Re: NFS max file size??

2003-09-22 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 06:47:20PM +0200, Joan Tur wrote:

 I need to copy files over 2GB over a NFS share, but it seems to be limited to 
 2GB  8-?

Correct.

Use NFS-V3. 

Roger. 

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Re: burning a lot of coasters

2003-09-19 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 03:45:00PM +0800, Crispin Wellington wrote:
 discipline). Realtime scheduling allows the burning process to get all
 the CPU it needs, regardless of what other processes are doing. I have
 never made any coasters, ever, burning as root.

Right. But in practise, lack of CPU is seldomly a problem. If anything
your buffer underrus will come from IO bottlenecks. 

Of course you can starve the burning process if you really want to. 

yes  /dev/null 
!!  !!  
!!  !!  
!!  !!  
!!  !!  

But if you get a shrinking or too small buffer, it's usually the 
disk not being able to seek fast enough. For example, if your source
tree has lots of small files. The seek-to-the-data of all those small
files will hurt throughput in a major way. 

And even worse: If you have anohter process suddenly require that
kind of attention of the disk drive. 

Roger. 

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Re: Computer won't boot without video cable

2003-09-19 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 08:09:42PM -0400, Mark Roach wrote:
 On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 16:22, John Hasler wrote:
  Why not just pull out the video card?
 
 Most systems will not boot if no video card is present. I imagine there
 is some guide on line on how to fool the video card into thinking a
 monitor is present using some sort of loopback adapter, possibly as
 simple as a wire from one pin to another.

Most of my computers say (a to me very familiar): 

beeep beep beep beep

when they boot without video card. 


Make sure you configure the bios to: 

HALT on no erorrs. 

It's usually on the first screen, below the settings for the 
drives. (on AMIBIOS at least)

Roger. 

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Re: burning a lot of coasters

2003-09-17 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 06:10:58PM -0400, Mark Roach wrote:
 I recently acquired a dvd+rw drive for archival of a few hundred gigs of
 document images and have been fairly disappointed with the performance
 of the device. I have gotten a total of 7 good, 4 bad dvds from the
 drive. It's a firewire device, I'm using growisofs as a normal user, and
 this is the error I keep getting
 
 Sep 15 20:55:23 imgburner kernel: Current sr00:00: sense key Medium Error
 Sep 15 20:55:23 imgburner kernel: Additional sense indicates Write error
 Sep 15 20:55:24 imgburner kernel: Current sr00:00: sense key Medium Error
 Sep 15 20:55:24 imgburner kernel: Additional sense indicates Write error
 Sep 15 20:59:46 imgburner kernel:  I/O error: dev 0b:00, sector 64

Are you using some dvd burning software and dvd+w media? My colleagues
say that the DVD burners don't have burnproof when burning DVDs, so
you hsould have your DVD image ready at all times. We build an image
in a large file on a local disk before starting to burn it. 

Oh, and we run the burn as root because otherwise it complains about not
being able to increase its priority. 

In theory this should not be a problem if you're using DVD+RW media. In
theory

Roger. 

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Re: Dual Parallel Ports and a PLX 9052 chip

2003-09-06 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 01:24:51AM -0400, Jody Grafals wrote:
 I just bought cheepy PCI dual Parallel Port card with a PLX 9052 chip 
 for my home linux server so I can add a second printer and a Old school 
 Connectix Web Cam but I can not get it working. I already have a Zip 
 drive and a printer working with the onboard parallel port with kernel 
 2.5.69. The PLX 9052 chips is in all kinds of wired stuff so I have not 
 had much luck on google looking for answers. Has anyone used this chip 
 before to support parallel ports or can anyone point me in the right 
 direction?
 
 I get nothing about the card in dmesg but I do get this output from lspci
 # lspci -vv
 00:0f.0 Network controller: PLX Technology, Inc. PCI - IOBus Bridge 
 (rev 02)
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 10
Region 0: Memory at e8002000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128]
Region 1: I/O ports at b000 [size=128]


Try telling the lpt layer that a printer port lives at 0xb000. 
See if that just happens to magically work. (I'm too lazy to go and
read the manuals for you, but you should be able to figure it out
by yourself..)

Then, suppose that it works, you will have to guess where the second
one lives: 
0xb004
0xb008
0xb010
0xb020
0xb040

Are the most likely candidates. 

Roger. 

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Re: an unfortunate dummy apologies

2003-09-01 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 05:13:22PM +, zoe wrote:
 apologies for my post yesterday

Accepted.

 red hat, suse, mandrake, caldera, and half a dozen
 other distributions all crashed or became unworkable)

Sounds like a hardware problem in your computer. 

 But then the desk bar/task bar stated to flicker and disappear under
 my user mode in KDE.  Root seemed ok, so did gnome. I repeatedly
 rebooted and restarted it feebly trying to get control.  At last I
 shifted it to the roof of the monitor and it seemed to stabilise.

Sounds like a hardware problem in your computer.

Read http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/ .

It sort of assumes you were trying to compile a kernel, and got
signal 11 erorrs during that. I recommend that after reading the
FAQ, you start compiling kernels just to try to get the signal 11
errros. If you do, then you know for sure that you've got a hardware
problem on your hands.

Roger.

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Re: killing xsane

2003-08-31 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 11:25:07PM -0400, Bret Comstock Waldow wrote:
 And it won't go away.  ps ax sees it - kill 'pid' doesn't get rid of
 it.  'killall xsane' won't get rid of it.

You COULD as a last resort send it the unconditional kill signal.

However, if you kill xsane it will try to neatly shut down the
scan-device. This takes (in some cases, on my scanner) over half 
a minute. IMHO, that's preferable to killing the scanning prgram 
forcibly.  (It's waiting for the scanner to complete somthing, and
the scanner wont do anything else unless it's finished doing that...)

Roger. 

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Re: cloning Debian hard drive

2003-08-28 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 09:49:40PM +0200, mess-mate wrote:
 On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:49:44 +1000
 Corey Ralph [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
 | On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 01:27  AM, Victory wrote:
 |  1, Is there way to clone this hard drive ?
 | 
 | If you are cloning it to an identical hard drive, you can use dd, eg:
 | 
 | dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
 | 
 Do you mean the same capacity or the same capacity AND manufacter/model ??
 mess-mate

The new disk needs to be exactly the same size, or larger. Note
that some manufacturers sell drives that are 80 million kilobytes
as 80 Gb, while other manufacturers sell a drive that is only
80 billion bytes as 80 Gb. So even if they are both 80 gig they
might not be the same size. 

When you've copied it, and the second disk is larger, you have a 
couple of options. Leave the unused space at the end as it is, or
try to use it. 

You could just add an extra partition at the end provided you already
had an extended partition. That's the easiest. Expanding the 
partition closest to teh end is the other option which risks losing
the data on that one when not done exactly right...

Roger. 

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Re: spamassassin

2003-08-27 Thread Rogier Wolff

The suggestion to use -L to perform only local tests will indeed
prevent the Osirussoft blacklist from influencing your scores. But
it might also prevent other useful checks from running. 

I added:

score RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM 0.0

to my ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs file. 

Roger. 

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Re: Challenge-response mail filters considered harmful

2003-08-14 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 12:32:53PM -0700, Alan Connor wrote:
 Right. A properly designed CR requires the recipient of the CR to hit Reply
 and paste a string on the subject line. ONCE. Only one time EVER.

Wrong. I want to communicate with lots of people. I have to do that
for every CR system user.

Roger. 

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Re: Using dd to copy a disk.

2003-07-29 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 11:14:32PM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
  Note that I'm recommending you run lilo while you're concerned about
  the MBR. It might work, but running LILO again gives you a bigger
  chance to get it to work
 
 Yes, I would think I'd need to do that.  The RAID card is confusing to 
 me -- I assume the MBR says which drive and which sector (first sector, 
 I suppose) to load the OS.  So I'd think that would be different for the 
 new hardware.

Yes. However it should be telling:

drive 0x80 sector 1234

where 1234 is the LBA of the sector to be requested, which will in 
fact not change. Also drive 0x80 is the first BIOS drive, which
should also work. So, as long as you've specified LBA as an option
in the lilo.conf, things might just work.

 
  Oh, Note that you'd be copying a LIVE partition. A logging filesystem
  like ext3 or XFS will take care in writing stuff to the drive in the
  right order. You're screwing that up by just copying over the
  raw drive.
 
 So rsync would be a better way to go, then.  That would avoid that 
 problem.

Yes. In that case skipping the rerunning lilo step is no longer 
dangerous but guaranteed not to work. 

 Otherwise, probably best to drop into single mode and then mount 
 everything read only, as you suggest, and then run the dd command.
 I assume rsync will handle the symlinks ok.  Plus I could re-partition 
 the drive (say into a single partition) and rsync wouldn't care.

Right. 

 I would have expected rsync to take longer, but I guess as was pointed 
 out dd will copy unused sectors.

Right.  In the case where I did it, it copied 70G of unused sectors, 
and finding out which 10G to copy took less time... 

Roger. 

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Re: Using dd to copy a disk.

2003-07-28 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 12:53:27PM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
 I need to clone a disk.  The source is a 3ware hardware RAID 1 array.  
 From Linux it looks like /dev/sda
 
 $ mount
 /dev/sda2 on / type xfs (rw)
 proc on /proc type proc (rw)
 devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
 /dev/sda5 on /tmp type xfs (rw)
 /dev/sda6 on /usr type xfs (rw)
 /dev/sda7 on /var type xfs (rw)
 /dev/sda8 on /usr/local type xfs (rw)
 /dev/sda9 on /home type xfs (rw)
 
 The destination is /dev/hda
 
 Can I build a new bare metal drive on /dev/hda using dd
 
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda
 
 Will that work with the hardware RAID array?  If so will it also copy 
 the MBR?

Yep. Yep. 

 The destination drive will NOT be used in a RAID array.  Also, the 
 drives in the RAID array cannot be used outside of the array due to the 
 meta data written by 3ware card.

I take objection to the term cannot be used: 
As harddisk-recovery.com we'll make them work if neccesary, but
that's not really relevant now.

 Is there a better way to clone the data on my RAID array for use in a 
 stand-alone (non-raid) machine?

This is the one command that does the job easily. 

- Make sure the destination drive is large enough. 
- It might boot, it might not. 

- Modify the /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf files before rebooting. 
- Add

device=/dev/hda
  bios=0x80

to Lilo.conf, mount the hda disk on /mnt and then run 
  lilo -r /mnt

(Mount at least the / and /boot partitions! Hmm. you don't have /boot,
so / would have to do )

Note that I'm recommending you run lilo while you're concerned about
the MBR. It might work, but running LILO again gives you a bigger
chance to get it to work


I recently cloned a drive this way. Copying over the 80G took quite
some time. 

It would have been faster to just mount both sides and perform an
rsync. Note that rsync is a great tool for stuff like this: 

partition hda to your liking
mk???fs /dev/hda2
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt
rsync -vax / /mnt

should do the trick for one parttion. 

Oh, Note that you'd be copying a LIVE partition. A logging filesystem
like ext3 or XFS will take care in writing stuff to the drive in the
right order. You're screwing that up by just copying over the
raw drive. (the OS might write onto some block that you've already
passed in your dd, and THEN write a block that you haven't. So the
copied filesystem will have the second write, but not the first. That's
bad if that was a required ordering. I've done this lots of times without
trouble on an ext2 filesystem, and the resulting fsck never found any
trouble. I've done it once on an ext3 filesystem, and DID get into 
trouble. So be careful: It's obviously better to remount everything 
readonly before doing this 
mount -n -o remount,ro / 
mount -n -o remount,ro /tmp
mount -n -o remount,ro /var 
...

Roger. 

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Re: 120 GB hard drive on old P75

2003-07-17 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 10:50:13AM -0700, Carl D. Blake wrote:
 Jul 11 14:31:46 gondolin kernel: hdc: IC35L060AVVA07-0, ATA DISK drive
 Jul 11 14:31:46 gondolin kernel: hdd: , ATA DISK drive

Your kernel is having trouble contacting hdd with the question:
Hi, what's your name?.  This could imply that there are other 
problems for example with: Hi, what's your capacity?

Some drives simply  don't work with certain other drives. So, can you
try if the 120G drive works when it isn't slave to the IBM drive?

Speaking of which... You have a 60G IBM drive. Those sometimes 
suddenly break down. You do have good backups or no important stuff
on that drive don't you?

(Some people say: Oh, but those break down in the first 3-6 months, 
mine's been working for over a year now, so I'm safe. Yeah! Right!
Anything but my data.)

Roger. 

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Re: 120 GB hard drive on old P75

2003-07-17 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 10:50:13AM -0700, Carl D. Blake wrote:
 Jul 11 14:31:46 gondolin kernel: hdc: IC35L060AVVA07-0, ATA DISK drive

Oh! Before I forget.  Even if that IBM drive is labelled Hitachi 
or HP, it's still an IBM drive. 

Oh, ignore the comments from others about 80 pin cables. That's just
for extra performance in modern computers. It shouldn't affect you
with your old storage-server. (The 120G drive is capable of doing 
about 50Mb per second, your P75 will only be able to get 5 to 10Mb
per second of that drive anyway)

Roger. 

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Re: keystroke ctrl+s freezes terminal/console

2003-07-15 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 07:33:47AM -0400, Shawn Lamson wrote:
 Hey all -
 
 I have noticed that pressing ctrl+s in console or xterm suspends
 input... I have not figured out how to successfully get out of that
 situation.  Is there a graceful way?  What is the purpose of ctrl+s
 ( i believe I have the emacs style command line editor )?  How can I
 disable ctrl+s or alter it so that it does not freeze my
 console/xterm?

Note that control-S doesn't suspend input. It suspends OUTPUT!
control-Q lets the output go again. 

Rogier.

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Re: NP-complete whatever, solve the knapsack problem!

2003-07-15 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 06:35:31AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
 On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 05:10, martin f krafft wrote:
  Scenario: 100 Files between 100-200Mb.
  Desired Result: These burned to CD in any order, so that to minimise
the number of CDRs
  
  Question: is there a tool to automate this?
 
 When I've had very similar problems, I've created a 2 column file
 with filenames and sizes, and import it into a spreadsheet.
 
 Sort it by size descending, and start playing best fit.  With
 Cut-and-paste and sum(), it really goes pretty quickly.

I do the same with du | sort -n and a couple of directories. 

But if someone knows a tool, I'd appreciate it!

(Note that I'd be willing to accept a non-optimal solution as long as
it isn't too far off. Note that we would normally move to DVDs if the
number of CDs becomes too large. So the number of disks is usually not
very large.)

Roger. 

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Re: Is my hard drive dying?

2003-03-25 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 03:32:13AM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1
 
 On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 10:16:28PM -, Andrew Pritchard wrote:
  Does this mean my drive is dying? I've not had any problems with the machine
  till now.
 
 If you don't have hdparm spinning down your drives, odds are you are
 looking at the early stages of a hrd drive failure.

Early? One of the blocks on the drive just went away. It's most
likely unrecoverable. Moreover, it's not just a block that wasn't 
used at all, because otherwise, the kernel wouldn't have requested
it from the drive. So, Andrew: Get your data off that drive ASAP, 
consider the drive a goner until proven otherwise. 

(Some people are giving lots of possibilities of the drive not 
giving the ghost. I find this dangerous: If I'd get lots of advice
it could be this or that, which all indicate that the data will
be safe on the drive, I'd consider checking that out while in fact
I should be backing up the data that can still be read from the 
drive. 

Andrew already got his important data off the drive. Good.  But
for the others: You might end up feeling very sorry if you push 
someone with a faulty drive into checking out a couple of other 
possiblities before they try to backup their data, and it's too 
late)

Roger. 

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Re: Mysterious disk activity

2003-01-27 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 01:58:04AM +, Pigeon wrote:
 Hi,
 
 I get these occasional very long bursts of disk activity, usually but
 not always within an hour or so of booting up, during which the HD LED is
 on continuously and the machine is very slow to respond. There were
 cron jobs running global finds, which I knocked out; this helped, but

Yes, that's for the locate command. You can use locate filename, and
it will quickly (i.e. within two seconds, if you have less than a couple
of million files unlike us) show you where files live that have 
that name. 


 didn't stop it entirely. To make it more mysterious, ps ax during such
 a burst shows nothing untoward:

If the knock them out is by hand, then you will have let find run
for a couple of seconds. A little later, your system will decide that 
find accessed a bunch of directories, and will write hte last access
time on those directories back to disk. That would explain the disk IO
burst. 

Note that load does not always correspond to CPU usage: The system 
will count processes waiting for disk IO towards the load as well. 
This represents the slowness that lots of disk IO causes you to
feel. 

The updatedb (that find running for locate) will run from the dayly
cron jobs. There might be a bunch of other things that are considered
useful to run every day. 

Oh, most systems (I haven't checked debian) will move the dayly jobs
to the middle of the night if you leave your system running 

Roger. 

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Re: Follow-up: Worst night ever...

2003-01-16 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 12:17:04AM -0600, Michael Kahle wrote:
 Disk: 6x 36MB Ultra SCSI disks

 I also need some advise how to partition the drives.  I figure most of it
 will be one large partition (~80-100GB RAID 5), and a few other partitions
 for things like swap, root, boot, homes, etc.  I am of the school that has
 had only a few partitions in the past.  One for boot, one for root and one
 for swap.  I understand that this is not the best way to configure ones
 system.  Any advise?  Please be detailed.

I would assign an 2Gb partition at the beginning of every drive, and
assign the rest for the big raid. 

Just install the system onto the first 2G partition of the first drive, 
and only later worry about setting up the RAIDs. 

Use the 6x 34G partitions for your large dataset. I would suggest: 
5 disks in raid configuration and a hot spare. That will give you 136G
of data-space. 

The small partitions you use to mirror your root. Assign one for swap 
(how about the one that is hot spare in the raid config?).  Think 
about what to do with the other three. (e.g. a nightly backup of
your root perhaps: A mirror doesn't protect you against woops, I didn't 
mean to delete THAT.)

Roger. 

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Re: how to rename multiple files

2003-01-07 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 09:51:21PM -0500, Fraser Campbell wrote:
 On January 4, 2003 09:20 pm, the fabulous Gerald V. Livingston II wrote:
 
  Thank you. Took a couple of tries to get the syntax correct but I
  ended up with this:
 
  if [ `ls *.jpg 2/dev/null|wc -l` -gt 0 ]
 
  then for i in *.jpg; do mmv $i `date +%s`-$a.jpg; a=a+1; done
 
  fi
 
 If there were thousands of jpgs you'll probably still get a too many 
 arguments error with that for loop.  I usually do something like this:

Nope, The for is internal to the shell. It will not suffer from the
too many arguments problem. Whereas, the ls you suggest is external
and WILL have that problem!
 
 ls *.jpg | while read i; do
 mv $i `date +%s`-$a.jpg; a=a+1
 done

[ I created a directory whith too many files and then: ]

sh-2.05$ ls * | while read i ; do
 echo $i
 done
sh: /bin/ls: Argument list too long
sh-2.05$ 

[ whereas: ]

sh-2.05$ for i in * ; do echo $i; done

alksdjfklasjljkdasjkladsjklasdjlkasjkldfljksljkjklassdkljfljkdsfjlsalkfj999
h-2.05$

(ls IS internal on some shells, but apparently not in mine, or maybe
not when running non-interactively, but then again, I DID do this
interactively... )

Roger. 

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Re: debian on openbrick

2003-01-03 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 06:36:32PM -0500, Bao C. Ha wrote:
 Personally, I don't think it is safe to mount the compactflash as
 the live root filesystem.  It is not designed to have that many
 write-cycles as a regular hard disk.  So, even with a larger size 
 compactflash, what we are doing will still be valuable contributions.

FYI, 

I'm doing a project where I had my ext-3 root filesystem mounted
read-write. Turns out that by turning off the power to the system, 
you can crash the filesystem beyond repair. 

My client has seen it two or three times, I've seen it happen twice. 

I'm hoping it won't happen again when I use the root filesystem
read-only. 

Roger. 

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Re: How stupid can i get :( - please help pls pls pls

2002-12-29 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 12:25:37AM -0800, Jatin Golani wrote:
 Now if I try to boot into Debian I get a kernel panic.
 When booted into Mandrake, fdisk still shows the
 partition as a Linux partition with id 83...if I
 try to mount this partition i get a bad fs, bad
 superblock or too many mounted filesystems msg. If i
 try doing a swapon /dev/hda6 (hda6 is or was my
 ext3)just to see if i can load it as swap, swapon
 doesn't complain :( Under Windows Partition Magic
 still shows the partition as Linux

Hi Jatin, 

First let me say that I work for a commercial data-recovery company. 
My guess is that we would be able to recover most of your data, so if
you really, really value your data, feel free to send it to us (or a
competitor if you want, but I doubt that they have as much experience
with Linux as we do.)

You could try to do an fsck with an alternative superblock. That should
work,  but could make matters worse. So here in the lab we'd make an
image of that partition before we would try such a thing

Roger. 

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Re: MotherBoards - Dual Athlon PC2100 vs Single Athlon PC2700/3200

2002-12-29 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 04:26:21AM -0600, Hanasaki JiJi wrote:
 Any thoughts on overall performance if the following systems?  The key 
 factors are:
 1. Support by Woody out of the box
 2. Will the single processor systems be faster because the memory is 
 slower on the duals?
 3. Is onboard video better/faster due to better bandwidth?
 
 Dual Athlon 2400MP and PC2100 - 760MPX
 MPX only supports PC2100
 Motherboards considered
   ASUS A7M266-D
   ^^^ That's the one I have. 
   Tyan Thunder K7X (S2468)
   MSI K7D Master (MS-6501-030)
   Gigabyte GA7DPXDW+
   Gigabyte GA7DPDW-C
 
   VS
 
 Single Athlon and PC2700 or PC3200 - KT400
 No motherboards found w/ fast RAM and dual cpu
   ASUS A7V8X LAN
   Soyo SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra
   Soyo SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra (Platinum Edition)
   Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra
 
 nForce2
   ASUS A7N8X - PC3200/2700

I had an Aopen AK77-8XN


Onboard Video could be fast, but make sure that it has separate
video RAM, and doesn't grab some of your mauin memory. That'll
impact performance more than the second CPU. 

In theory I could desing an application that depends wholly on the
memory throughput. So having pc2100 would be slower than pc3200. 
This would mean the duals would bite the dust. 

I could also design an application that DOES NOT depend on the
memory bandwidth, but only on the raw CPU speed. This time the
dual athlons will win big. 

What YOU will be doing with those machines will be somewhere in
the middle. My guess is that the multicpu machines will feel faster.

Oh! My KT400 board had an issue with the AGP port: I couldn't get it
to go fast. The result? I went back to a KT266 based board. 

Roger. 

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Re: Webcam

2002-12-28 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Fri, Dec 27, 2002 at 09:46:33PM +0100, Jens Gecius wrote:
 bob parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 
  http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages2.pl?keywords=webcam
 
  I did that and I installed the package called webcam, it is a package for 
  ftp loading a stream of webcam images to a server. It is not for dowloading
  still images to the hard drive.
 
  Why not try out your own advice before giving it to see if it does the job?
 
 Actually, I did that. What I didn't do is researching your famous
 webcam. No matter what the manufacturer calls it, if it's a digicam,
 you should have asked digicam not webcam. If it's a webcam, use
 any v4l-program - if you have a v4l-driver for that cam.
 
 So, please, don't tell others how to give advice if your question is
 imprecise. 

The first reading of his post made it clear to me that he had a 
detachable webcam. There is no use if you start bitching because 
you can't read. 

Roger. 

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Re: computer hypothermia -- help!

2002-12-26 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 01:35:24AM -0500, Nori Heikkinen wrote:
 on Thu, 26 Dec 2002 12:24:18AM -0600, Kent West insinuated:
  Nori Heikkinen wrote:
  
  right ... i forgot to mention (important, i realize) that not only
  was [the computer] in the car for 4 days, it was also in the car
  when it hit a deer going quite fast. 

  
  
  So, how fast was the deer going?   ;-)
 
 :)  well, i'm not sure, but it was directly orthogonal to the
 direction i was going in, at highway speeds ...
 
 seriously, can an impact like that fry a computer?  i've made backups
 and am going to fool aroud with connections in the morning, but i'm
 wondering what i'm looking at here ... it seems kind of dire.  :(

harddisks can withstand a pretty hefty G-load: 70G for the quantum
Fireball TM drive for which I happen to have the manual. 

However, if you calculate the G-forces for a drive dropping from 
5cm (2 inches) onto a solid table, you'll get VERY high numbers
(at least 500G!). 

Now, if you were in a car, and you survived, something tied to the 
car probably didn't experience enormously high G-forces. However, 
if the computer was in the back, and allowed to start moving before
hitting something solid, then chances are that it experienced WAY
too high G-forces. 

Now the number in the manual is a guarantee: the manufacturer 
guarantees that if you stay below 70, the drive will still work. 
OEMs may actually want to test that number before they buy it. 

In an uncontrolled experiment, you might easily hit 500G and still
have a drive that sort-of works. 

On the other hand, from the sound of it, it sounds as if you need
to reconnect everything inside the computer, and it will work again. 

Roger. 

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Re: SMTP standards : needs outgoing SMTP server be MX for my domain?

2002-12-20 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 04:08:59PM +0100, DEFFONTAINES Vincent wrote:
 An organization refuses emails from my domain, under this reason :
 My domain's mailer that connects to their SMTP server is not MX of my
 domain.

Well, if they want to refuse mail from you they can do so for any
reason they like. They'll refuse mail from all large ISPs here in 
the netherlands (they will have separate servers for incoming
and outgoing mail: they need different machines for these things,
because of the load, and this separation is natural). 

I host a couple of domains, and ALL people mailing from those domains
will be refused: My server (the MX) does NOT relay.

 I am wondering if SMTP standards require that email sender of a domain be
 its MX? I find that really surprising.

It is their decision to filter on some stupid hint that a mail 
might be spam. This is a very bad hint, and has lots of false 
positives. Their problem. 

Roger. 

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Re: Debian hotswap and 5 9's

2002-12-11 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 10:25:54PM -0800, nate wrote:
 Hanasaki JiJi said:
 5 9s on any hardware..You need redundant motherboards, power supplies,
Yes. 
 cpus, ram, disks, network, and of course it all needs to be hot swappable.

No. 

Think RAID. 

In RAID it is acceptable that any one harddrive goes completely 
bad. 

So, if you have a computer that allows it's network card to fail, 
sends you an Email requesting a new network card, and that you can
change the network card all while the computer is still completelly
functional, then that's great. One way to solve the problem. 

However if your system remains up because you get an Email from the
redundant computer who took over, then that's acceptable as well, as
long as you reach the stated goal (99.999% uptime of the SYSTEM!!). 

If you have staff onsite who can diagnose a broken switch in less than
a minute and they have the spare parts to replace it within two minutes, 
you can tolerate one or two of these single-point-of-failure  failures
a year. 

But this solution is more expensive than devising a fail-over system
(you do this ONCE!) that allows the switch to fail without bringing 
the system down, and then buying two switches (you had to have one
spare in the case with the clever staff as well!). 

Also note that if for example, your failover can lose one transaction,
you can consider this a partial failure of your system. If it takes a 
week to recover the transaction (humans on the phone?) and this is
1 millionth of your transactions in that week, then this can be considered
a 0.0001 % of downtime during that week, or 0.02% on a yearly
scale. You can have this happen twice a week and still easily achieve
five nines aggregate uptime. 

The bad reputation that you'd get from losing a tranasction may however
be valued more, so that you'd have to weigh this type of failure. Fine
Multiply by ten, and with the presumed volume, you're still plenty clear
of five nines. 

Roger. 

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Re: Debian hotswap and 5 9's

2002-12-11 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 10:46:43PM -0800, nate wrote:
 the places that I have worked at probably aim for 95% uptime to be
 minimum. not sure how many hours or days a year of downtime that
 calculates to ..

I realistically aim for 99.9% on my webserver. Last year we got around
99.99, this year we won't. We swapped hardware twice this year. One 
time with 0 downtime, as we also moved location and IP address. The
other time we didn't get to plan ahead and had to suffer several minutes
of downtime due to reboots to swap the motherboard. All in all about 
20 minutes of downtime over a period of about an hour. 

But yes, we don't have measures in place to ensure that we reach this
level of reliability. So we're in trouble if something bad happens. 

Roger. 

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Re: Debian hotswap and 5 9's

2002-12-11 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 02:19:23AM -0800, nate wrote:
 Rogier Wolff said:
 
  No.
 
  Think RAID.
 
 think CPU fan fails, CPU overheats, CPU fails, system crashes.

You misunderstand my think Raid remark. In a RAID configuration you
can handle a WHOLE DISK going offline. If your SYSTEM can handle a
whole CPU giving the ghost, then you can still achieve high uptimes 
by just taking over the jobs on another machine. 

So, if you want reliable storage you can buy ultra-reliable disks, and
hope they never die, or you can buy a Redundant Array of Inexpensive
Disks, and use them in such a way that any one of them failing wont
bring your whole storage system down.

Similarly if you want a reliable system, you can buy ultra-reliable
Sun-ultra with internal failover for RAM, CPUs, powersupplies network
cards etc etc. Or you can configure a Redundant Array of Inexpensive
Linuxboxes.

If you configure it correctly, any failure on one of the linuxboxes is
indeed likely to bring the whole box down, but the system will keep on
providing it's services.

Roger. 

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Re: sync root passwords?

2002-12-07 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 04:57:27PM -0500, Andrew Perrin wrote:
 You might want to reconsider the project, frankly - why not make different
 root passwords for different machines? That would seem to be a more secure
 alternative. You can make them systematically different to save yourself
 memorizing them all, by (for example) using the second letter of the
 hostname as one of the characters of the root password or something along
 those lines.

Because if you have to start writing them down, they become less secure. 
And if the adversary knows the trick to your systematic modifications
of the password (which may take only one or two to guess correctly), 
you are back to square one. 

In general, for convenience there are rhosts, mounts and ssh keys that
will allow you to go from one machine to another. Failing that, the 
regular sysops will log in using the password from the machine that 
has fallen. Having root, it is trivial to grab the password as it
is being typed. 

Back in '90 I found a remote hole that allowed me root-access to 
about 10% of the hosts under consideration (over 2000). My estimate
was that I'd be penetrating some 70% of the clusters, which would
allow me full access to that cluster, and because of inter-cluster
relationships I'd be able to hack another estimated 25% of the 
clusters, for a total of about 95% of the hosts broken into. 

For the record: I didn't break into any computers, I stopped at
scanning for the hole, and Emailing the sysops to get it fixed. 
(to which one answered within 15 minutes: Ok, thanks, fixed on a
saturday afternoon. No other replies were recieved.)

Roger. 

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Re: tiger always reports 'no password' with NIS

2002-11-24 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 04:09:38PM -0800, nate wrote:
 Sebastian Haase said:
  That is: I use NIS and have specific users maked with a '+' - sign in
  /etc/passwd
  like this:
  +alexis::0:0:::
 
  Isn't this a correct way of 'nis-sifying' certain users !?
 
 yes that is correct, the system is probably complaining because it can't
 find a password in /etc/shadow. Which is to be expected if your using
 NIS, or some other authentication(PAM with mysql, ldap, etc)

Nope. I'm guessing that it is complaining because it thinks that user
+alexis doesn't have a password. TIP: Verify that login agrees that
it's supposed to use NIS, and doesn't allow a username of +alexis,
without a password.

I suggest that you try: 

+alexis:*:0:0:::

to be sure that SHOULD some program have a bug in that it doesn't know
about the NISification, it won't allow +alexis in without a password. 
Hopefully the nis-aware tools will still allow alexis in through the NIS
password. 

Roger. 

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Re: hdparm and DMA

2002-11-19 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 09:40:38AM +1000, mdevin wrote:
 On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 12:47:09 -0500, Mike Dresser wrote:
  On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, mdevin wrote:
  
   # hdparm -i /dev/hdc
   /dev/hdc:
Model=WDC WD400BB-32AUA1, FwRev=18.20D18, SerialNo=WD-WMA6R3707054
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5
  
   # hdparm -i /dev/hda
   /dev/hda:
Model=WDC WD400JB-00ENA0, FwRev=05.03E05, SerialNo=WD-WMAD12312399
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 *mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5
  
  Definately in non-ultradma mode, mdma2 is ... 16mbyte/sec?
  
  See the DMA mode it's using?  I'd take a look at your cabling and routing
  thereof.  What kind of cable is connected to the drive?  Can you take
  this hard drive and stick it in the other computer, and see how it
  performs, using the cable that is in the other computer?
 
 My other computer is older and its motherboard doesn't have support for
 ATA133 (80pin cable), but I guess it would just be treated as ATA100.  I
 can't shut that one down at present though.

FYI: 

From ATA66 onwards, or even ATA33, you  need the 80pin cable. 

Roger. 

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Re: hdparm and DMA

2002-11-19 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:16:57PM +0100, Emil Pedersen wrote:
  /dev/hda:
   Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.46 seconds =278.26 MB/sec
   Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in 16.12 seconds =  3.97 MB/sec
 
 THIS is ok, without dma performance is lousy, but I really don't
 understand why you can't turn it on (or get better perf when you do)!

On my system hdparm complains: Permission denied when I try to turn
on DMA.

My system gets a whopping 5.33Mb per second.


  Thus all the same as before whether turned on or off.  I also tried
  setting MultiSect to max of 16 (which hdparm -i told me it could do),
  but this didn't change things either.
  
  So are the read times as expected for an IDE ATA133, 7200RPM, 40GB drive?
 
 Certainly not.  Bellow is what I got from my IBM 7200 rpm disk, (using
 UDMA66):

My disk gets 48Mb per second in a different system. I have a 7200 RPM
WD800 (the one with the lowsy 2M buffer).

Roger. 

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Re: hdparm and DMA

2002-11-19 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 03:29:24AM +1000, mdevin wrote:
 Actually, some more digging shows some new support in the 2.5 kernel for
 the VIA VT8235 chipset which is on my mobo.  It seems that udma6 can
 then be enabled by passing 'ide0=ata66' to the kernel at boot time.
 (Note that I do have the drive connected using an 80 pin ATA133 cable).

I am running 2.4.18 Debian stock kernel. I just (remotely) rebooted
the box with ide0=ata66, and it still tests at 5.3 Mb per second.


OK, I checked: 2.4.19 doesn't have the 8235 support yet, 2.4.20rc2
does.

I was hesitant to upgrade to a kernel that doesn't come with my
distribution, but I guess I have to. It's not that I'm not competent
to compile my own kernel, it's that it is such a hassle, that I'd
rather not. (It starts with recompiling the thing, rebooting a couple
of times to see what works and what doesn't, Then all of ALSA has to
be recompiled etc etc... I'm told all this is just half an hour work
(if all goes right first time), but it always ends up more (because
it doesn't go right first time) )



Roger. 

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Re: from GIF to PS

2002-11-18 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 03:57:45AM +0200, Egor Tur wrote:
 Hi All.
 How can I convet gif file to postscript file?

I use:

cat file.gif | giftopnm | pnmtops  file.ps

You need netpbm. I just checked: It's available. 

Roger. 

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* The Worlds Ecosystem is a stable system. Stable systems may experience *
* excursions from the stable situation. We are currently in such an  * 
* excursion: The stable situation does not include humans. ***


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Re: Cannot access box after hdparm experimenting

2002-11-18 Thread Rogier Wolff
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 06:14:53PM +0200, Ulla Russell wrote:
 When I reboot now the booting progresses better but then stops
 with the message:
 
kernel panic: No init found. try passsing init= option to kernel
 
 I rebooted and tried typing the following at the lilo prompt:

Hi, 

It looks as if you crashed your system badly by playing with hdparm. 
That usually doesn't happen. 

The crash somehow managed to corrupt your harddisk so that essential
programs (init, bash) are now corrupted and no longer on your disk. 

How much else is gone, I don't know. It will take some work to get
working again. You'd have to boot from CD or floppy to be able to
rescue this. 

I find it unlikely that you need to rerun lilo or grub (whatever
you're using). You might need to figure out where your root fs
is: If that ended up wrong, it's logical that it can't find 
the utilities. 

But I find it much more likely that you had a major fs-screwup, 
and that fsck put everything in lost+found, instead of that a few
bits fell over and magically altered your root parttion into something
that DOES mount, but DOES NOT contain an init and bash. 

Roger. 

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* excursions from the stable situation. We are currently in such an  * 
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