Andree's Debian & General Musings

For some reason, I always thought that it costs money to access the POSIX Standard. Not so - it's freely available (and they even provide a Firefox search plugin)!

I've just uploaded mondo 2.09-2 which comes with a number of improvements and bug fixes (one reported and more unreported):

• No more garbled screens or error messages because of insufficiently escaped strings used in system() or popen(). (Well, not quite true, but the one known issue should be fixed now with new function module mr_stresc() that can be used wherever else needed.)
• mondorestore will now ask in non-nuke mode whether an existing post-nuke script is to be executed. (Doing this is generally a good idea on Debian as the post-nuke script in the package updates the initrd image to adjust for RAID and other system changes.)
  
• Fixed issue where stabgrub-me would fail if /etc/grub.conf is a symbolic link preventing the user from editing the grub config file. (This requires readlink which I've added to mindi-busybox, hence the new mindi-busybox package version.)
• I was getting segmentation faults in space_occupied_by_cd() - it's not a good idea to do fin = popen(...) followed by fgets(...,...,fin) without checking the success of the former. Fixed this by evaluating errno after the popen() call. (Strangely, with the errno checking in place, popen() doesn't seem to fail anymore, which might indicate a different underlying issue althogether - we'll see.)
  

Whilst working on the above I also experienced problems with ntfsclone and the still very present NFS issue with kernel 2.6.17.

Because of bespoke NFS issue I tested with DVDs as backup media on amd64 with kernel 2.6.17-2-amd64 (2.6.17-7).

...is not only an interesting Ringo Starr album, but also describes quite fittingly the nature of an email I received today from Nathanael Nerode.

In his email, Nathanael inquires about #16827, which I had filed a whopping eight years and 231 days ago today.

I hadn't used neither olvwm nor LyX for many years (although especially the latter served me extremely well at the time). But I thought that Nathanael boldly going where noone had gone for more than eight years deserved an equally bold answer, so I installed and tested. The good news is that the issue does indeed appear to be fixed! :-)

There was this long-standing problem with Mondo Rescue that during restore runs the virtual consoles wouldn't work on amd64. I managed to finally track this down to a rather bizarre bug in glibc.

The problem is actually fixed in glibc 2.4. When I found out that 2.4 is not going to make it into etch, I asked whether the fix could be backported to 2.3. To my total delight, this is exactly what Aurelien did! Thank you a lot, indeed! :-)

Without further ado I thus bring you mindi-busybox-1.2.1 with working virtual consoles. (The only other noteworthy change is that there is a link now from /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts in the restore system to keep the new upstream busybox happy.)

Testing was done on:

• sid, i386, stock Debian kernel 2.6.17-2-k7 (2.6.17-6) to NFS
• sid, amd64, stock Debian kernel 2.6.16-2-k8-smp (2.6.16-17), LVM & RAID to NFS
  

I decided that before my socket 939 ASUS A8V Deluxe motherboard becomes obsolete, I should do an upgrade to dual-core. It so happened that my dealer had an Athlon64 X2 4800+ returned to him the other week, so I went for it. It's the fastest that the board supports and comes with juicy 2x 1MB L2 cache (which apparently got axed by AMD now as part of the price-battle with Intel). My only concern was about power/heat/noise because it's the 110W model, but to my delight it appears to be running cooler and quieter than the (130nm) 3500+ I had before. Cool! ;-) While I was at it I also doubled the RAM to 2GB and bought two SATA hard disks and a swappable tray system for them.

The latter was mainly so I could do some tests in regards to #380703. The outcome is that restore works fine with SATA disks on above motherboard using its Via SATA controller (haven't tried the Promise one yet). So far, so good - or rather bad, because I can't produce the problem.

At least I do have a fix for #379966 which basically entices the introduction of a new function mr_stresc() to properly escape things when using system() or popen(). It's gone through a few revisions both by the submitter and upstream (Thanks Steve & Bruno!) and should be in upstream soon.

For the time being, I have just uploaded mindi-1.09-1 and mondo-2.09-1. They are purely new upstream versions and don't close any of the open bugs - hopefully, this will follow soon. Testing was done on an etch system using a SATA disk and a sid system using PATA. The archiving mode was NFS both times and the kernel used was also the same, i.e. 2.6.16-2-amd64-k8-smp (2.6.16-17).

I am experiencing problems with 2.6.17 kernels and creating ISO images on NFS mounts using mkisofs. mksiofs would just hang sooner or later whilst writing the image file. With 2.6.16 there is no such issue. And neither cp nor dd have this problem with 2.6.17. Weird. I'll have to do some more testing and probably will bring it up on the debian-kernel list before I file a bug report.