Andree's Debian & General Musings

I was fortunate enough to attend lca2007 last week and to meet Bruno Cornec, the Mondo Rescue project leader, for the first time in the flesh.

The conference was pretty cool, and I found the quality of the program to be generally impressingly high: Excellent topics, superb presentation skills, humor and genuine passion for the topic at hand. The atmosphere and organisation were great, too - extremely well done, 7 Team!

My personal two highlights were:

• Andrew Tanenbaum's keynote because he really sticks to his guns and even after 20 years or so finds new aspects that could make microkernel architectures appealing. This time it is system self-healing and robustness. Even though I yet have to try out the Minix 3 CD I found in my conference bag, I guess he may have a point (and moving functionality into user space has been a happening thing for years now). I found the keynote to be both amusing and instructive and dealing with a pressing topic. Also, even though it probably is far from usable in real-world scenarios, at least with Minix 3 there is code and an actual system to demonstrate the ideas and concepts.
• Christopher Blizzard's keynote about OLPC, his participation in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion and a conversation that we had over lunch after. (Admittedly, I was so excited during parts of the latter that I couldn't decide what topic to bring up, oh well.) My impression is that Chris is a person of integrity and real compassion for Free Software. He appears to have a very positive attitude and comes across as genuine. Chris may not have said that much new during his keynote, but I think he worked the subject of relevance for projects well. More importantly, Chris was the only one in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion to make a firm stand for Open Source as an ideal and against binary drivers. (Not 100% true, AJ was as well, but really more appearing to report what Debian does. And a question for openSUSE: Do you really think a marketing guy on a discussion panel will appeal to people?)

Apart from the conference as such, it was super cool to meet Bruno. We had a number of good conversations and did some nice hacking, burning the midnight oil a couple of times. And HP gave me a (used) zx2000 (which Bruno carried all the way from France to Sydney!) to enable me to work on the (Debian) Itanium port of Mondo Rescue - thank you HP and Bruno! Bruno's talk was well received, and it was great to actually meet people that use the software that I spend quite a bit of time on. :-)

Finally, there is the Linus phenomenon (so you can tell this is my first
Linux conference) - he amazingly is basically left in peace: People who know him obviously talk to him and he participates vividly in discussions and so forth, but everyone else does the business as usual thing - no autographs, no photos, no nothing. I was (positively) impressed and refrained from asking him to sign my copy of Just for Fun (just kidding).

Finally, finally, I propose to find an alternative for the term 'awesome' next year. ;-)

mindi-2.21~r1021-2 and mondo-2.21~r1021-2 are now on http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/ with the following changes:

• petris works again during restore (self-inflicted, oh well).
• Restore of ISO images and friends should now work when gzip (i.e. '-G') is used.
• The network interfaces should be fine now when booting into a restored system for the first time.

Other than that:

• The crash in mondorestore when nuking from tape has disappeared. I have no idea what caused it or why it went away again, though...
  
• Kernel 2.6.18-3-k7 hangs when 'acpi=off' is specified (which is the default as per mindi's ADDITIONAL_BOOT_PARAMS, so restore fails with this kernel). I have filed bug #406809 which may or may not be related to #389931.
• The issue with booting a (NTFS) Windows partition failing after a restore appears to be normal as per the ntfsclone manpage:

  Usually, Windows will not be able to boot, unless you copy, move or restore NTFS to the same partition which starts at the same sector on the same type of disk having the same BIOS legacy cylinder setting as the original partition and disk had.

• I have tried a few things playing with parted and ntfsresize, but so far the only thing that works reliably in order to get Windows to boot is resizing the partition using gparted. I still have to figure out what it is that gparted does differently. (If you know, please tell me!)
  

Off to bed now so that I'm fine and dandy when I pick up Bruno from the airport in the morning for lca2007. :-)

Preliminary Debian packages for Mondo Rescue 2.2.1 are available at the usual place: http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. (r1021 is the SVN revision of the actual 2.2.1 release.)

The new version comes with quite an impressive list of fixes and enhancements as can be seen on the Mondo Rescue website. The new '-G' option which allows for using gzip as the compressor is my personal favourite as it really speeds things up! Also, I've finally gotten around to fixing #222065 and there is no more unsolicited creation of directories in /var/cache anymore (neither submitted upstream yet).

Unfortunately, there are a few issues:

• Links in directories that actually are links themselves are not resolved correctly (fixed in the Debian package.).
• nuke restore from tape makes mondorestore crash (at least on amd64). The workaround is to use automatic or interactive mode.
• Windows 2000 does not boot after a restore (at least on amd64). The data is restored but there is something wrong with how fdisk creates the partition (I believe). This actually also happens with 2.2.0 as well, so it is not a regression. I have to look into this more. The workaround is to use gparted (or similar) and resize the windows partition/filesystem by a few MB.
  
• petris doesn't start when restoring (again at least on amd64). Surely the most minor issue I noticed so far...
  

Anyway, apart from the above, things seem to be ok. Give it a try if you like! If you do find more issues, let us know via the mailing list and - even better - send a patch. ;-)

Other than that, (belated) Happy New Year to everyone! :-)