Andree's Debian & General Musings

I only sent a [VAC] message on Sunday asking people whether they'd be interested to meet in Melbourne this week. To my great surprise and delight, this resulted in a nice Japanese dinner at Ginza with Russell Coker, Hamish Moffat, Anibal Monsalve Salazar and Jason (sorry, no full name) followed by a drink in a pub in the city. (The drink was actually free as in beer due to Russell organising some vouchers - very good! ;-) )
We had interesting conversations about various topics including Debconf6 which Anibal had attended and it was really good to meet some other Debian developers. Hamish stayed a bit longer and we had a good conversation about packaging, Ubuntu and the general direction of Debian.
In summary a very nice evening - thanks guys! ;-)

I'm in Melbourne for the week, so I thought I take a laptop with Ubuntu Dapper from work with me to see how Mondo Rescue works on it.
I had prepared myself well by making sure that all build dependencies where installed - or so I thought. It turned out that I couldn't install the freshly built packages because some binary dependencies where not installed - very clever. Not.
I didn't have Internet access in the hotel, the winmodem in the laptop doesn't work with free software and there were no (free) WLAN access points. I did, however, have my Treo 650 with an SD memory card. Also, I noticed for the first time that the laptop actually has an SD card slot. I tried the card from the Treo in the laptop and amazingly enough it just worked. (There you go, another glorious Ubuntu success story...) So, I downloaded the necessary packages using the Treo's Blazer webbrowser (which didn't go all that smoothly, downloading stalled all the time basically, but removing and reinserting the SD card helped here), and then installed from the SD card onto the laptop.
Looks like Mondo Rescue is running quite well on Ubuntu Dapper at least in the standard install, i.e. no RAID and no LVM. Cool. Writing to DVDs directly literally takes hours, though. No idea why that is, so I haven't run out of things to keep me entertained yet. ;-)

mindi-1.08-2-1, mindi-busybox-1.00-7 and mondo-2.08-2-1 are now in incoming. The main changes apart from being new upstream versions are:

• LVM support,
• includes Debian-specific post-nuke script to update initrd images after restore,
• fixed DHCP support, i.e. using something like 'nuke ipconf=dhcp:eth0' should work now (feature done by Bruno, I just ironed out some scripting buglets).

I have switched over to upload amd64 packages partially because I wanted to and partially as a workaround for the still unamended Packages-arch-specific file. If anyone can tell me how to get this changed, I'd be very grateful. Other than that, I have double-checked that i386 builds in pbuilder, so fingers crossed that i386 packages are going to get built automatically.

The packages were tested doing a full archive and restore run on sid i386 (NFS) using kernel 2.6.16-2-k7 (2.6.16-14) and on sid amd64 (ISO/DVD) using kernel 2.6.16-2-amd64-generic (2.6.16-14) (I've had intermittent problems with the OOM killer in -k8 kernels during restore.). The amd64 setup uses a combination of two RAID volumes and two physical LVM volumes one of them on top of RAID with multiple logical volumes. (/boot is a normal partition because I like grub.)

Hopefully, I can now focus somewhat more on the remaining bugs, some of which look like they might entice substantial upstream work. We'll see. Oh, and upgrading mindi-busybox to 1.1.3 would also be nice, there is a problem with mount/mtab support that I have to get to the bottom of first.

All in all, with both RAID and LVM support pretty much there (knock on wood), Mondo Rescue in etch should be much improved over the version in sarge.

I just noticed that I haven't written anything for more than three weeks, so I thought it's time to give a little bit of an update:

Packaging mindi 1.0.8 and mondo 2.0.8 is coming along nicely, albeit with more work involved than I was actually hoping for. I've put together a bit of a list of issues and their workarounds. Interestingly enough, nothing of this stuff is actually related directly to Mondo Rescue.

I have put some effort into LVM2 support and am now able to restore an amd64 Sid system with RAID and LVM2 (on top of RAID; /boot is still a normal partition because I like grub). Also, I have added a post-nuke script that rebuilds initrd images to adjust them to things like different IDE controllers on the restore system. It still has some shortcomings which I hope to address in future versions.

Hopefully, I'll be able to release new packages within the next few days.