink it once 
you've done the backup.


For what I want it for - snapshotting before I run an emerge - guessing 
the size is far more important because I don't want the snapshot to be 
dropped half-way through the emerge!


Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] console scrollback (kernel 5.14)

[Wols Lists]

On 26/09/2021 22:22, Jorge Almeida wrote:

On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 6:24 PM antlists  wrote:



Hello, Wol and Dale

When you rebuild it, get a surge protector and then put a UPS behind
that ... snag is that's all extra expense :-(



Surge protectors: I googled it and mostly got bad reviews. Do they
_really_work?  What would you recommend? It probably should be
something amazon-purchasable! Availability in my country is probably
limited (and overpriced to boot, I bet).


Surge protectors are tricky. In the UK, our power supply is pretty clean 
so they're (almost) a waste of time. They should have a status on them, 
usually they're good for one shock and that's it. The big danger in many 
places is a lightning hit on overhead power lines. And if it's a storm 
you can have several hits in quick succession which will overwhelm the 
protector ...


UPS: never gave it serious thought, I had the impression there was too
much unclear stuff: for example, is it noisy (does it need a fan)? If
(when) some component needs replacement will I know it before
disaster? And does the replacement require a "qualified technician"? (
Dale's description is not very reassuring!)


Again, you need a decent unit. And they're mostly a lot cheaper than a 
computer, so if they take the hit rather than your computer you're quids 
in whatever. But even if they're a not-very-good unit, if your local 
power is crappy they should clean it up and protect your computer to 
some extent.


Note that my lightning problem happened at night with both computer
and monitor powered down (but still connected to a wall outlet through
an interrupted extension; hence the "not-so-smart" self-qualifying...)

The problem is, I'm in an area where the protection these things provide 
is pretty redundant - I'd probably be fine without them. If you need 
them, as I said the danger is they're overwhelmed right at the start and 
then your kit gets damaged along with the surge protector and UPS ...


Cheers.
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] SMR drives (WAS: cryptsetup close and device in use when it is not)

[Wols Lists]

On 31/07/21 04:14, William Kenworthy wrote:
> (seagate lists it as a 5Tb drive managed SMR)
> 
> It was sold as a USB3 4Tb desktop expansion drive, fdisk -l shows "Disk
> /dev/sde: 3.64 TiB, 4000787029504 bytes, 7814037167 sectors" and Seagate
> is calling it 5Tb - marketing!

Note that it's now official, TB is decimal and TiB is binary, so a 4TB
drive being 3.64TiB makes sense. TB is 10e9, while TiB is 2e30.

btw, you're scrubbing over USB? Are you running a raid over USB? Bad
things are likely to happen ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] cryptsetup close and device in use when it is not

[Wols Lists]

On 26/07/21 22:00, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 06:10:19PM -0500 schrieb Dale:
> 


> 
>> I've had more drives go bad when using USB enclosures than I've ever had
>> on IDE or (e)SATA.
> 
> Interesting, I can’t really confirm such a correlation from the drives I
> have lying around. And I don’t see how USB can cause damage to a drive.
> Except for physical impacts owing to the fact that USB drives are easily
> moved around.
> 
>> I've had two drives fail after years of service that were IDE or SATA.  I
>> have three drives that are bricks and all of them were in USB enclosures
>> and far young to die.

I've bought "add your own drive" USB enclosures, and ime they kill
drives. The big one killed a 3.5" drive dead, and the little one stunned
a 2.5" (as in, it no longer worked in the enclosure, I managed to revive
it ...)

I've never had any internal drives die on me (although I have rescued
other peoples' dead drives).
> 
> Perhaps they became too hot during operation. Enclosures don’t usually
> account for thermals. Didn’t you mention you lived in a hot area?
> 
>> I paid more for eSATA external enclosures and have had no
>> problems with drives going dead yet.  All of them have far surpassed the
>> drives in the USB enclosures.

I've now bought a dual USB/SATA chassis you can hot-plug the drives
into. I haven't used that enough to form opinions on its reliability.
> 


> 
>> I think my drives are either Seagate or WD.  I tend to stick with those
>> two, unless it is a really awesome deal.
> 
> Yea. First the SMR fiasco became public and then there was some other PR
> stunt they did that I can’t remember right now, and I said “I can’t buy WD
> anymore”. But there is no real alternative these days. And CMR drives are
> becoming ever rarer, especially in the 2.5″ realm. Except for one single
> seagate model, there isn’t even a bare SATA drive above 2 TB available on
> the market! Everything above that size is external USB stuff. And those
> disks don’t come with standard SATA connectors anymore, but have the USB
> socket soldered onto their PCB.
> 
Are you talking 2.5" drives here? There are plenty of 3.5" large CMR
drives. But as far as I can tell there are effectively only three drive
manufacturers left - Seagate, WD and Toshiba.

The SMR stunt was a real cock-up as far as raid was concerned - they
moved their WD Red "ideal for raid and NAS" drives over to SMR and
promptly started killing raid arrays left right and centre as people
replaced drives ... you now need Red Pro so the advice for raid is just
"Avoid WD".

>From what I can make out with Seagate, the old Barracuda line is pretty
much all CMR, they had just started making some of them SMR when the
brown stuff hit the rotating blades. So now it seems pretty clear, they
renamed the SMR drives BarraCuda (note the *slight* change), and they
still make CMR drives as FireCuda. Toshiba "I know nuttin'".

Cheers,
Wol

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [SOLVED] Re: [gentoo-user] Is there a way to misconfigure USB ports in the kernel?

[Wols Lists]

On 29/07/21 10:28, Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:
> I just directly formatted one of my two Philips 128G USB 3.0 sticks with
> "mkntfs"  and the write performance  without VeraCrypt  did not improve.
> Further searching  the web  I found that vendors  were rarely specifying
> the writing speeds of  their USB sticks at all,  and if they did,  there
> was a tendency to exaggerate.  See for instance

Could this be the 512B / 4K sector size problem?

If performance is horrible, it could well be a stick / partition
mismatch. I never investigated, but if the stick is faking a 512B sector
size, so the partition is using 4K blocks aligned on sector 1, it will
kill write speed, and in time will kill the stick, too!

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] --depclean wants to remove openrc. Yikes!

[Wols Lists]

On 25/07/21 14:49, Dale wrote:
> The problem here is that a user installed a package outside of
> emerge/portage's knowledge.

No that does *NOT* appear to be the problem.

The problem is that the user installed - *using* *portage* - a package
that satisfied a critical system dependency. Except that they did not
intend for it to satisfy that dependency!

If they HAD installed it outside of portage, they wouldn't have this
problem.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] --depclean wants to remove openrc. Yikes!

[Wols Lists]

On 25/07/21 12:47, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> They are, @system is a set of packages and nothing it it will be
>> > depcleaned. However, openrc is not part of @system, the virtual is.

> Ah, that's it.  So we have critical system packages which aren't part of
> @system.  I think openrc is a critical system package.
> 
Well, it's not installed on my new system. I doubt it's installed on any
new-ish gentoo-gnome systems. So openrc itself can't be critical.

It may be critical for *your* system ... :-)

Let's rephrase it - "openrc is one of the (optional) packages that
satisfied a critical dependency". Your problem is caused because you
have explicitly installed an alternate package that satisfies the same
critical dependency.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] --depclean wants to remove openrc. Yikes!

[Wols Lists]

On 24/07/21 22:09, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> I'm actually using s/qmail, tarball direct from its maintainer, since
> there's no ebuild for it.  Originally, I had daemontools from the same
> place, until I discovered there was an ebuild for it.

THAT LOOKS LIKE YOUR PROBLEM.

If daemontools has been pulled in because it's explicitly named in
world, then emerge will (quite reasonably) assume that openrc (which is
an implied dependency) can be dispensed with.

In other words, if one member of a virtual package is explicitly
installed, all the other members can be dispensed with. Changing this is
likely to cause breakage all over the place!!!

Okay, it's a nasty surprise to discover that installing a package with
multiple uses can make the system assume you're using it for things
you're not, but I think the only *workable* fix is, as others have said,
to add openrc to the world set.

You've explicitly pulled in a boot manager package. You can't expect
portage to keep a bunch of implicit package managers (systemd, sysV,
openrc etc) lying around when you haven't asked for them. I've installed
postfix as my mailer - I don't want exim, sendmail, etc etc lying around
"just in case".

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] [FIXED] New install - Wayland and graphical login

[Wols Lists]

On 28/06/21 20:23, antlists wrote:
> On 26/06/2021 13:00, Michael wrote:
>> On Saturday, 26 June 2021 11:50:01 BST antlists wrote:
>>
>>> I just want a working systemd/wayland desktop system. So basically, a
>>> full-weight normal desktop.
>> [snip ...]
>>
>>> I've got this one selected, /desktop/plasma/systemd
>>
>> Select default/linux/amd64/17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd (stable).
>>
>> Then update @world.  You should be good to go as long as video drivers
>> and
>> firmware are in place, but if X11 is not working this could be an area
>> meriting further investigation.
>>
> Okay, ...
> 
> One new kernel later (along with some grub debugging :-), world updated,
> ...
> 
> X11 still isn't working - first it complained it couldn't find twm, so I
> emerged that, now startx just runs and exits, and the log doesn't seem
> to show anything wrong ...
> 
> Wayland is interesting ... if I try to startplasma-wayland, it comes up
> with the starting plasma stuff, and there's a mouse cursor, but nothing
> except a black screen and the cursor. When I kill it from a root tty,
> there's an error
> 
> Failed to create wl_display (No such file or directory)
> 
> which a google tells me I haven't got a compositor ...
> 
> I also get further errors, but they're probably a consequence -
> 
> Could not load the Qt platform plugin "Wayland" in "" even though it was
> found
> 
> and the same error for xcb.
> 
So simple. I was missing "emerge plasma-meta".

This is where it would be nice to have something like the handbook, or a
chapter in the handbook, on bringing up a working graphical environment.
Now to get something like sddm working :-)

(Plus updating my SUSE version to 15.3, re-organising my hardware, blah
blah blah :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] New install - Wayland and graphical login

[Wols Lists]

On 21/06/21 16:17, Michael wrote:
> Have you tried using a Display Manager?  Some of my systems won't work with 
> Wayland, but I haven't spent time to find out why all I get with them is a 
> black screen.
> 
> Anyway, from a VT you'd run something like:
> 
> XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland

Okay, we're slowly moving forward ...

My first attempt got the error "kwin-plasma won't run as root" or
somesuch. Created a new user for me, and promptly got a black screen!

As I said earlier, X currently won't run. I've got a Asus EAH4350, and
am loading the Radeon driver. When I looked at the X log it was clearly
loading the driver, which failed with something like "cannot find
/dev/card1". If that gives anyone any clues where to point me that's
great, or I'll transfer the logs to this machine and post them.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] New install - Wayland and graphical login

[Wols Lists]

On 26/06/21 00:51, Michael wrote:
> On Friday, 25 June 2021 20:15:22 BST antlists wrote:
>> On 25/06/2021 09:46, Michael wrote:
>>> On Friday, 25 June 2021 08:50:32 BST antlists wrote:
>>>> On 23/06/2021 10:11, jdm wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, 21 Jun 2021 16:17:41 +0100
>>>>>
>>>>> Michael  wrote:
>>>>>> On Monday, 21 June 2021 17:27:31 BST Wols Lists wrote:
>>>>>>> What happens when you get to the end of the handbook?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I want to get a working Wayland setup with a (multi-user) graphical
>>>>>>> login. When I set my old system up ($DEITY knows how long ago) I
>>>>>>> seem to remember a page on setting up X, and all sorts of stuff.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Now, you seem to get dumped at working tty1 prompt, and then the
>>>>>>> *helpful* documentation JUST STOPS. It doesn't even point you at
>>>>>>> anything! (Yes it points you at the portage page about how to
>>>>>>> maintain your system, but that isn't much use if you can't DO
>>>>>>> anything with the system...)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I've found the page on Wayland, but it just says "set this use flag
>>>>>>> and install two packages".
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Where's the documentation that tells me what I need, and how to set
>>>>>>> it up, please ...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>>> Wol
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Have you tried using a Display Manager?  Some of my systems won't
>>>>>> work with Wayland, but I haven't spent time to find out why all I get
>>>>>> with them is a black screen.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Anyway, from a VT you'd run something like:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland
>>>>>>
>>>>>> or
>>>>>>
>>>>>> XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session
>>>>>
>>>>> There is a wayland greeter which uses greetd and gtkgreet which may
>>>>> be worth looking at and there is a gentoo wiki which goes a long with
>>>>> it. It works with wayfire which is a nice wayland window manager and is
>>>>> very reliable.
>>>>>
>>>>> Also look at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Wayland_Desktop_Landscape
>>>>
>>>> Thanks, but I'm none the wiser ... the thing is, for X the instructions
>>>> are simple - "install xorg, run startx".
>>>>
>>>> Okay, I've done that and got errors I need to solve, but with Wayland I
>>>> just don't have a clue. I don't know what I need, I don't know how to
>>>> start it, all I've got is a pile of bits in a box, and I don't know what
>>>> to do with them.
>>>>
>>>> Everything I find is like a meccano set - there's loads of bits and
>>>> pieces, but no instructions, and I don't have a clue how they fit
>>>> together. Where's the recipe that says "do this this and this and you
>>>> should have a gui"?
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Wol
>>>>
>>>  From what I recall as long as you set USE="wayland" globally and
>>>  re-emerge
>>>
>>> world with '--changed-use' you should able to launch your dekstop in
>>> wayland, rather than Xserver.
>>>
>>> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Wayland
>>>
>>> There is a caveat, to make things simple: your desktop environment should
>>> have full support for wayland compositing - e.g. Plasma and Gnome come
>>> ready baked with their own compositor and will run in Wayland.  Window
>>> managers which do not possess a compositor will require one installed
>>> separately, as noted in jdm's post, but then we're getting into a box
>>> with a pile of bits in it.
>>>
>>> To launch wayland you can either install a Display Manager and select to
>>> start wayland from its GUI options, instead of X11, or you can run the
>>> stanzas I provided above.
>>
>> Bear in mind my profile is desktop/plasma/systemd ...
>>
>> This is very informative, but it blows up on me ... I've checked that
>> wayland is in my use flags so that should all be okay ...
>>
>> # XDG_SESSION_TYPE=

[gentoo-user] New install - Wayland and graphical login

[Wols Lists]

What happens when you get to the end of the handbook?

I want to get a working Wayland setup with a (multi-user) graphical
login. When I set my old system up ($DEITY knows how long ago) I seem to
remember a page on setting up X, and all sorts of stuff.

Now, you seem to get dumped at working tty1 prompt, and then the
*helpful* documentation JUST STOPS. It doesn't even point you at
anything! (Yes it points you at the portage page about how to maintain
your system, but that isn't much use if you can't DO anything with the
system...)

I've found the page on Wayland, but it just says "set this use flag and
install two packages".

Where's the documentation that tells me what I need, and how to set it
up, please ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [SOLVED] [gentoo-user] New install - root is mounted read-only

[Wols Lists]

On 18/06/21 10:31, Adam Carter wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 7:15 PM Wols Lists  <mailto:antli...@youngman.org.uk>> wrote:
> 
> I've started tackling my new build again, and when it boots root is
> read-only. Hopefully I've just missed something stupid, but how to I get
> it to transition read-write?
> 
> 
> Weird - here's my fstab and dmesg entries if you want to compare;
> # 
> /dev/nvme0n1p1 /boot vfat noauto 1 2
> /dev/nvme0n1p2 / ext4 noatime 0 1
> 
I hadn't updated fstab - there weren't any entries in it.

As soon as I added the root file system, it remounted fine and it all
works. Now to get Wayland working ... :-) (and write a custom systemd to
start dm-integrity and make my home partition appear ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Python-3.9 and emerge problems

[Wols Lists]

On 18/06/21 10:46, Jacques Montier wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> This morning :
> 
> #emerge --sync
> #emerge --oneshot sys-apps/portage
> #emerge -auvDN --with-bdeps=y --keep-going world

You can't try just updating python? When I tried to emerge portage it
blew up with loads of stuff about 3.8 and 3.9, so I just did an "emerge
-uDN python" and everything started working (well, emerge at least ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol
> 
> I get these errors :
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/python-exec/python3.9/emerge", line 51, in 
> retval = emerge_main()
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/main.py", line 1319, in
> emerge_main
> return run_action(emerge_config)
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/actions.py", line 3392,
> in run_action
> retval = action_build(emerge_config, spinner=spinner)
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/actions.py", line 354,
> in action_build
> success, mydepgraph, favorites = backtrack_depgraph(
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/depgraph.py", line
> 10005, in backtrack_depgraph
> return _backtrack_depgraph(settings, trees, myopts, myparams,
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/depgraph.py", line
> 10043, in _backtrack_depgraph
> success, favorites = mydepgraph.select_files(myfiles)
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/depgraph.py", line
> 4055, in select_files
> return self._select_files(args)
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/_emerge/depgraph.py", line
> 4189, in _select_files
> set_atoms = root_config.setconfig.getSetAtoms(s)
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/__init__.py",
> line 271, in getSetAtoms
> myatoms.update(self.getSetAtoms(s,
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/__init__.py",
> line 271, in getSetAtoms
> myatoms.update(self.getSetAtoms(s,
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/__init__.py",
> line 260, in getSetAtoms
> myatoms = myset.getAtoms()
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/base.py", line
> 58, in getAtoms
> self._load()
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/base.py", line
> 53, in _load
> self.load()
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/dbapi.py", line
> 111, in load
> self._setAtoms(self.mapPathsToAtoms(self._files,
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/portage/_sets/dbapi.py", line
> 83, in mapPathsToAtoms
> for p in exclude_paths:
> TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable
> 
> And i can't do anything else...
> 
> I see that python-3.8 has gone away
> # eselect python list
> Available Python interpreters, in order of preference:
>   [1]   python3.9
> 
> emerge --info file attached
> 
> I don't really know what to do.
> Any idea ?
> 
> Thanks a lot in advance,
> 
> Regards,
> 
> /--/
> /Jacques/

[gentoo-user] New install - root is mounted read-only

[Wols Lists]

I've started tackling my new build again, and when it boots root is
read-only. Hopefully I've just missed something stupid, but how to I get
it to transition read-write?

System is grub, systemd, and root is an lv ...

Do I need to do anything special with the initrd? Manually remounting
fixes it fine as far as I can tell.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo alternatives

[Wols Lists]

On 07/06/21 14:11, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 11:25:55 +0200, n952162 wrote:
> 
>>> You could also look at using distcc if you have more than one machine
>>> to spread the load.
>>>
>>>  
>>
>> Ah, that's also interesting  ... that's like an alternative to a local
>> binary server (which I'm currently doing) - the compilations are
>> distributed on all nodes in the network - and then, presumably are also
>> available to all nodes?  ...
> 
> The compilation is distributed but the result is only available to the
> host running emerge. However, if you set FEATURES=buildpkg and set
> $PKGDIR to a shared directory, you could use the same binaries on other
> systems, provided they are set up the same.
> 
> 
That's roughly what I did - with two systems, they were set up to build
compatible packages, and store all the gentoo stuff on shared drives. So
depending on which one I rebuilt when, they often upgraded from binary
packages built by the other machine.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [SOLVED] [gentoo-user] Less available memory than installed

[Wols Lists]

On 03/06/21 21:20, Toldi Balázs wrote:
> I tried booting from Minimal install disk. It had the same problem.
> 
> Then I tried pulling the two ram sticks out and put them back. It seems
> like this fixed my issue (Although I don't really know what caused it in
> the first place).
> 
Could it be that the 7 has a higher clock speed than the 5? Maybe one
stick was badly seated (seems like it) and something like that could
easily cause it to "disappear".

> Thanks for everyone's suggestions :)
> 
Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Less available memory than installed

[Wols Lists]

On 03/06/21 18:16, Toldi Balázs wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> In my current PC I have 16 GB of RAM installed. It worked fine until
> today, when I upgraded my CPU from a Ryzen 5 1500X to a Ryzen 7 2700.
> The system boots up just fine, but when I use the free command the total
> memory is only 8 GB. When I looked into the BIOS, it showed me the
> correct amount. What should I do?

What does the mobo manual say? Are your memory boards in the correct
banks? It could be the MMU in the Ryzen 7 insists on banks 1 & 2 being
filled before 3 & 4 while the 5 isn't so fussy.

I don't know about this, not having this sort of problem before, but I
do know from building my own systems that the memory boards need to be
paired up correctly, however you define "correct" ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Dual booting with Windows 10

[Wols Lists]

On 25/05/21 20:02, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 May 2021 17:43:00 BST antlists wrote:
>> On 25/05/2021 16:23, Peter Humphrey wrote:
>>> 4.  I have the existing ESP mounted on /boot. It belongs to Windows and
>>> cannot be enlarged beyond 100MB.
>>
>> I don't know how this works, but I installed Windows 10 and SUSE
>> dual-boot. SUSE installed a second 500MB ESP, and it works. Somehow the
>> system must be able to link the two together.
> 
> Oo-er! What, on the same drive?
> 
There's only one drive ...

Cheers.
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] sysrescue+new asus mobo+secure boot=0

[Wols Lists]

On 12/05/21 13:43, John Blinka wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 8:57 PM Mike Kaliman  > wrote:
> 
> I have an Asus TUF Gaming X570 and have the secure boot OS type as
> "Other OS". I've been using rEFInd to dual boot with Windows.
> 
> 
> So, this suggests that “Other OS” was sufficient to allow you to boot
> some kind of Linux distro, which you then used to install Gentoo.  I
> take that as proof of concept that what I’ve tried *ought* to work.
> 
So what I guess *might* be happening is that there is a signed
boot-loader on the "other OS" on CD, but because the gentoo boot loader
is not signed, that's why it's not working ...

So somehow you need to get your "other linux" booted again, get back
into gentoo, and install a signed binary boot loader. Pain in the Arse!!!

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] I am thinking of buying Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB with 7 or 10 inch touch screen display in June 2021

[Wols Lists]

On 09/05/21 09:29, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
> Finally, does your Linux distribution support Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8
> GB? Can I do 4K Ultra HD video editing on the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8
> GB? Like adding watermarks, and cutting away unwanted 4K scenes. Is
> there a good 4K video editing software for Linux?

Actually, for video editing, I would at least look at buying a cheaper
PC, and a couple of high-end graphics cards.

Make sure that the software you choose (including linux) can off-load
video operations to the graphics cards, they will provide much better
"bang for your buck" than ram and cpu, in that arena at least ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Rusty problems

[Wols Lists]

On 27/04/21 23:00, Michael wrote:
> There's three options, I can think of:
> 
> 1. Use dev-lang/rust-bin, as Matt suggested above.
> 
> 2. Buy more RAM, or use a surrogate PC with more RAM to cross-compile it.
> 
> 3. Use a partition with enough space on it to bind mount /var/tmp/portage, 
> for 
> this package only.
> 
> I use the 3rd option, but I'm wondering if option 1 may be the smartest move 
> for my needs.

4. Add gazillibytes of swap. With a maximum of 16GB on my mobo, my two
disks each have a 32GB swap partition so that's 80GB of "ram" available
to my system. My /var/tmp/portage tmpfs is 30GB.

So obviously I use option 4 :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Network switch - LED will not turn ON

[Wols Lists]

On 26/04/21 22:53, the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
> If they cable is the problem the LED port on the 70ft long cable on the 
> switch would be orange "not green"; correct me anybody if I'm wrong.

I guess it depends what's wrong with the cable. And what the green light
is testing for.

There'#s a reason it's called "twisted pair" - that reduces interference
from all the wires stuffed close together. If it was badly connected
when it was made, or the cable's taken a hammering, or or or, you might
be getting a green light because the router says "the circuit is okay",
but poor data transmission because a bad quality cable is suffering from
excessive cross-talk.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Looking for other Seamonkey users

[Wols Lists]

On 06/04/21 05:19, Dale wrote:
> Another question, can I just copy my current emails over and "import"
> them?  I think Seamonkey uses mbox type setup.  I know I could with
> Thunderbird but it was a bit fussy.  It did work tho. It also made it
> easier to switch back.

Consider setting up a local imap server. Do all email clients do imap
nowadays?

I use thunderbird, and since fetchmail broke, I just use rules to pull
everything down from the net, sort it, and copy it to local folders on
my imap server.

You could then use mutt, or neomutt, or pine, or alpine, or whatever, to
read (most of) your mail. And any html garbage they couldn't handle, you
could use thunderbird or seamonkey or whatever.

No need to move mail between different clients. And as for moving your
current stuff over, you just move it from Seamonkey's local store to the
imap server and it'll appear for all the other clients.

Because I move around between home computers, having my mail like this
exposed on an imap server is brilliant ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Why do we add the local host name to the 127.0.0.1 / ::1 entry in the /etc/hosts file?

[Wols Lists]

On 10/03/21 18:37, Grant Taylor wrote:
> ACK
> 
> By default, Kerberos includes IP restrictions in tickets.  It chooses
> the IP based on what the system returns.  So if the system returns
> 127.0.0.1 (or ::1) for the hostname, any tickets that use that IP will
> be non-viable / useless anywhere but localhost.

Could it be (I don't use Kerberos) this tricks Kerberos into associating
127.0.0.1 with your FQDN, so it works for the first person to request
it, and then breaks for everyone else?

Also, bear in mind I think in certain setups /etc/hosts is redundant.
Don't you specify somewhere a list of services to use to look up
computer names, and if /etc/hosts is missing/disabled in that list, it
gets ignored?

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Saving an image as black and white

[Wols Lists]

On 01/03/21 13:48, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 11:50:35 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:
> 
>> I've got a bunch of scans, let's assume they're text documents. And
>> they're rather big ... I want to email them.
>>
>> How on earth do I convert them to TRUE b documents? At the moment they
>> are jpegs that weigh in at 3MB, and I guess they're using about 5 bytes
>> to store all the colour, luminance, whatever, per pixel. But actually,
>> there's only ONE BIT of information there - whether that pixel is black
>> or white.
>>
>> I'm using imagemagick, but so far all my attempts to strip out the
>> surplus information have resulted in INcreasing the file size ???
>>
>> So basically, how do I save an image as "one bit per pixel" like you'd
>> think you'd send to a B printer?
> 
> $ convert input.jpg -threshold 50% output.png
> 
> should do it, you may need to play with the threshold setting. The file
> command reports the output file as being "1-bit grayscale".
> 
> You can also use -monochrome but that will produce a dithered image,
> that's probably not what you want judging by your description.
> 
> 
FINALLY!

Thanks, that worked! Okay, I also adjusted the dpi because the original
scan was 600 and I've reduced it to 300, but this has reduced the file
size from 3MB to 180KB.

Dunno why, but everything I was trying was INcreasing the file size :-(

And the png does make a massive difference - the same command with jpg
output is 1.7MB - so why is my scanner chucking out 800KB jpegs if I set
it correctly?

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] Saving an image as black and white

[Wols Lists]

On 01/03/21 12:11, (Nuno Silva) wrote:
> On 2021-03-01, Wols Lists wrote:
> 
>> I've got a bunch of scans, let's assume they're text documents. And
>> they're rather big ... I want to email them.
>>
>> How on earth do I convert them to TRUE b documents? At the moment they
>> are jpegs that weigh in at 3MB, and I guess they're using about 5 bytes
>> to store all the colour, luminance, whatever, per pixel. But actually,
>> there's only ONE BIT of information there - whether that pixel is black
>> or white.
>>
>> I'm using imagemagick, but so far all my attempts to strip out the
>> surplus information have resulted in INcreasing the file size ???
>>
>> So basically, how do I save an image as "one bit per pixel" like you'd
>> think you'd send to a B printer?
>>
>> Even at 300dpi, I make that 300*300/8 ~= 10KB/in^2 or 800KB of
>> uncompressed info for a page of A4, not 3MB.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Wol
> 
> Somebody else might have a better suggestion, or perhaps a better
> understanding of the JPEG format and of what needs to be tuned, but, for
> example:
> 
> convert origin.jpg -threshold 70% -monochrome result.jpg
> 
> (And adjust the "-threshold percent" if needed. It might be that you
> don't need thresholding at all, but if you do, it apparently must go
> before "-monochrome".)
> 
> (Depending on the receiving end, you could also explore other
> formats. Here, if the scanned document can be stored in monochrome, I
> usually use djvu.)
> 
Thanks but no, I've already tried that. It makes matters worse!

I've messed about with the scanner, so it is now creating 800KB images,
but I don't want to rescan everything I've done.

The problem is that it is clearly saving the images as greyscale, not as
black And when I search for help, what I want is swamped by all
the false positives for greyscale.

Oh - and for Nuno - sorry tesseract is no use, they are NOT text. That's
why I used the word "assume" - to make it clear that I want a
1-bit/pixel palette, not a 5-byte/pixel greyscale.

Cheers,
Wol

[gentoo-user] [OT] Saving an image as black and white

[Wols Lists]

I've got a bunch of scans, let's assume they're text documents. And
they're rather big ... I want to email them.

How on earth do I convert them to TRUE b documents? At the moment they
are jpegs that weigh in at 3MB, and I guess they're using about 5 bytes
to store all the colour, luminance, whatever, per pixel. But actually,
there's only ONE BIT of information there - whether that pixel is black
or white.

I'm using imagemagick, but so far all my attempts to strip out the
surplus information have resulted in INcreasing the file size ???

So basically, how do I save an image as "one bit per pixel" like you'd
think you'd send to a B printer?

Even at 300dpi, I make that 300*300/8 ~= 10KB/in^2 or 800KB of
uncompressed info for a page of A4, not 3MB.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] What is the best way forward?

[Wols Lists]

On 25/02/21 08:45, hitachi303 wrote:
> Am 25.02.2021 um 02:43 schrieb Grant Taylor:
>> I need to update a system that hasn't been updated in 337 days (March
>> 24th 2020.  --  Life has been ... trying.
>>
>> What is the best way forward?
>>
>> It seems as if there have been a lot of changes in the interim; glibc,
>> Python 2.7 being deprecated, default Python going to 3.7(?), other
>> breaking changes
>>
>> Is there a way that I can sync portage to something from April, May,
>> or even June of 2020, do a full update (including "-DUNe @world")?
>> Iterating through multiple rounds to get current?
>>
>> Any help would be appreciated.
>>
> 
> 
> 
> I found it to be helpful to de-install as many programs as possible
> before starting the update and the first emerge --sync. This reduces the
> amount of conflicts by a considerable amount. Stuff like libreoffice or
> thunderbird and so on and all of their dependencies. Everything your
> system does not need to run but what you need to be productive when you
> use your system. I use -av --depclean for this.
> 
> Also there is something in the gentoo wiki about upgrading old or too
> old systems.
> 
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Upgrading_Gentoo#Upgrading_from_older_systems
> 
I'd do something a bit like that. The trick is to do the ABSOLUTE
MINIMUM each step.

Can you "emerge portage"? Given the elephant in the room that is all the
python changes, if that works you're probably 90% of the way there.

Do you need to update the system profile? Update it to a very basic
profile and "emerge @system". NO --deep, NO --new-use, nothing like that.

If portage says it can update some things but not others, then tell it
to update what it can. Normally I'd "emerge -C" any blockers, but with a
minimal system that's probably not wise.

Once that's done, select your real profile that you want, and again do a
basic "emerge @system". Followed by "emerge @world".

Now do your full-blown "emerge --deep --new-use", depclean, new kernel,
all that sort of stuff.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] VBoxClient --clipboard seems to be broken with a recent update [ probably RESOLVED ]

[Wols Lists]

On 08/02/21 21:39, n952162 wrote:
> On 2/8/21 9:17 PM, n952162 wrote:
>> VBoxClient --clipboard seems to be broken with a recent update
>>
>> You can start it without error but it just goes away.  The last thing in
>> the strace is a clone.
>>
>> Anybody else seen this problem or know of a fix?
>>
>> VBoxClient has behaved like this before, if memory serves. Either I've
>> just forgotten what the problem was, or something new has popped up.
>>
>>
> 
> I just saw that my virtualbox-modules emerge failed.
> 
> Probably related to this:
> 
> $ uname -a
> Linux txm0 *4.19.72-gentoo* #7 SMP Tue Jun 9 19:51:52 CEST 2020 x86_64
> GNU/Linux
> 
> $ lt  /usr/src/
> total 16
> drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Feb  3 02:14 linux-5.4.92-gentoo
> drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Dec 30 19:17 linux-5.4.80-gentoo-r1
> drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Dec 12 21:55 linux-4.19.72-gentoo
> drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Oct 20 23:50 linux-5.4.72-gentoo
> lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   20 Nov  8  2019 linux -> linux-*4.19.72-gentoo*
> 
> I'm not sure why I have all these newer versions of the kernel ...
> 
> What should I be at?  For an amd64...
> 
> Oh man...
> 
> $ eselect kernel list
> Available kernel symlink targets:
>   [1]   linux-5.4.72-gentoo
>   [2]   linux-5.4.80-gentoo-r1
>   [3]   linux-5.4.92-gentoo
> 
> Was there an adminstrative step that I missed there?
> 
> 
When you do a sync, it pulls down the latest version of kernel source. I
don't do it all the time, but you really ought to upgrade to 5.4.92.

What I do (can't remember exactly because my live system hasn't been
upgraded since forever :-) is copy .config from the old kernel to the
new, and then is it "make oldconfig"? Either way, it configures the new
kernel using the old config file so all my local-specific stuff is kept.

Then just set it up in grub/whatever, make sure it works, and switch
over to it.

ALWAYS make sure your kernel is up-to-date before a depclean, because
this is what happens ...

(I *THINK* your old config will still be left lying around - as a
locally modified file it shouldn't be cleaned up ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on rpi

[Wols Lists]

On 09/02/21 11:29, Andrew Lowe wrote:
> On 8/2/21 11:36 pm, Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> Hello list,
>>
>> I have a Pi 400, on which I'd like to install Gentoo if I can. I've
>> tried a
>> few approaches so far, but each one has fallen foul of some obstacle. For
>> instance, today I tried installing a small Gentoo system into a
>> chroot, to do
>> the compiling there. It seemed to be going well until time came to
>> upgrade
>> openssl. It stopped when it couldn't cope with the ARM platform. Zlib
>> also
>> failed, needing static compilation, I think.
>>
>> I see references to using crossdev, wine and taking a prebuilt system
>> from
>> various sources, but I haven't found a way through yet.
>>
>> What setup do people use for compiling for Raspberry Pi?
>>
> 
> I'm about to try this:
> 
> https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit
> 
> for a couple of 3's and then some 4's when they turn up. Have you tried
> it and it fails?
> 
Bear in mind apparently a normal pi boot setup doesn't work on the 400.
Don't know anything about it except apparently if you stick a card for
the pi 3 or 4 in a 400, it won't boot. It needs to be optimised for the 400.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing printers via Cups

[Wols Lists]

On 08/02/21 05:40, Dan Egli wrote:
> Hey folks, I'm a bit lost on this, so I hope you can help me out.

Dunno how much help I'll be ...
> 
> I have a computer I want to act as the central print server for a
> network. It would spool all jobs for all printers, and send them out to
> the actual computers the printers are connected to, or to the printer
> itself in the event of a printer directly connected to the network. To
> start with, I have setup the server and added the printer connected to a
> Windows 10 Home computer to it.

Is this wise? Windows 10 Home is rather castrated - networking is a PITA
because it assumes you won't ...

 After a bit of work, I managed to get it
> so I can print a test page from cups and it comes out on the printer.
> But when I try to connect another computer to the printer via the print
> server, the other computer never sends it out. Just says the printer is
> busy.

This is typical. In my linux setup, the printer is always busy. Stuff
still prints fine, though.
> 
> How can I set this up correctly? To describe exactly what I'm trying to
> do, let's just use four computers in this example. A is the central
> print server. B is the windows client with the printer. C and D are
> linux machines. What I want is if either C or D print something, they
> both send it to A, and then A sends it to B.
> 
I'd try moving the printer to A, or configuring C & D to print directly
to B. I dunno how you set up smbprint, but that should send straight to
a shared printer on B no problem.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Console scrollback

[Wols Lists]

On 20/01/21 19:59, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> I can understand the kernel
> maintainers not being enthusiastic about the existing code.  But that
> dates from, I believe, the 1990s, when RAM was measured in megabytes, and
> processor speeds in megahertz.  Optimisation for speed and store usage
> just isn't important any more.

I thin you're being highly optimistic. Bear in mind that this is the
code that was responsible for Alan Cox ceasing linux development, it's
such a pile of steaming manure ...

Don't ask me why it is, but I think it's got so much stuff wrong with it
that the entire system is marked "beware here be dragons".

https://lwn.net/Articles/842415/

Take a read, as it's mentioned in this article.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] resizing and moving home directory to new partition on same drive

[Wols Lists]

On 11/01/21 04:06, the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
> On 1/10/21 3:46 PM, antlists wrote:
>> And a little bit you might have missed - DON'T put root's home on a mounted 
>> disk - if it's currently in /home, move it to /. Don't forget to edit 
>> /etc/passwd if you have to move it.
> 
> Can I use "nano" to edit /etc/password file 
> all I need to change is the 
> user:x:1000:1000::/home/user:/bin/bash
> 
> to:
> user:x:1000:1000::/mnt/home/user:/bin/bash
> 
> Or I need to use:  "vipw -s"
> 
No - if you follow my suggestion you don't need to change anything. Just
make sure, before you wipe your old install you know which user numbers
are used for "user" - here it's 1000, and "thelma" if you've got a user
called thelma.

What I was worried about was you might have a line

0:x:0:0::/home/root:/bin/bash

What THAT line should be is

0:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash

but it probably already is. You seem to be confusing the root user and
yourself - you need to get that straight in your head because if you
don't you're likely to give yourself some nasty shocks.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] resizing and moving home directory to new partition on save drive

[Wols Lists]

On 11/01/21 00:31, the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
> On 1/10/21 3:46 PM, antlists wrote:
>> On 10/01/2021 21:42, the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
>>> I want to move /home directory to a new partition (save drive).
>>>
>>> I have 1-SSD drive:
>>> Filesystem  Size  Used Avail Use%
>>> /dev/sda4   916G  405G  464G  47% /
>>>
>>>
>>> Home directory is on it taking about 360GB
>>>
>>> I was planning doing it in stages.
>>>
>>> Stage-1
>>> Using Gparted to resize "/" portion shirk it to about 450GB
>>> create new ext4 partition  for /home /dev/sda5
>>>
>>> Boot-strap the PC with live-gentoo
>>> mv /home /home.org
>>> mkdir /home
>>> mount ext4 /dev/sda5 /home/
>>>
>>> cp -rp /home.org/*  /home/
>>>
>>> edit fstab:
>>> /dev/sda5/homeext4default  0  0
>>> reboot and test home
>>>
>>> Am I missing something?
>>
>> Couple of things.
>>
>> Firstly, why use a gentoo live disk? Just log in as root.
>>
>> Secondly, why rename home? Just mount sda5 on /mnt to do the move, then add 
>> it to fstab to mount on /home.
>>
>> And a little bit you might have missed - DON'T put root's home on a mounted 
>> disk - if it's currently in /home, move it to /. Don't forget to edit 
>> /etc/passwd if you have to move it.
> 
> Can you elaborate pls.?
> My current "home" is in "/"; so why move it there, it is already there.  
> I don't have extra disk around, but I could copy /home over network to 
> another PC.

Are you logging in as root?! THAT'S DANGEROUS!

Probably not, you are probably misunderstanding me.

I've just checked, on my system, root's home is /root, which is as it
should be. Is your home /home/username, or is it /username? You make it
sound like it's /username, which I don't think is what you mean ...
> 
> I was planning to move "home" to another partition as I plan to wipe old 
> installation (it is impossible for me to upgrade); it will be easier to 
> reinstall.
> My old installation is: 
> Portage 2.3.24 (python 3.5.4-final-0, default/linux/amd64/17.0/desktop, 
> gcc-6.4.0, glibc-2.25-r10, 4.9.72-gentoo x86_64)
> 
> Since, old installation has home or "/" (root) partition, if I wipe the root, 
> home will be gone as well.  So I was planning on moving "home" to another 
> partition, this way all data will be there.
> So, after moving "home" to another partition "sda5" I can wipe the "sda4" and 
> re-install gentoo.  "home" data would not be touched by upgrade. 
> 
> 
Ahh ... you didn't say that! That changes everything!

Okay. I would look to free about 380GB (just enough) at the end of the
disk to create sda5 which will be (at least temporarily) your new /home.
LOGGED IN AS ROOT just mount that on /mnt, and copy the contents of
/home into it.

Now using your gentoo install disk delete sda4 and split it into two -
your new sda4 for your new gentoo, and a new sda5 (AT LEAST as big as
one you created in the last step), which will shunt the partition you
just created into sda6. Install your new gentoo.

Now you've got sda4 (/), sda5 (which will be /home), and sda6 (where
you've just copied your old /home). Mount sda6 on /mnt again, and copy
it to /home (sda5).

Finally, delete sda6, extend sda5 to use the space you've just freed,
and expand the filesystem on /home to use the full size of the extended
partition.

That'll probably leave you with a 150GB /root, but that'll be plenty I
expect (and a 760GB /home).

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ncurses; I think I wrecked my fresh install

[Wols Lists]

On 30/12/20 01:04, Grant Edwards wrote:
> You must be talking about some sort of weird "wide" encoding (is there
> such a thing as UTF-16?). I've never seen a file like that.  Everybody
> and everything uses UTF-8 these days and has for years. UTF-8 is a
> superset of ASCII, and doesn't increase size of the file unless
> non-ascii characters are used. Converting an ASCII file to UTF-8
> encoding is a noop. An ASCII file _is_ UTF-8.

There is utf-16 - MS's default version. They wrote their unicode support
*before* utf-8 really was a thing. So we have the nix's settling on an
8-bit char, and MS settling on a 16-bit char BEFORE that. Unbaking that
mess would be fun ...

So that file is probably something to do with MS and ASCII-16 :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[Wols Lists]

On 19/12/20 21:31, David Haller wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, antlists wrote:
>> On 19/12/2020 18:49, David Haller wrote:
>>> -dnh, the MoBo though is quite a fine piece with 8 SATA + 2 eSATA
>>>  ports onboard:)  I'm gonna miss eSATA in newer HW:(  Hot-plug
>>>  almost like USB but full SATA feature set and speed (e.g. SMART).
>>
>> Buy add-in sata cards. The ones I've been looking at are two-port cards, with
>> two internal and two external (jumper-selected) connectors.
> 
> I already got one. Yes, I'd pitch MoBo w/many SATA vs. MoBo w/fewer
> SATA plus AddIn, but PCI(e) slots are also limited and >=2 port cards
> get expensive rather quick, say a card with >= 4 internal and
> _extra_[0] 1-2 eSATA ... So, I'll rather have a MoBo with lots of SATA
> + addin than MoBo plus tons of addin cards...

Well, I feel as frustrated as you with my new setup. My new mobo
wouldn't boot so I took it to the shop saying "I think it needs a BIOS
update". They replaced the mobo, and fortunately offered me the old one
back before chucking it. I discovered it was still under warranty, sent
it back to Gigabyte, and it came back fixed with a BIOS update!!!

The replacement mobo (which they charged me twice what I'd paid for the
original) was spec'd as having "plenty of onboard SATA". I think the old
Gigabyte mobo had at least 6. The new one has 6, of which two collide
with the graphics cards or NVMe. Seeing as I'm planning on running
multi-seat, I need two graphics cards ... :-(
> 
> 
> Were it not for gentoo and large stuff needing 6+ hours to compile,
> the occasional reencoding of a video[3], and some fucking websites
> which take ages to load (which was one reason for me to update 10
> years ago from my then Athlon 500[2])... *ELIDED* those *ELIDED*
> webdevs *ELIDED* - sideways - *ELIDED* that *ELIDED* *ELIDED* so
> called webpages that gobble CPU as if there's no tomorrow! And
> *ELIDED* I know, I built webpages that (besides larger pictures) load
> snappy over a 4kB/56kBit/s modem in fractions of a second (no wonder,
> being typically <0.5KB in size and no JS or other crud, there's a lot
> you can fit in 1 KB :).
> 
> What was I saying, ahh, yes: ... I'd not even consider upgrading.
> 
> Well, more RAM would be nice by now, what with those *ELIDED* browsers
> and *ELIDED* Java-Apps gobbling RAM as if there's TiBs of it for
> free... *ARG*&*()#@*{!@_)(@I*CONNECTION RESET BY BEER*

Smile ...
> 
> -dnh
> 
> [0] i.e. working in parallel to the internal ports
> 
> [1] SATA2 was still normal then
> 
> [2] yep, the original, slowest Athlon ever sold, sufficed for me for
> many many years, along with an even older Matrox Mystique (the
> original 150MHz RAMDAC but as the beefy 4MB SGRAM version)

I ran that same Matrox - loved it - with an Athlon 1400  - tbird - and
that lasted me ages and ages. The chip ran at 1050 because the mobo was
a 100MHz bus but the chip wanted 133MHz. I think that machine had 758MB
ram - 3x256MB sticks because that's the max it would take. And because
its replacement had "issues" (still does) I compiled everything on the
slow machine before installing it on the fast one ...
> 
> [3] BTW: it's astonishing how inefficient some streamed videos are
> encoded, just today I crunched down one from 2.9GiB to about
> 639MiB. Albeit, I scaled down from 720p to 576p, but do the maths.
> 
> I regularly get to <50% of the size of the original without any
> scaling, and all without any visible loss (x264 with crf=23:nr=750,
> that codec-internal noise reduction alone can get you ~10% less
> size ;) Well, it's what you get when you don't know about codecs
> or you just run HW-encoders at defaults, I guess...
> 
Oh - and if your original is mpeg2, you might find you've deleted entire
streams of stuff you're not interested in.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: update fails, but I don't see why

[Wols Lists]

On 14/12/20 08:51, Dale wrote:
> If you are able, maybe you can compile the bigger packages on a faster
> system?  If it is a option, it may help. 

If I have multiple similar machines, I create a shared a shared local
repository. Then I run emerge with the settings (can't remember what
they are) "use binary if it's there, create binary".

That way, especially the big ones, only get built on one machine.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] [SOLVED] fsck.fat 4.1 - File system couldn't be fixed [SOLVED]

[Wols Lists]

On 14/12/20 05:41, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> Excerpt from Michael:
> 
>> Right, on UEFI MoBos the ESP partition used by the UEFI firmware to locate 
>> and 
>> run *.EFI executables must be FAT32.  Such .EFI executables stored on the 
>> ESP 
>> may be OS boot managers/loaders, or other UEFI compatible applications.  The 
>> boot manager loaded by UEFI is then left to its own mechanisms (boot loader 
>> and fs drivers) to load whatever fs the kernel image resides on.
> 
> Is it necessary for the ESP to be FAT32, as opposed to FAT16 or FAT12?
> 
> What happens if the ESP is formatted FAT12 or FAT16?
> 
I think the spec actually says it must comply with a specific version of
the FAT definition. Not sure which version, but that does specify all
three FAT layouts, so all three are acceptable. Look at mjg's blog for
more detail, I guess.

That protects against updates to the spec making incompatible changes,
but doesn't protect against clueless manufacturers not following the
spec - "works with Windows" is so often the de-facto spec.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Switching default tmpfiles and faster internet coming my way.

[Wols Lists]

On 07/12/20 04:24, Dale wrote:
> I visited with my friend who recently got the same type of internet I'll
> be getting.  Odds are, the boxes will be the same.  She has hers through
> a power company and that's what I'm getting, just a different power
> company.  Anyway, as I suspected, it has a little box which is the
> modem.  It looks a lot like a old AT Westel modem.  It's a little bit
> smaller but other than that, almost identical.

Can't comment. If you've already got a cat-5 link from your router to
the internet modem, chances are you're okay.

My two routers looked pretty much identical too - the only difference
was the first had an RJ-11 WAN uplink, the second has an RJ-45. Other
than that they are the exact same model.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] duplicate gentoo system - errors

[Wols Lists]

On 25/11/20 13:31, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Now, one area I would use UUIDs is with mdadm if you're not putting
> lvm on top.  I've seen mdadm arrays get renumbered and that is a mess
> if you're directly mounting them without labels or UUIDs.

Or if you do it properly you don't need UUIDs :-)

mdadm always USED to number its arrays starting with 0. Now it counts
down from 127.

Worse, if you use numbers, mdadm just changes them as it sees fit. I
created my array as md0, next thing I know it's md127.

It is recommended to use names, so I call it by what it is, so I have
things like /dev/md/gentoo, /dev/md/home etc.

I'm moving to lvm, and will use the same tactic.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Grub and multiple distros on LVM [was duplicate gentoo system ...]

[Wols Lists]

On 24/11/20 23:39, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 23:25:38 - (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote:
> 
 In grub, does chainloading an LVM virtual partition work the same as
 chainloading a "real" partition?  
>>>
>>> I suspect not as GRUB will be reading the menu files and GRUB doesn't
>>> read from LVM volumes.  
>>
>> Then what does grub's "lvm" module do, and how does it read the
>> distro's .cfg files from the LVM volumes in which the various distros
>> are installed?
> 
> Maybe what you want. I haven't used LVM or GRUB much n the past several
> years, so maybe it is OK now, although a quick web search before I posted
> implied it wasn't. RTFM time?
> 
> 
I *think* the grub volume itself has to be plain, no lvm, mdadm etc. All
the stuff for that is in the initramfs, so grub loads the initramfs,
starts the kernel, the kernel starts pid 1 which can now start mdadm,
lvm etc, and then it can pivot root onto the proper root filesystem.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] youtube-dl and the conf file.

[Wols Lists]

On 30/10/20 21:56, Dale wrote:
> I read somewhere that
> it is being fought.  I think EFF is involved along with others.

Let's hope the EFF / Github argue "unclean hands" - that one of the
primary uses of youtube-dl is to get round the copy-protection that the
RIAA has forced copyright holders to use when they don't want to ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: tried desktop profile

[Wols Lists]

On 14/10/20 22:37, Jack wrote:
> Why do you need two graphics cards?  I've been driving two monitors off
> each of the last several graphics cards I've used - both nVidia and ATI,
> from simple PCI to PCIE needing the extra power connector.

Because I'm not driving two monitors. I'm running a two-user system.
AIUI, each session needs its own graphics card (which could drive two
monitors for that user).

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] tried desktop profile

[Wols Lists]

On 13/10/20 16:37, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Since the profile without the desktop emerged @world correctly after the
> make.conf file got adjusted correctly for this computer I think all it
> will run will be the basic profile.  Even if it were possible to emerge
> the compiles necessary for a desktop and get the rest of the system built
> I'd probably run into difficulties later.  I'll do the basic profile on
> this machine and maybe do a desktop on the newer machine at some later
> date.

No, you can add any programs you want and it'll just pull in what you need.

HOWEVER, now you've fixed it for the basic profile, I'd just change that
to the desktop profile and re-emerge, and it'll pull in all the new
stuff to go to the desktop profile.

NB - you're still putting your post below the .sig marker. If you can't
see clearly, we accept that it's difficult, but it helps us if you can
get it right (like with language and foreigners, there's a big
difference between people who have difficulty doing the right thing, and
people who can't be bothered to do the right thing ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] tried desktop profile

[Wols Lists]

On 13/10/20 07:48, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 13, 2020 8:28:01 AM CEST Andreas Fink wrote:
>> On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 02:10:04 -0400
>>
>> Jude DaShiell  wrote:
>>> x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-g++: fatal error: Killed signal terminated
>>> program cc1plus compilation terminated.
>>
>> These two lines stongly suggest that you ran out of memory while
>> compilation. You could try to build it with only one job (-j1),
>> currently you are using -j2.
>> Another option would be to buy more RAM ;)
>> And last but not least, you could increase your swap memory, but be
>> prepared that your system becomes unresponsive and compilation will
>> probably take forever.
> 
> One more suggestion, your PORTAGE_TMPDIR is set to "/var/tmp".
> By default, this is a tmpfs, which means it's all kept in RAM.

If that's true then somebody has ed up!

/tmp is specified as "files may disappear at any time"

/var/tmp is specified as "temporary storage that should survive a reboot"

Okay, that's not the exact wording, but that is the effect.
> 
> If your system is that low on RAM, you might want to change that to a 
> different location that is backed by a real disk.
> 
The other thing about default tmpfs, is it defaults to half of ram. So
it could actually be quite small. I explicitly set mine to be big,
because I configure oodles of swap.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Multilib ABI specific CPU use flags?

[Wols Lists]

On 11/10/20 05:42, Jonathan Yong wrote:
> Was it just the previous message? I canceled sending the message when I
> realized it wasn't signed. Google SMTP must have accepted it anyway.

You can't cancel a message. Once it's left your inbox, it's gone.

And Google won't/can't do anything (unless the recipient is gmail)
because just as it will have gone from your outbox, it will have gone
from their system before you've even realised "oh shit I didn't mean to
hit send".

You're effectively relying on the recipient's mail client to honour a
request to throw the previous message away, and many clients either
don't honour, or don't even recognise, such a request.

That's why a previous mail client of mine (Turnpike), by default,
wouldn't empty the outbox until the contents were at least a minute old.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: sda=stroke boot parameter

[Wols Lists]

On 09/10/20 23:49, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2020-10-09, Ashley Dixon  wrote:
> 
>> Especially with `grub-mkconfig`, you don't have to manually  edit  
>> configuration
>> files at all, which doesn't seem to be an option for  users  of  LILO.
> 
> I always had a lot of problems getting grub-mkconfig to work. The
> documentation about various options and configuration variables seemed
> to be inconsistent, confusing, and often different considerably from
> one distro to the next and from one version to the next. I find it far
> easier to just edit grub.cfg.
> 
Yup. I ran it for the initial setup, and haven't run it since
(especially since some of my systems were dual-boot). It's easy enough
to edit ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] about to install kernel source package

[Wols Lists]

On 10/10/20 01:09, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Before I do this, would it be useful to do
> emerge --config espeak in the chroot environment?
> On a previous kernel install failure, I ended up emerging espeakup and it
> was only then I found the accessibility support submenu in make menuconfig
> had got populated with speakup-related stuff but I couldn't get to
> speakup.synth in that submenu.  speakup.synth was found by a search, I
> just couldn't land on it to adjust it.
> 
That's a "feature" of kernel configuration - a fair few options are
inaccessible if their predecursors are disabled. A search should tell
you why you can't find it, and which options to enable to make it appear
in the normal hierarchy.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Errors in nonexistent partitions

[Wols Lists]

On 13/09/20 13:26, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> So I'm still left wondering what to do. I'm happy that the hardware isn't on 
> the blink, anyway.

Can you use gdisk to create a new partition in some empty space on the
disk, delete it again, and write a partition table? Basically anything
to get gdisk or gparted to actually write a new partition table (that
should be the same as the old one, of course).

If there are hidden problems that udisk or whatever is picking up on -
garbage data somewhere most likely - that's the most likely way of
clearing it.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to switch from rust to rust-bin?

[Wols Lists]

On 08/09/20 15:53, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> There is a way, uninstall rust. virtual/rust requires only one of rust
> and rust-bin, if both are installed it will take rust meaning rust-bin
> gets depcleaned. If only one is installed, the virtual will take that. If
> neither is install, the virtual will pull in rust.
> 
> Adding packages like this to the world file is storing up problems for
> later.

Agreed. But if an update comes along, will it still use rust-bin, or
will it upgrade rust-bin to rust?

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How to switch from rust to rust-bin?

[Wols Lists]

On 07/09/20 20:54, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2020-09-07, Andreas K  Hüttel  wrote:
> 
>> That works, but pretty please try something else first!
>>
>> # make sure source-based rust is not in the world file
>> emerge --deselect dev-lang/rust
>>
>> emerge -1 dev-lang/rust-bin
>>
>> It should be as easy as that. *If* all dependencies are fulfilled by
>> both rust and rust-bin, then the second emerge call will unmerge
>> rust and merge rust- bin.
> 
> It did not.  I executed the two commands shown above (the first
> reported that no such atom was found in the world file).  I ended up
> with both dev-lang/rust and dev-lang/rust-bin installed.

If rust is called in as a dependency, it won't be in the world file, so
the first command will have no effect ...
> 
> When I subsequently ran "emerge --depclean --ask" it wanted to unmerge
> dev-lang/rust-bin.

rust-bin was emerged with the -1 option, ie "don't stick it in world" option
> 
> I had to manually unmerge dev-lang/rust to get rid of it (which then
> prevented --depclean from trying to unmerge rust-bin).
> 
So --depclean, relying on what is in world, notices that nothing has a
dependency on rust-bin and wants to remove it.
> --
> Grant
> 
What you need to do (and this is a pain, but ...) is to add rust-bin to
the world file. There may be a --select option (opposite of deselect),
or I'd just manually add it to the world file.

At which point, anything with the virtual rust dependency will notice
that rust-bin is installed, and use that.

There's no way I know of to tell portage to use rust-bin rather than
rust to satisfy the virtual and, indeed, it makes sense for rust-bin
*not* to be the default.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] tuning desktop appearance for legibility

[Wols Lists]

On 03/09/20 18:44, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
> i think this problem that we have could've been
> avoided if the web was originally designed to only
> deliver content, without any power to dictate
> appearance, so that appearance is 100% a task that
> a local client should choose.

Isn't that how the web originally WAS designed? That the web-site sent
content and the browser determined how it was displayed?

My big bugbear is when I hit "print" and what comes out on the printer
bears no resemblance WHATSOEVER to what is displayed on screen - ie
pretty much every big shop website there is ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] What is the fastest file system for microsd?

[Wols Lists]

On 31/08/20 21:00, Andrew Udvare wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 15:07 никита степанов  > wrote:
> 
> What is the fastest file system for microsd?
> 
> 
> Any file system without journaling and other extra parts. I would place
> my bets on ext2 in terms of raw speed.
> 
> There is also FAT and exFAT which should be fast enough. exFAT is
> optimised for flash storage and is now in the kernel.

Note that ext2 doesn't exist any more as a separate filesystem. I think
it was lwn, I saw the maintainer say that it's only ext now, ext2 and 3
are just synonyms for "4 with various options switched off". So I'd read
the docu and see what you think ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] tips on running a mail server in a cheap vps provider run but not-so-trusty admins?

[Wols Lists]

On 30/08/20 14:06, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
> you know there is this almost neat concept called
> url?
> 
> rumours say that urls can identify various web
> applications, ranging from websites, rss, games,
> video, and, guess what?  mails.  all over
> http/https/h2 over same tcp 80/443.  hard to
> believe, but this magic is known since early
> 1990s.

Have you looked at urls lately?

http:/example.org/blah/blah

https:/example.org/foo/bar

git:/github.com/my/wonderful/project

smb:/mypc/username/documents

The first bit of the url is the protocol - guess what - it explicitly
chooses between http / hhtps / git / whatever.

It runs above tcp/udp, not tcp80/443.

(I've never seen an smtp:/ or imap:/ url, but I guess they could easily
be formulated.)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo Council vs Umbrella Corp ?

[Wols Lists]

On 29/08/20 20:47, William Hubbs wrote:
>> > Sound to me like you are an excellent candidate to join the Gentoo 
>> > Council?  If so, contact Mgorny for pointers.

> The functions being discussed in this thread belong to the
> trustees (the board of directors for the foundation) [1]. Thhey are
> definitely not part of the council's skill set [2].
> 
> mgorny and others are advocating disbanding the Gentoo foundation
> and transfering all of Gentoo's assets to an organization such as the Software
> Freedom Conservancy [3] and allowing the council to exist as it currently 
> does.
> 
> As a member of the council, I'll be the first to say I don't know
> anything about trustee functions. For me, the question is, do we want to
> control our own destiny as an organization or do we want to have another
> organization control it in some way? To be honest, I do not have that
> answer because I don't know how much control an umbrella organization
> would try to exert, and since they would control our purse strings, I
> don't know what the scope of control they would be able to exert is.

Sounds to me, actually from many of the other posts in this list, that
too many people don't understand the difference between a person, their
role, and a post.

(To give my favourite example, capitalism - at least the American form -
tends to emphasise "profit for the shareholders". But many shareholders
are either employees or pension fund members, who are severely damaged
by this "search for profit". Actions taken to "protect the shareholder"
often *damage* the owner of the shares!)

Speaking from an English view of things here ...

The over-arching legal authority here is presumably the Gentoo
Constitution. This gives power to the trustees, but also limits their
power. The trustees have no power to alter the constitution - that's
down to the people who created it - us the wider gentoo community I
suppose ...

The trustees then *delegate* the daily management to the foundation, who
*manage* the assets on behalf of the trustees and the constitution. The
foundation is enTRUSTed with the assets of the constitution, to manage
it in accord with the constitution. Any breach of that is a breach of
TRUST, which is pretty serious legally.

Should we as the constitution/trustees take our assets away from the
foundation and give them to the SFC to manage, that now puts the SFC in
place of the foundation, with the SAME trust and legal issues. They
*must* keep our assets separate from everyone else's (including their
own) and *must* return said assets should they cease operating.

So, legally, whether it's the foundation, or the SFC, there shouldn't be
any noticeable change. But it should result in a lot of cost saving, as
the SFC's accountants will have more experience and be more efficient,
and by sharing we reduce costs. The SFC could buy a mainframe (to which
we chip in) to centralise hardware. Etc etc. But legally, WE OPT IN.
They can't take our money and do it without asking.

The big fly in the ointment I see here is the US's casual attitude to
enforcing all this (and I've heard some horror stories from Canada too
:-( I'm also involved in something exactly similar in the UK, and a lot
of people are worried ...

So from a legal point of view what's the problem? From an enforcement
point of view if things go wrong, well yes I know there's a problem!

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] tips on running a mail server in a cheap vps provider run but not-so-trusty admins?

[Wols Lists]

On 21/08/20 02:39, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
> On Thursday, August 20, 2020 11:41 AM, antlists  
> wrote:
> 
>> Will that python script allow for the situation that the message is
>> received, but the message was NOT safely stored for onwards transmission
>> before the receiver crashed, and as such the message has not been
>> SUCCESSFULLY received?
>>
>> SMTP has lots of things specifically meant to ensure messages survive
>> the internet jungle on their journey ...
> 
> thanks for the point.  would it suffice if we have
> these notifications:

You're re-inventing the wheel.
> 
> 1. receipt by final mail server (mandatory).

This is part of SMTP already, in that each server (post office)
acknowledges that the message has been received AND SAFELY STORED.
Without that last guarantee, "receipt by the server" isn't worth
diddley-squat.

> 2. receipt by end user(s) (optional).

This is part of current mail protocol - dunno what it's called but I can
switch on a flag in Thunderbird, and I will get a message back saying my
email is in the recipient's inbox.

> 3. opening by end user(s) (optional).

Likewise, I will get a notification that the email has been "read".
> 
> ?
> 
> 
> 
> (1) is required by the server, else mail will be
> retransmitted from source relay(s) (or client if
> done directly).  (2) is optional by final server,
> (3) is optional by end user's client.
> 
> the job of a relay would be to optionally add some
> metadata (e.g. maybe describing sender's role) and
> sign the whole thing (e.g. by company's private
> key).  this way we can have group-level rules.
> 
Except that SMTP allows for the fact that a message may (or may not)
pass through several post-offices on the way. The old internet thing of
"don't assume any computer will survive a nuclear attack - take whatever
route you can find ..." so there is no guarantee that a relay going in
one direction will even see a message going back in the other.

And as an example of how hard this is, look at what a mess the telcos
have made of SMS, which is basically the same thing! How often on New
Year's Eve do (or did) the system fall over so all the "Happy New Year"
messages either disappeared, or arrived several days late ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] tips on running a mail server in a cheap vps provider run but not-so-trusty admins?

[Wols Lists]

On 17/08/20 12:33, Ashley Dixon wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 04:50:43AM +, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
>> thoughts on how to maximally satisfy these
>> requirements?
> 
> How many concurrent users will be connected to the mail server? How much 
> traffic
> will the S.M.T.P.  server receive (read: how many  e-mails  arrive  on  a  
> daily
> basis)?  If you really don't trust your V.P.S. provider, and your mail server 
> is
> small-ish, you could just skip all the trust issues and buy a cheap Raspberry 
> Pi
> for £20 or so.

Yup. If you've got mail DNS records pointing at your home server,
incoming mail shouldn't be a problem and your vps admin can't snoop :-)
> 
> Running a mail server over a domestic connection presents some issues,  such  
> as
> dynamic I.P. ranges appearing in the Spamhaus blocklist, or some 
> tyrannicalesque
> I.S.P.s blocking outbound port 25 (S.M.T.P. submission port), but it is 
> possible
> to have a smooth, self-administered mail server, providing you can  put  in  
> the
> time and effort.  I have been doing it myself for a few years with  Courier  
> and
> Postfix (although I wouldn't recommend Courier; Dovecot is far superior).
> 
Can't you tell your server to forward all outgoing mail to your ISP's
SMTP server? That way, you don't have to worry about all the spam
issues, and it *should* just pass through.

The main worry for snooping is inbound mail waiting for collection -
outbound requires a dedicated eavesdropping solution and if they're
going to do that they can always snoop ANY outgoing SMTP.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] External hard drive and idle activity

[Wols Lists]

On 04/08/20 08:42, Wols Lists wrote:
> Both LVM and btrfs offer snapshotting, so you take a snapshot before
> doing an in-place rsync, giving you one full backup per snapshot, but
> the drive is actually only storing the changes between snapshots.
> Probably run the backup much faster too.

Just strikes me this would be near ideal for an SMR drive, because this
would be copy-on-write, so the backup would just be streaming new data
to disk.

And by judiciously choosing when to delete snapshots, you have
considerable control over when the drive decides to do a defrag.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] External hard drive and idle activity

[Wols Lists]

On 04/08/20 04:17, Dale wrote:
> This drive is formatted with ext4.  It doesn't have LVM or anything just
> straight ext4.  Given it is external, I didn't see the point of having
> LVM on it and adding another layer to deal with when there is no
> benefits to it. 

LVM has a big advantage if not much (relatively) changes between
backups. If you have let's say 900GB of data, your backup disk is 1TB,
and say 20GB of data changes between backups, with LVM that drive could
store 5 *full* backups! You could use btrfs to the same effect.

Both LVM and btrfs offer snapshotting, so you take a snapshot before
doing an in-place rsync, giving you one full backup per snapshot, but
the drive is actually only storing the changes between snapshots.
Probably run the backup much faster too.

If this drive is used to store full backups, and only stores the one
copy, it won't be that expensive/risky to reformat and try that?

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Local mail server

[Wols Lists]

On 29/07/20 00:11, james wrote:
> On 7/28/20 12:10 PM, Wols Lists wrote:
>> On 28/07/20 16:01, james wrote:
>>> (2) DNS resolvers, (?) mail-servers for a robust mail system that "I"
>>> admin, and (1) internet facing web server and (1) internal only facing
>>> or limited outward facing Web server for development and security based
>>> testing. Static IP are basically $5/month from my ISP.
>>
>> Do you really want to pay for a static IP? I'd go IPv6 instead.
>>
>> I learnt my v4 in the days of 10-base-2, and I'd really love to update
>> to punching holes in a v6 router. Limited risk, and no worries about
>> static IPs, NATing, all that legacy stuff ... :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Wol
>>
> 
> 
> So, IPv6 can be assigned without payment to an ISP? Besides having
> static IPs without bandwidth connections routed (assigned) to those IP6
> addresses are not useful?
> 
> 
> If I go IPv6, where does the bandwidth come from?
> 
>From your ISP?

The OP's ISP charges EXTRA for a static address, which shouldn't be the
case seeing as they have oodles of the things. Or maybe I'm out-of-date,
seeing as my ISP in the old days provided a static IPv4 free of charge
as a matter of course.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Local mail server

[Wols Lists]

On 29/07/20 00:18, james wrote:
> It's the bandwidth provider's policy. Static IPs (4 or 6) requires a
> monthly fee. If you know a way around this, with full privileges one
> gets with static IP addresses, I'm all ears.?

? I can understand a fee for a static IP4 - they've run out, after
all, and people are fighting over them ...

Don't ISPs get a 2^64 allocation of IP6 *network* addresses? They should
just allocate one to your router and that's that! Still, I wouldn't put
it past them to charge extra for what should be free.
> 
> I do not want some limited/dysfunctional solution. I want/need the full
> ability of what static IPs addresses bring. (all ports open etc).

That's not what a static IP brings, that's what a "globally known" IP
brings - if your router advertises its address to something like dyndns
every time it starts, you'll have the same result. Snag is, that's a
chargeable subscription, I believe.
> 
> I am curious about your details via IPv6 and static (permanently
> assigned ) addresses.

That's why I need to dig and investigate :-) My first ISP in the days of
dial-up allocated a static IP as a matter of course. Not only was it
useful to use, it suited them because customers could only use it on one
computer at a time otherwise routing got screwed up :-)

Then we went to broadband, and in effect it was static because the
modem/router was always on ...


It'll be interesting digging through all this. Just try and make sure
you use your router as a firewall. I think my router drops all incoming
connections BY DEFAULT. But I can open up any port I want, either to
re-route to an internal computer or just pass through to it.

My first investigations would be (1) how do I advertise my router's
network address on dyndns, and (2) once the outside world knows my IP,
how do I let stuff through my router/firewall.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Local mail server

[Wols Lists]

On 28/07/20 16:01, james wrote:
> (2) DNS resolvers, (?) mail-servers for a robust mail system that "I"
> admin, and (1) internet facing web server and (1) internal only facing
> or limited outward facing Web server for development and security based
> testing. Static IP are basically $5/month from my ISP.

Do you really want to pay for a static IP? I'd go IPv6 instead.

I learnt my v4 in the days of 10-base-2, and I'd really love to update
to punching holes in a v6 router. Limited risk, and no worries about
static IPs, NATing, all that legacy stuff ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: dns/bind-tools 9.14 -> 9.16 pulling in 17 new dependencies?!

[Wols Lists]

On 23/07/20 06:45, Walter Dnes wrote:
> ...does indeed pull in sphinx.  If I didn't know any better, I'd say
> that Lennart is behind this.  Anyhow, I've managed to avoid llvm
> altogether (USE="-llvm"), so I don't have that problem.

I think you might find sphinx is a dependency of the kernel ...

Iirc all of the kernel doc is slowly being switched to sphinx.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Testing a used hard drive to make SURE it is good.

[Wols Lists]

On 23/06/20 19:32, Sid Spry wrote:
> The danger of SMART is that rate of false negatives is so high (IME) that
> you might erroneously think a drive is not going to fail and putting off a
> backup. A good backup policy should mitigate this, but you still might plan
> around drive lifetime SMART predicts before realizing they are or can be
> bad predictions.

Thing is, SMART is best at predicting PLATTER FAILURE. Expecting it to
tell you that other parts of the drive are going to fail is like
expecting a car mechanic to inspect your plumbing :-)

And it's probably the marketeers closing the stable door after the horse
has bolted - platters USED to be the least reliable part of the drive.
Now we've got lead-free eco-solder it's the PCB that's most likely to
fail ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Memory cards and deleting files.

[Wols Lists]

On 21/06/20 00:11, Michael wrote:
> PS. exFAT has made it into the latest Linux kernels.

Great. So linux may be able to read the card just fine, but it's still
useless in the device I bought it for ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Memory cards and deleting files.

[Wols Lists]

On 20/06/20 23:14, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> It sounds like it may be filesystem corruption. With an SD card I'd
> either reformat it, preferably in the device that will be using it,

If that's possible ... :-)

I now have two devices, my car radio and a tv, both of which require the
vfat filesystem. New cards seem to come with exFAT. And of course
neither the radio nor the tv have the option to format a card ... (and
Windows has deleted the "format as vfat" option). Thank $DEITY for
mkfs.vfat :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Testing a used hard drive to make SURE it is good.

[Wols Lists]

On 17/06/20 05:47, Dale wrote:
> From what I've read, all the drive makers were selling SMR without
> telling anyone at first.  It wasn't just WD but Seagate as well.

Yes, but Seagate didn't start selling SMR drives advertised as
"optimised for raid/nas".THAT is what's so bad about the WD case - those
drives are almost guaranteed to fail the moment anything ELSE goes wrong
elsewhere.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Testing a used hard drive to make SURE it is good.

[Wols Lists]

On 16/06/20 10:04, Dale wrote:
> I might add, I don't have LVM on that drive.  I read it does not work
> well with LVM, RAID etc as you say.  Most likely, that drive will always
> be a external drive for backups or something.  If it ever finds itself
> on the OS or /home, it'll be a last resort. 

LVM it's probably fine with. Raid, MUCH less so. What you need to make
sure does NOT happen is a lot of random writes. That might make deleting
an lvm snapshot slightly painful ...

But adding a SMR drive to an existing ZFS raid is a guarantee for pain.
I don't know why, but "resilvering" causes a lot of random writes. I
don't think md-raid behaves this way.

But it's the very nature of raid that, as soon as something goes wrong
and a drive needs replacing, everything is going to get hammered. And
SMR drives don't take kindly to being hammered ... :-)

Even in normal use, a SMR drive is going to cause grief if it's not
handled carefully.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Testing a used hard drive to make SURE it is good.

[Wols Lists]

On 16/06/20 08:34, Dale wrote:
> Right now, I'm backing up to a 8TB external drive, sadly it is a SMR
> drive but it works.  As I go along, I'll be breaking down my backups. 
> Example.  I may have my Documents directory, which includes my camera
> pics, backed up to one drive.  I may have videos backed up to another
> drive.  Other directories may have to be on other drives.  The biggest
> things I don't want to lose:  Camera pics that could not be replaced
> except with a backup.  Videos, some of which are no longer available. 
> That requires a large drive.  It currently is approaching 6TBs and I
> have several videos in other locations that are not included in that. 
> Documents which would be hard to recreate.  Since I have all my emails
> locally, I don't want to lose those either.  Just a bit ago, I was
> searching for posts regarding smartctl.  I got quite a few hits.

Streaming to an SMR should be fine. Doing a cp to a new directory, or
writing a .tar file, or stuff like that.

What is NOT fine is anything that is likely to result in a lot of
head-seeking as files and directories get modified ...

Remember that when backing up - so a btrfs with snapshots, or an lvm
snapshot with rsync in place, is most definitely not a good idea with SMR.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] clone root from HDD to SSD causes no video with NVIDIA driver

[Wols Lists]

On 10/06/20 06:47, Raffaele BELARDI wrote:
> nomodeset did not change anything, but adding EFI_FB to the kernel finally 
> got me a functional console. But if I startx from there I am back again to 
> the same point, no X, no console switching with CTR-ALT-Fn, no crash in 
> syslog, I have to SSH to get to a working shell. I'm not getting anywhere, I 
> think I'll better install from stage3.

Console switching is, iirc, a toggle-off-on feature. It might be toggled
off by default and starting X toggles it on, but it's not getting that
far ...

See if you can toggle it on at the console and then try startx.

Or is it possible you can't toggle buffers because it's booting with
only console enabled? That could also explain the X problem because it
hasn't got a buffer to switch to?

Hope this helps, although it probably won't ...

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Seagate ST8000NM0065 PMR or SMR plus NAS SAS SATA question

[Wols Lists]

On 23/05/20 08:39, Michael wrote:
> Is there a way to determine if a drive on sale is SMR *before* purchase?  I 
> assume after purchase it is a matter of filling up the drive with zeros and 
> keeping an eye on it stalling for minutes at a time; or is there some hdparm/
> smartctl output to inform accordingly?

THAT IS THE PROBLEM!

If you read up where people have been surprised, the information is
encoded in the last four letters of the drive model. In other words, the
bit that nobody looks at.

For example, I can't remember whether EFAX is CMR or SMR, but that is
what tells you on a WD Red. And even if you're lucky enough to be told
the drive model, that is the bit that is updated every time the model is
updated, and it's the bit they don't tell you, and it's the bit you only
discover when the drive is in your hands and you can read the
information plate on it and google it.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] New system, systemd, and dm-integrity

[Wols Lists]

On 15/05/20 14:49, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 9:18 AM antlists  wrote:
>>
>> On 15/05/2020 12:30, Rich Freeman wrote:

I've snipped it, but I can't imagine dracut/mdadm having the problems
you describe today - there are too many systems out there that boot from
lvm/mdadm. My problem is I'm adding dm-integrity to the mix ...
> 
> So, compared to what you're doing I could see the following advantages:
> 
> 1.  All the filesystem-layer stuff which obviously isn't in-scope for
> the lower layers, including snapshots (obviously those can be done
> with lvm but it is a bit cleaner at the filesystem level).  I'd argue
> that some of this stuff isn't as flexible as with btrfs but it will be
> far superior to something like ext4 on top of what you're doing.
> 
> 2.  No RAID write-hole.  I'd think that your solution with the
> integrity layer would detect corruption resulting from the write hole,
> but I don't think it could prevent it, since a RAID stripe is still
> overwritten in place.  But, I've never had a conversation with an
> md-raid developer so perhaps you have a more educated view on the
> matter.

I don't know as it would. The write hole is where all the blocks are
intact, but not all of them make it to disk. That said, the write hole
has been pretty much fixed now - I think new raids use journalling which
deals with it. That's certainly been discussed on the list.
> 
> 3.  COW offers some of the data-integrity benefits of full data
> journaling without the performance costs of this.  On the other hand
> it probably is not going to perform as well as overwriting in place
> without any data journaling.  In theory this is more of a
> filesystem-level feature though.
> 
> 4.  In the future COW with zfs could probably enable better
> performance on SSD/SMR with TRIM by structuring writes to consolidate
> free blocks into erase zones.  However, as far as I'm aware that is a
> theoretical future benefit and not anything available, and I have no
> idea if anybody is working on that.  This sort of benefit would
> require the vertical integration that zfs uses.
> 
> In general zfs is much more stable than btrfs and far less likely to
> eat your data.  And FWIW I did once (many years ago) have
> ext4+lvm+mdadm eat my data - I think it was due to some kind of lvm
> metadata corruption or something like that, because basically an fsck
> on one ext4 partition scrambled a different ext4 partition, which
> obviously should not be possible if lvm is working right.  I have no
> idea what the root cause of that was - could have been bad RAM or
> something which of course can mess up anything short of a distributed
> filesystem with integrity checking above the host level (which, IMO,
> most of the solutions don't do as well as they could).
> 
> One big disadvantage with zfs is that it is far less flexible at the
> physical layer.  You can add the equivalent of LVM PVs, and you can
> expand a PV, but you can't remove a PV in anything but the latest
> version of zfs, and I think there are some limitations around how this
> works.  You can't reshape the equivalent of an mdadm array, but you
> can replace a drive in an array and grow an array if all the
> underlying devices have enough space.  You can add/remove mirrors from
> the equivalent of a raid1 to freely go between no-redundancy to any
> multiplicity you wish.  Striped arrays are basically fixed in layout
> once created.
> 
>> As the linux raid wiki says (I wrote it :-) do you want the complexity
>> of a "do it all" filesystem, or the abstraction of dedicated layers?
> 
> Yeah, it is a well-established argument and has some merit.
> 
> I'm not sure I'd go this route for my regular hosts since zfs works
> reasonably well (though your solution is more flexible than zfs).
> 
> However, I might evaluate how dm-integrity plus ext4 (maybe with LVM
> in-between) works on my lizardfs chunkservers.  These have redundancy
> above the host level, but I do want integrity checking for static data
> issues, and I'm not sure that lizardfs provides any guarantees here
> (plus having it at the host level would probably perform better
> anyway).  If the integrity layer returned an io error lizardfs would
> just overwrite the impacted files in-place most likely, so there would
> be no reads from the impacted block until it was rewritten which
> presumably would clear the integrity error.
> 
> That said, I'm not sure that lizardfs even overwrites anything
> in-place in normal use so it might not make any difference vs zfs.  It
> breaks all data into "chunks" and I'd think that if data were
> overwritten in place at the filesystem level it probably would end up
> in a new chunk, with the old one garbage collected if it were not
> snapshotted.
> 
The crucial point here is that dm-integrity protects against something
*outside* your stack trashing part of the disk. If something came along
and wrote randomly to /dev/sda, then when my filesystem tried to
retrieve a file, 

[gentoo-user] New system, systemd, and dm-integrity

[Wols Lists]

I'm finally building my new system, but I'm pretty certain I'll need
some advice to get it to boot. As you might guess from the subject the
"problem" is dm-integrity.

I'm using openSUSE as my host system, which I used to set up the disk(s).

So currently I have

sdb
--> sdb3
   --> dm-integity
  --> md-raid
 --> lvm
--> root

And my root partition is on lvm. Currently I have a custom systemd
config file that sets up dm-integrity. How do I add this to the gentoo
initramfs? Without it raid won't recognise the disk, so there'll be no
root partition to switch to at boot.

Plan for the future is to add dm-integrity recognition to upstream
mdadm, but for that I need my new system, so's I can demote my old
system to a test-bed.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] which linux RAID setup to choose?

[Wols Lists]

On 03/05/20 08:53, hitachi303 wrote:
> Nothing you asked but I had very bad experience with drives which spin
> down by themselves to save energy (mostly titled green or so).

Good catch!

For anything above raid 1, MAKE SURE your drives support SCT/ERC. For
example, Seagate Barracudas are very popular desktop drives, but I guess
maybe HALF of the emails asking for help recovering an array on the raid
list involve them dying ...

(I've got two :-( but my new system - when I get it running - has
ironwolves instead.)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] which linux RAID setup to choose?

[Wols Lists]

On 03/05/20 06:44, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
> hi - i'm to setup my 1st RAID, and i'd appreciate
> if any of you volunteers some time to share your
> valuable experience on this subject.
> 
> my scenario
> ---
> 
> 0. i don't boot from the RAID.
> 
> 1. read is as important as write.  i don't
>have any application-specific scenario that
>makes me somehow favor one over another.
>so RAIDs that speed up the read (or write)
>while significantly harming the write (or
>read) is not welcome.
> 
> 2. replacing failed disks may take a week or
>two.  so, i guess that i may have several
>disks fail one after another in the 1-2
>weeks (specially if they were bought
>about the same time).
> 
> 3. i would like to be able to grow the RAID's
>total space (as needed), and increase its
>reliability (i.e. duplicates/partities) as
>needed.
> 
>e.g. suppose that i got a 2TB RAID that
>tolerates 1 disk failure.  i'd like to, at
>some point, to have the following options:
> 
>  * only increase the total space (e.g.
>make it 3TB), without increasing
>failure toleration (so 2 disk failure
>would result in data loss).
> 
>  * or, only increase the failure tolerance
>(e.g. such that 2 disks failure would
>not lead to data loss), without
>increasing the total space (e.g. space
>remains 2TB).
> 
>  * or, increase, both, the space and the
>failure tolerance at the same time.
> 
> 4. only interested in software RAID.
> 
> my thought
> --
> 
> i think these are not suitable:
> 
> * RAID 0: fails to satisfy point (3).
> 
> * RAID 1: fails to satisfy points (1) and (3).
> 
> * RAIDs 4 to 6: fails to satisfy point (3)
>   since they are stuck with a fixed tolerance
>   towards failing disks (i.e. RAIDs 4 and 5
>   tolerate only 1 disk failure, and RAID 6
>   tolerates only 2).
> 
> 
> this leaves me with RAID 10, with the "far"
> layout.  e.g. --layout=n2 would tolerate the
> failure of two disks, --layout=n3 three, etc.  or
> is it?  (i'm not sure).
> 
> my questions
> 
> 
> Q1: which RAID setup would you recommend?

I'd recommend having a spare in the array. That way, a single failure
would not affect redundancy at all. You can then replace the spare at
your leisure.

If you want to grow the array, I'd also suggest "raid 5 + spare". That's
probably better than 6 for writing. but 6 is better than 5 for
redundancy. Look at having a journal - that could speed up write speed
for raid 6.
> 
> Q2: how would the total number of disks in a
> RAID10 setup affect the tolerance towards
> the failing disks?
> 
Sadly, it doesn't. If you have two copies, losing two disks COULD take
out your raid.

> if the total number of disks is even, then
> it is easy to see how this is equivalent
> to the classical RAID 1+0 as shown in
> md(4), where any disk failure is tolerated
> for as long as each RAID1 group has 1 disk
> failure only.

That's a gamble ...
> 
> so, we get the following combinations of
> disk failures that, if happen, we won't
> lose any data:
> 
>   RAID0
>   --^--
> RAID1   RAID1
> --^--   --^--
> F   .   .   .   < cases with
> .   F   .   .   < single disk
> .   .   F   .   < failures
> .   .   .   F   <
> 
> F   .   .   F   < cases with
> .   F   F   .   < two disk
> .   F   .   F   < failures
> F   .   F   .   <
> .   F   F   .   <
> 
> this gives us 4+5=9 possible disk failure
> scenarious where we can survive it without
> any data loss.
> 
> but, when the number of disks is odd, then
> written bytes and their duplicates will
> start wrap around, and it is difficult for
> me to intuitively see how would this
> affect the total number of scenarious
> where i will survive a disk failure.
> 
> Q3: what are the future growth/shrinkage
> options for a RAID10 setup?  e.g. with
> respect to these:
> 
> 1. read/write speed.

iirc far is good for speed.

> 2. tolerance guarantee towards failing
>disks.

Guarantees? If you have two mirrors. the guarantee is just ONE disk. Yes
you can gamble on losing more.

> 3. total available space.

iirc you can NOT grow the far layout.
> 
> rgrds,
> cm.
> 
You have looked at the wiki - yes I know I push it regularly :-)

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Trouble with backup harddisks

[Wols Lists]

On 02/05/20 02:42, tu...@posteo.de wrote:
> On 05/01 09:27, antlists wrote:
>> On 01/05/2020 09:03, tu...@posteo.de wrote:
>>> Hi Wol,
>>>
>>> data copied !:)
>>>
>>> I did a
>>>
>>>  mdadm --examine /dev/sdb
>>
>> Except I pointed you at a utility called lsdrv, not mdadm ... :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Wol
>>
> 
> Hi Wol,
> 
> Ouuouud...oh damn! Sorry, Wol...
> 
> I donwloaded the lsdrv from github and this is, what it prints
> 
>   File "./lsdrv", line 323
> os.mkdir('/dev/block', 0755)
>   ^
> SyntaxError: leading zeros in decimal integer literals are not permitted; use 
> an 0o prefix for octal integers
> [1]4367 exit 1 ./lsdrv
> 
> 
> Seems a little buggy...
> 
did you read the note that says it is a Python 2 script? Unless it's
been updated (I haven't checked) you need to change the shebang line to
force python2.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] 32GB RAM and Swap

[Wols Lists]

On 01/05/20 21:29, Dale wrote:
> It gets really slow to respond when it uses swap but it beats crashing. 
> Just set swapiness to a low number.  I think mine is set to 10.
> 
> Given the cheapness of hard drives, I'm not sure why having several
> gigabytes of swap space is of much concern.  I have the same amount of
> ram as you and I have a 12GB swap space.  I use LVM so I can grow it if
> needed or just add another swap space.  I might add, I've seen times
> where it gets used.

That first paragraph is why too much swap space is bad - if an app goes
rogue it can kill system response and make regaining control of the
system a nightmare.

Accidentally or on purpose, if a system runs out of ram and starts
thrashing, you're in big trouble if it's an app eating memory like no
tomorrow.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Trouble with backup harddisks

[Wols Lists]

On 30/04/20 11:36, tu...@posteo.de wrote:
> But than I have the same problem another way around: I can
> no longer access my new system ... due to the different 
> sector size
> 
> Are there any other ways to fix this problem?

All I can suggest is to check the kernel and see if it's an option that
has been disabled (512-byte sectors, that is).

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Trouble with backup harddisks

[Wols Lists]

On 30/04/20 10:32, tu...@posteo.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> recently I switched from the old MBR-scheme to GPT on
> my new PC.
> 
> I have two external USB-harddisk, which were partioned/formatted with
> a MBR-scheme/MSDOS partition (but were never used to boot from. They are pure
> data containers).
> 
> When I connect these to my new PC, only the device is shown:
> /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc.
> 
> The kernel is configured (beside other things) as follows:
> 
> #
> # Partition Types
> #
> CONFIG_PARTITION_ADVANCED=y
> # CONFIG_ACORN_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_AIX_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_OSF_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_AMIGA_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_ATARI_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_MAC_PARTITION is not set
> CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION=y
> # CONFIG_BSD_DISKLABEL is not set
> # CONFIG_MINIX_SUBPARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_SOLARIS_X86_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_UNIXWARE_DISKLABEL is not set
> # CONFIG_LDM_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_SGI_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_ULTRIX_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_SUN_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_KARMA_PARTITION is not set
> CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y
> # CONFIG_SYSV68_PARTITION is not set
> # CONFIG_CMDLINE_PARTITION is not set
> # end of Partition Types
> 
> CONFIG_BLOCK_COMPAT=y
> CONFIG_BLK_MQ_PCI=y
> CONFIG_BLK_MQ_VIRTIO=y
> CONFIG_BLK_PM=y
> 
> dmesg shows this:
> [14617.672363] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=25a2, 
> bcdDevice=10.21
> [14617.672364] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, 
> SerialNumber=3
> [14617.672364] usb 2-2: Product: Elements 25A2
> [14617.672365] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Western Digital
> [14617.672366] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 575844314132383959393934
> [14617.681660] usb-storage 2-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
> [14617.681737] scsi host10: usb-storage 2-2:1.0
> [14618.725450] scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD   Elements 25A2
> 1021 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
> [14618.725594] sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
> [14618.728090] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Spinning up disk...
> [14619.748918] ...ready
> 
> I tried different USB ports in a desperate hope of success...
> ...no, same problem.
> 
> Interestingly fdisk shows the following:
> 
> host> sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
> Disk /dev/sdb: 931.49 GiB, 1000170586112 bytes, 1953458176 sectors
> Disk model: Elements 25A2   
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

This could be the key. Sector sizes have been changing from 512 to 4096
over many years. If your kernel has been updated to expect/use 4096 byte
sectors, it might not be able to read the disk properly.

> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x16f2a91f
> 
> Device Boot StartEndSectors   Size Id Type
> /dev/sdb1   1 1953458175 1953458175 931.5G ee GPT
> 
> The type is shown as GPT...but the drive has a MSDOS partition table.
> 
> Reading my (old) internal harddrive with an external USB docking
> station is possible without any problems, though.
> 
> Unfortunatelu I have no space for 1T image of that drive -- otherwise
> I would have made an image copy and experiment with that.
> 
> So better ask, than sorry ;)
> 
> Is this fixable or did I lost my backups?
> 
Do you have access to an old kernel?

The other thing is try using gdisk (or that could be fdisk under another
name :-( But some partitioning schemes can write a GPT with protective
MBR - if you can find something that will take the MBR and write it as a
GPT that might help, too.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Understanding fstrim...

[Wols Lists]

On 14/04/20 13:51, Rich Freeman wrote:
> I believe they have
> to be PCIv3+ and typically have 4 lanes, which is a lot of bandwidth.

My new mobo - the manual says if I put an nvme drive in - I think it's
the 2nd nvme slot - it disables the 2nd graphics card slot :-(

Seeing as I need two graphics cards to double-head my system, that means
I can't use two nvmes :-(

But using the 1st nvme slot disables a sata slot, which buggers my raid
up ... :-(

Oh well. That's life :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] repair uefi vfat /boot?

[Wols Lists]

On 24/03/20 20:11, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
> from now on, will start the smart daemon + some raid solution (after replacing
> faulty disk).

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

Cheers,
Wol