number 9

DISCLAIMER: As I said , I only run openlink so I can serve NFS (samba and netatalk are too slow for fullscreen video over 100Mbit). If I was running samba and/or appletalk I would probably not have had a problem.

That said: if you setup NFS on your linkstation, NEVER EVER EVER (ever) backup using the web frontend.

I’ve been backing up my other machines to the LS for a few months.
I got a fast/cheap/quiet/lovely Seagate 250Gb disk and thought I’d backup using the UI (openlink is a superset of the official firmware. I stupidly thought this would be ok.).

Plugged in the disk. It took the LS about an hour to build what looked like an ext2 filesystem on it.
I should have started running at that point.

The backup script on the LS is called do-backup.pl (I would upload a copy, but someone might stumble across it and I don’t want that on my conscience).

Whoever wrote it made the decision to allow clients read-only access to shares while they were being archived. Which would be cool, except the way they do that is essentially:

1. chmod -R 555 $SHAREDIR
2. cp -R $SHAREDIR /mnt/usbdisk/`date`
3. chmod -R 777 $SHAREDIR

I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly. Key features are:

• it makes no attempt to remember/restore the old perms. This does horrible things to an NFS share. I’m (charitably) assuming it doesn’t fuck up samba/appletalk too badly.
• every file on the share is made executable before it even does anything (’chmod ugo-w -R …’ would have the same effect and be slightly less stupid)
• every file in the share is world writable when it completes
• cp??? (Google returns patches that at least use rsync)
• this is a CGI. The only user feedback is a blinkenlight on the USB disk
  (I’m using 50Gb, it was 45 minutes in before I sshed to see what was going on)
• Samba and Appletalk support readonly shares (NFS does too, but I forgive that as it’s not part of openlink)

This rant is mainly due to the death of the eMac the next morning¹. I was left with a backup of the LS I didn’t trust and a ‘good copy’ of all our digital photos that had been tampered with. It took a lot of work I could really have done without to make sure that the permissions were sane.

What’s really to blame² is shitty filesystems that force developers to hack around their lack of features (snapshots in this case). I’ll go into more detail when I’ve calmed down

The Linkstation is still a great piece of kit as far as it goes.

In my case, it’s gone on amazon marketplace.

¹ yes, I’m aware of the repair program . No, my serial number isn’t in the list.

² no. not the guy who puts important things on firmware written by people who run off with paypal donations . definitely the filesystem. definitely.

It’s taken a year, but Google Earth finally went Linux.

The installer is pretty neat – you don’t need root, and everything goes into one folder with all dependencies, so it’s easy to deinstall. It worked acceptably on my crappy asus laptop too, which was a big surprise.

When I stuck it on my desktop, I got warnings that performance would stink because I had no hardware OpenGL (judging by the number of questions on ubuntu-users, I’m not the only one).

I have an Nvidia card, I just never needed 3D before (shows how lazy I’ve got, I used to regularly handbuild DRI support into FreeBSD4). So thought I’d enable DRI:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
$ # needs linux-image-386 instead of the 686 image
$ # (hyperthreaded p4, but haven't noticed a performance hit)
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
$ # tweaks your Xorg.conf (makes a backup, don't worry)
$ sudo reboot

When X next starts, I get an Nvidia logo and the desktop is a whole lot snappier.
More to the point, Google Earth now flies (and xscreensaver does’nt intermittently DOS the box any more)

Still no Sketchup for Linux, so I can’t build Isengard in my garden yet. Bah.

UPDATE: I’ve gone off the idea. I don’t roam, I don’t want all the family to have to know the WPA passphrase to use their laptop account, and I like wmii , where applets don’t really make any sense. I prefer the system-wide way of doing WPA myself.

Here’s the Ubuntu Dapper (or better) ‘WPA Howto’:

$ sudo apt-get install network-manager wpasupplicant
$ # edit out the NICs in /etc/network/interfaces
$ # that you want to be managed by NM
$ sudo reboot
$ # after reboot, run up 'nm-applet'

NetworkManager is great. The daemon runs in the background, watching for HAL events, and uses the best connection it can.

Plug in ethernet, it uses ethernet. Yank it out, it scans for WLANs.

If it needs help (e.g. unlocking the WPA-PSK or WEP keys stored in your keyring) it asks the user via a GNOME or KDE applet². It uses a local DNS forwarder and can notify apps (over DBUS) of network state changes.

This setup has a few implications. The most obvious is that you don’t get online until after you login to the GUI.
It also assumes the user is the one with the knowledge, not (whoever is root on) the laptop (suppose that’s how other OSes handle it anyway, just feels odd).

I imagine if you run many non-DBUSed servers that need a network at boot, or have hardcoded IPs in your firewall, it might piss you off a bit. But would you roam with that setup?

Although the applet is by default the font of all knowledge, you could easily run a non-GUI userland component as part of the usual boot If ubuntu-installer had one, WPA wireless users could net install at last.

¹ seems 256Mb isn’t enough RAM (!) to hibernate. Shut down firefox first and it’s fine.

² the applet works in fluxbox (and other window managers I presume) too, but it’ll ask you for the passphrase every boot. You can Google up some gnome-keyring voodoo if that drives you mad.

I finally took a proper look at my finances. Saved about 50 pounds a month
so far by practicing the ancient art of ‘retention team brinkmanship’
on NTL and several insurance companies (I heartily recommend this butt-ugly but invaluable site) .

Sort-of-related and as planned
, my last mini-itx board is on ebay this week.
Nano-itx boards are finally in the shops , and they’re a lot nicer than mini-itx in a lot of ways, but I can’t find it in me to get that excited. They’re very late ; EPIAs size “don’t impressa me much” any more (there’s more competition now), and even the fastest boards are dog slow compared to a 300 quid Dell (yes, they’re ugly. Hide them in the loft.). So they sort of fall between two chairs.

Anyway, by Thursday I’ll be server-free.
Instead of servers that sit around waiting for ribena to be poured into them, I’ll have (on toddler-inaccessbly high shelves):

• a 250Gb buffalo linkstation fileserver
• my slug
• a gumstix 200xm connex (sold the 400 to pay for it. 4Mb flash was a bit cramped)

The Linkstation was mainly because the eMac filled up
with bittorrented bbc telly and I needed a networked disk.
First thought was ‘use the slug’, but that’s for breaking playing with.

Besides, I want
lots of storage for not lots of money, so I need 3.5” disks.
That means an external caddy, which is ugly, noisy, unwieldy and needs a mains plug (it’s tricky to get mains power up by the wrt54g and I’m not up for dangling cat5 around the house like it’s LAN Christmas).

Creating users, shares etc is a doddle and it’s pretty fast.
It has a not-quite silent fan, but then it’s above the eMac (a.k.a. ‘the iHairdryer’)
so by comparison it’s a ninja on tiptoes.

Samba works fine, but I’d like a newer netatalk, multicast dns and NFS (then the slug and gumstix have access to comparitively unlimited storage) so I need custom firmware .
This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to get away from as a recovering makeworld addict
but in this case I think it’s justified.

In other news : hairy lobsters , eh? wow.

Two things were stopping me – new boards rumoured in the summer and the additional import fees (which I hear almost double their cost).
Last week a CFstix audio pack came up on ebay from a fairly reputable UK seller and I got it for cheap.

As you can see, it’s fucking tiny:

It gets a bit bigger (but still nowhere near a palmful) with the add-on boards.

400Mhz XScale PXA255 chip, 64Mb RAM and 4Mb flash, serial and USBnet, and a CF slot for wifi or storage. Oh, and sound if that’s your bag. Mighty nice.

Course, I haven’t powered it up yet (need a 2 → 3 pin adapter for the power brick), so it might be broken…