Oops!
Oops! I did it again. I paniced your box. Your data is lost.
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NetworkManager works!
Well, I finally got NetworkManager working, complete with it’s StudlyCaps. It involves emerging it from gentopia, moving /etc/dhcp/dhclient-script.sample to /sbin/dhclient-script, and making sure gnome-keyring-deamon is running. I also had to modify the security for the NM dbus, because my home-brew session doesn’t seem to set on_console for some reason. Anyway, after that, and figuring out that “WEP Key (128-bit)” couldn’t accept a hex key and I had to use “Hex Key” instead (WTF? There’s an ASCII key too, so what’s the “WEP Key” thing?), it finally all works. Woot!
Now, I just have to figure out how to integrate it with my homebrew session management, and see if it works in the uber-cool multi-radio roaming setup we have at work…
Too many programs?
There is some kind of disconnect between what’s available via portage, and what people actually know about. A number of times recently, someone has posted to -dev asking “Shouldn’t there be a program to do foo?” only to have someone respond “Try program bar”. The most recent example of this was module-rebuild. Now, I knew about module-rebuild, and I know about genlop, and eix, and…, but most people don’t. Why is this?
Partly, I think it’s just human nature. People complain rather than looking for answers. I can’t even count the number of times someone has asked me about something, and I’ve gone and googled for it, and given them the answer. They could, and arguably should, have googled themselves, but they didn’t. People are lazy, they want the answers handed to them.
Partly, I think it’s a lack of documentation. We should have a page somewhere listing all the cool apps we have that make working with gentoo easier.
Partly, I think it’s the abysmal lack of speed of emerge -s. Before I discovered esearch/eix, I never used emerge -s, because it was so slow. Now, I use eix constantly, because it’s fast. Couldn’t eix be incorporated into portage, and the eix cache rebuild when portage metadata is rebuilt? That would make it alwasy fast and up-to-date for end users, and would could actually tell people to search.
What’s the final answer? I don’t know, but I’d like to see both of the above done at some point, as I think they would help. Ultimately, there’s nothing we can do about the first point, and we can’t really make it a policy to answer such questions with “Google is your friend” without alienating our user base, but we can still make it as easy as possible for users to help themselves.
Retroscope
This sounds pretty interesting. Probably fairly boring if it’s just you, tho.
RAID goodness
All this time, knowing full well the complete lack of backups (and even having lost data in the past), I’ve been dancing with the devil, in the form of no redundancy on my main storage box. It had hundreds of GB of data on it, and if any one drive failed, there goes all the data on it. Well, no more. Today, the ice has gotten thicker:
md0 : active raid5 hdd1[3] hdc1[2] hdb1[1] hda1[0] 732587712 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
/dev/mapper/storage-storage 699G 84M 699G 1% /mnt
And the disk space had doubled. 
Of course, the road to RAID 5 goodness was not all smooth. My nice, new hard disks arrived, and I put them all into the box, and powered up, and it ran great… for about 2 seconds. Dead power supply. “What!?” I said to myself, “A 350 Watt PS can’t power 5 hard drives in a dual CPU box?” Well, apparently not, so the next day I went and ordered a new Antec 430 Watt PS for pickup at CompUSA.
During that night, however, some moron managed to cut my DSL line 2000 ft. from my house. I went ahead and ordered the PS anyway (from work, of course), completely forgetting that my mail server was behind my (now useless) DLS line, and I therefore couldn’t get the confirmation email necessary to pick up the PS. One call to LBDSL and a few line tests later, I learned the line was cut, and that SBC had 24 hours to fix it.
Fast forward to yesterday, ~3 PM, my DSL comes back up. Yay! Next step, wait for may backed up mail to arrive, go and pick up my PS, go home and perform surgery on my beloved dulie, and it comes to life! Joy of joys. Then, it gets to the point of loading grub, and hangs. Shit.
I vaguely remembered that, when I last used the scsi disk in that box as a system drive, I couldn’t get it to boot from grub, but I had to use an IDE drive to bootstrap grub. Hmmm… Okay, let’s try re-installing grub on the SCSI drive, and see if I can make it work now. Oops, how do I boot? I have 4 IDE drives, so no room for a CD. Well, no problem, I’ll plug in the CD in place of one of the hard drives. Quick boot later, I’m at the prompt for the Gentoo live CD kicking myself for forgetting that the live CD doesn’t include the Advansys driver! A bit hard to re-install grub on the scsi drive with no driver for the scsi controller…
<sigh> Okay, I’ll boot off the previous system drive (IDE) and install grub from that. Swap in the old IDE drive, boot, go into the BIOS and change to boot order so it boots from that drive. All the way into Gentoo, run the grub shell, “find /boot/grub/grub.conf”. Hmm… It’s on (hd3,0). That doesn’t seem right, it should be on (hd4,0). Oh well, install grub and shut down and remove hard drives and reboot. No go, grub can’t find (hd3,0). Of course, because (hd3) is the 4th IDE drive, and is currently unpartitioned. WTF? Re-configure with the old system drive and reboot. Back in the BIOS, I suddenly notice it’s only seeing 3 IDE drives. WTF? Oh, the new drives are all jumpered cable select. I bet the old system drive is jumpered master. Yep, it is, I’ll just change it to cable sele… WTF? The drive doesn’t have cable select?!?!?!? What kind of shoddy drive doesn’t even have cable select?
<sigh> Re-jumpering any of the new drives would be a pain, because they’re all screwed into the case. I know, I’ll use a CD drive, those slide out easily. No, wait. Grub doesn’t count CD drives when enumerating, so I’ll end up with (hd3) again rather than (hd4). Well, I have another drive lying here, I’ll jumper that slave and use it. Fast forward, I’m all booted up, install grub on (hd0) pointing at (hd4,0), shutdown, re-connect all the new drives, reboot, and I’m up! Yay!
Build the raid (really easy), check /proc/mdstat, and it’s running! Only 300 minutes until it’s coherent! (/me wonders why it takes to long to make an empty array coherent, but whatever). This morning, I make my filesystem and start copying from the old file server, and all is good. Phew!
So, now I’m RAIDed, and have a little more peace of mind. And, if you read this whole thing, you must be a glutton for punishment.
universe better
Mike:
I agree. I long ago stopped reading the planet. The universe is *much* better.