Hive Archive http://hivearchive.com Matt Michie's Musings Sun, 28 Nov 2010 04:10:02 GMT Blogofile hourly 1 Chinese Citation http://hivearchive.com/2008/12/11/chinese-citation/ Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:14:05 PST http://hivearchive.com/?p=173 Chinese Citation someone citing an article I wrote for Linux.com back in 2002 about China's Red Flag Linux. It's weird reading stuff I wrote back then now. Back in the day, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable. These days I actually know more, and feel like I know less. In fact, it's hard to find anything worthwhile to write about as I don't feel like I can do it justice. One of these days I'm going to have to chronicle some of the event surrounding Linux.com. I made a lot of good friends working on that site, made a little bit of money for college, and learned a ton. Still, there were some decisions made by VA/OSDN that weren't in the best interest of the community or the people that volunteered their time, energy and passion to trying to spread open source and evangelize Linux. Maybe some day I will, but not tonight :) Happy Holidays everyone!]]> Why does Ubuntu have so many forks? http://hivearchive.com/2008/11/10/why-does-ubuntu-have-so-many-forks/ Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:20:05 PST http://hivearchive.com/?p=167 Why does Ubuntu have so many forks? Bash one liner to randomize lines in file http://hivearchive.com/2007/10/18/bash-one-liner-to-randomize-lines-in-file/ Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:57:39 PDT http://hivearchive.com/2007/10/18/bash-one-liner-to-randomize-lines-in-file/ Bash one liner to randomize lines in file for i in `cat unusual.txt`; do echo "$RANDOM $i"; done | sort | sed -r 's/^[0-9]+ //' > randorder.txt In other words, put a random number on every line, sort the file, then take off the random numbers. Worked like a charm.]]> Hivearchive Downtime http://hivearchive.com/2007/10/05/hivearchive-downtime/ Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:45:34 PDT http://hivearchive.com/2007/10/05/hivearchive-downtime/ Hivearchive Downtime [root@nexus ~]# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 hdc1[2] hda1[0] 79360960 blocks [2/1] [U_] [>....................] recovery = 2.2% (1809408/79360960) finish=25.9min speed=49725K/sec md0 : active raid1 hdc2[1] hda2[0] 1052160 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: If you need to do this:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1 # mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/hdc2 # mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/hdc1
In other words, copy the master boot record from the good drive to the new drive so you have the same partitions, then hot add the new partitions to your array. WARNING DANGER DANGER WARNING. Backup all your data first, and test your backups work. Change the partitions and drives to match your own situation. Failure to do so will cause you to hose your system... That is all. Now if only Linux could do all this automatically like other sane operating systems. Update: I'm getting a little suspicious that just copying the MBR from one hard drive to another, messed up something with Linux's software RAID. Sigh. This is exactly how I would do it in Solaris, but Linux has no great documentation on how to do it easily. Lazyweb? Update, 2 Aug 2008: I did this again and this time realized that copying the MBR will work fine with DD, but Linux needs to be explicitly told to rescan the partition table. I simply opened up the device with fdisk, checked the partitions looked how I wanted and then rewrote the partition table. Fdisk then calls the IOCTL to tell the kernel to rescan the partitions. Problem solved. :) ]]> Worse is better? http://hivearchive.com/2007/06/29/worse-is-better/ Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:09:46 PDT http://hivearchive.com/2007/06/29/worse-is-better/ Worse is better? NVidia Forcedeth Ethernet Full-Duplex http://hivearchive.com/2007/05/25/nvidia-forcedeth-ethernet-full-duplex/ Fri, 25 May 2007 16:24:07 PDT http://hivearchive.com/2007/05/25/nvidia-forcedeth-ethernet-full-duplex/ NVidia Forcedeth Ethernet Full-Duplex Linux Block I/O Scheduler Interview http://hivearchive.com/2007/01/31/linux-block-io-scheduler-interview/ Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:33:20 PST http://hivearchive.com/2007/01/31/linux-block-io-scheduler-interview/ Linux Block I/O Scheduler Interview interview with the maintainer of the Linux Block IO layer. He discusses some of the limitations in the current I/O schedulers, and how they can be swapped out dynamically at runtime. I found the following particularly informative: "Splice has a host of applications. It can completely replace the bad hack that is sendfile(), which is an extremely limited zero copy interface for sending a file over the network. The neat thing about using pipes as the buffers, is that you have a known interface to work with and a way to tie things together intuitively. A good and easy to understand example is a live TV setup, where you have a driver for your TV encoder (lets call that /dev/tvcapture) and a driver for your TV decoder (lets call that /dev/tvout. Say you want to watch live TV while storing the contents to a file for pausing or rewind purposes, you could describe that as easy as:"
$ splice-in /dev/tvcapture | splice-tee out.mpg | splice-out /dev/tvout
"The first step will open /dev/tvcapture and splice that file descriptor to STDOUT. The second will duplicate the page references from the STDIN pipe, splicing the first to the output file and splicing the second to STDOUT. Finally, the last step will splice STDIN to a file descriptor for /dev/tvout. The data never needs to be copied around, we simply move page references around inside the kernel. It's like building with Lego blocks :-)"]]> Embarrassing Red Hat RPM Bug http://hivearchive.com/2006/06/08/embarrassing-red-hat-rpm-bug/ Thu, 08 Jun 2006 00:23:54 PDT http://hivearchive.com/2006/06/08/embarrassing-red-hat-rpm-bug/ Embarrassing Red Hat RPM Bug embarrassing RPM bug report that puts Red Hat developers in a bad light. I can understand that as a developer you could become frustrated with a report, but instead of trying to explain how the RPM database could go into an inconsistent state, and determine whether that was fixable or not, the developers berated the users. Is this how you build a community? Finally, after two years of ignoring the bug, Red Hat finally came around and 'fixed' it, though it isn't clear whether they fixed the general case, or put a work around for the behavior from the original report. I wasn't aware that RPM or yum had this behavior and it makes me trust the whole mess a lot less. I wonder how apt-get handles this. As a system admin, I generally prefer systems with package management. Being able to do security updates without hassle is a huge benefit. However, no matter how much one tries, there are always going to be programs or libraries outside your package manager. From a philosophical point of view, it is probably better to have all or nothing, so I sympathize with those who compile and install everything, or use a comprehensive system like BSD ports. I think a better system could be developed that encompasses the entirety of program management. It should include installing libraries from scripting languages such as Python Eggs, Ruby Gems or Perl CPAN. It should probably include hooks into GNU AutoConf/AutoMake, though I imagine the political hurdles of getting so many disparate projects to agree on a standard would be far greater than the technical ones. I suppose we can all hope.]]>