Re: Always run apt update before clicking on synaptic ?
Synaptic has a button to (essentially) run "apt update" It's in the upper left corner of the window and labeled "Reload" and if you hover over it, it says "reload the package information to become informed about new, removed or upgraded software packages". HTH! Rick
Re: "Proper" filesystem for Debian installed on a flash drive
On Thu, Sep 30, 2021, at 6:02 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote: > * On 2021 30 Sep 15:15 -0500, Marco Möller wrote: >> SUMMARY: >> I never observed problems with ext4 on my since 4 years heavily used USB >> pen-drive. >> >> Good Luck! >> Marco > > Thanks Marco! > > That is a very useful review of your experience. Your taking the time > to write it up is greatly appreciated. > > - Nate Marco, would you be kind enough to share the manufacturer and other specs of your USB pen drive? Thanks! Rick
Re: Debian 11 on old Macbook
Hold down the key when you turn the machine on. Hold it until the finishes. You should see a menu of possible boot disks. Pick one that has a penguin on it. Hope that helps! Rick On Wed, Nov 24, 2021, at 11:11 AM, David Wright wrote: > On Wed 24 Nov 2021 at 14:59:09 (+0100), fran...@libero.it wrote: >> I installed Debian 11 (386) on a 2009 Macbook Pro 13 "(5.5). >> >> The installation did not give me any problems except it did not detect wifi >> card and touchpad, but I was connected with ethernet and used an external >> mouse, so the whole process ended. >> >> During the installation phase of Grub I only chose the hd that appeared in >> the window and did all the installer. >> >> I enclose photos of the subdivision that the installer did. I only chose to >> install Debian on a partition that I had left empty choosing partitions / >> and home Unfortunately Debian does not appear on reboot and neither does >> Grub, but Mac OS (Snow Leopard) starts immediately How can I solve this >> problem? >> >> If I reinstall using AMD64 instead, what can be the right suggestions to >> install Grub in the right place to reboot with it? > > You don't mention anything about how you boot. From my great > experience of Macs (watching people use them in the last > century), I'm guessing you might have to hold down some key > while you boot. That's not just for dual-booting (certainly > not, 30 years ago), but for doing various Mac-ish things, > so it should be documented somewhere. > > Also there were threads here, in late August, about booting Macs. > > Cheers, > David.
Re: When to reboot after dist-upgrade?
I use the following little script. If it produces output, then a reboot is desirable. #!/bin/bash -p set -x PATH=/usr/bin:/bin lsof +c0 -w | grep ' DEL *REG *[^0 ]' | egrep -v \ '(/var/lib/gdm3|/usr/share/mime|/home/[^/]*)/(.cache|.config|.local)' What it does is look for library (and other) files that are in use but have been removed from the filesystem. The "egrep -v" filters out some files that various utilities create, open, then delete without closing so that if the utility ends catastrophically without cleaning up, they don't hang around. It's not perfect, but it does help. Rick On Sun, May 2, 2021, at 9:16 PM, Kenneth Parker wrote: > > > On Sun, May 2, 2021, 9:42 PM riveravaldez wrote: >> Hi, sorry if this is not the place to ask (and in that case please >> point me in the proper direction). >> >> I'm trying to distinguish when a system reboot is an absolute need >> and when it is absolutely safe to keep the system running/working >> after a `sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade`, once >> I have already performed a complete restart of all needed services >> through `sudo needrestart' options in Debian testing. > > In general, if the Kernel is updated, plan to Restart. Usually, dist-upgrade > is required, when Version Numbers change, requiring addition of new packages. > The Linux Kernel is a common (but not the only) reason for this. > > Also beware, because Debian occasionally will update the Kernel without > updating the Version Number. So it is possible that a Restart is required, > without a dist-upgrade. > > Good luck! > > Kenneth Parker > >> >> So, in a situation like this: >> >> $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade >> Reading package list ... Done >> Creating dependency tree ... Done >> Reading status information ... Done >> Calculating the update ... Done >> The following packages have been withheld: >>imagemagick inkscape libc-bin libc6 libc6-dbg libcrypt1 >> libpoppler-glib8 local openssh-client openssh-server >> openssh-sftp-server ssh >> 0 updated, 0 new will be installed, 0 to remove, and 12 not updated. >> >> $ sudo needrestart >> Scanning processes... >> Scanning processor microcode... >> Scanning linux images... >> >> Running kernel seems to be up-to-date. >> >> Failed to check for processor microcode upgrades. >> >> No services need to be restarted. >> >> No containers need to be restarted. >> >> No user sessions are running outdated binaries. >> >> $ sudo checkrestart >> lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfsd-fuse file system /run/user/1000/gvfs >> Output information may be incomplete. >> Found 6 processes using old versions of upgraded files >> (1 distinct program) >> (0 distinct packages) >> No packages seem to need to be restarted. >> (please read checkrestart(8)) >> >> , would be perfectly safe and right to keep the system running or on >> the contrary should I perform a (warm/cold?) reboot to be safe? >> >> Thanks a lot in advance for any hint or info. >> >> Kind regards. >> >> PS: `apt-get dist-upgrade` output is translated to English..., system is >> in Spanish and I keep not-remembering how to force console output >> to English, sorry... >>
X server running on a different machine [Re: Wanted: a special purpose Debian installer]
On Sun, Jun 27, 2021, at 8:33 AM, Peter Ehlert wrote: > > X clients like MATE don't directly depend on an X server, because in > > theory, the X server could be on a different machine. I'd love to be able to do that! E.g. a headless machine with plenty of RAM and CPU power to run Mate, but located in a locked building on the other side of campus. What do I need to install to do that? And what are the configuration options? AtDhVaAnNkCsE (thanks in ADVANCE) Rick
Re: Help: explanation of secure flash?
On Tue, Jul 6, 2021, at 3:37 PM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > I've seen warnings (against hacks) that say (among other things) to enable > "secure flash". I've been googling to learn more about that, but I haven't > found any good explanation. > > I'm beginning to get hints that it is not so much a thing (to be enabled), > but > more the (a) process to update the computer's BIOS. (e.g., "'Unable to start > a Secure flash session' error message.") > > Can somebody provide either a little more explanation and / or a link to a > (reasonably simple) reference? There are available on the market SATA and USB interface flash or SSD drives that have built-in encryption. they require the user to enter an encryption key when they start up. The software to handle requesting and passing the key can be in the BIOS or in a user-supplied boot-loader or user-mode app that resides on a non-encrypted disk. The advantage of this mode vs software encryption is that the encryption engine resides in the firmware of the disk so it doesn't eat up CPU or GPU cycles that should be better applied to running user apps. Use your favorite search engine to look for "self encrypted ssd" (without the quotes). Does that help? Rick
Re: Help: explanation of secure flash?
On Tue, Jul 6, 2021, at 5:43 PM, Rick Thomas wrote: > On Tue, Jul 6, 2021, at 3:37 PM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > > I've seen warnings (against hacks) that say (among other things) to enable > > "secure flash". I've been googling to learn more about that, but I haven't > > found any good explanation. ... > Use your favorite search engine to look for "self encrypted ssd" > (without the quotes). In particular: https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/self-encrypting-ssd-for-data-security
Re: Networking book recommendation
You might want to take a look at "Computer Networks" by A.S. Tanenbaum and D.J. Wetherall. It's available for free online at https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxza21pbmh8Z3g6NjQxMTI2MmYxMTAwZmNjZQ Or you can buy a copy from your local bookseller. Enjoy! Rick
Alternatives to ISC dhcp-client ?
According to the ISC webpage: > ISC has ended development on the ISC DHCP client as of early 2022. > This client implementation is no longer maintained and should not be > used in production any longer. Can anybody recommend a good replacement? Does anybody know what the Debian PTBs are planning for this? Thanks! Rick
Re: Alternatives to ISC dhcp-client ?
On Sat, May 7, 2022, at 8:14 PM, Jeremy Ardley wrote: > On 8/5/22 10:47 am, Rick Thomas wrote: >> ISC has ended development on the ISC DHCP client as of early 2022. >>> This client implementation is no longer maintained and should not be >>> used in production any longer. >> Can anybody recommend a good replacement? >> > > I presently use systemd-networkd which provides its own DHCP v4 and v6 > clients, and servers if you want. > > In my network my dual homed router acts as a dhcp client to the ISP and > gets an IPv4 address and is delegated an IPv6 /56 range. > > You can just use systemd-networkd as an IPv4 dhcp client. > Jeremy Is systemd-networkd automatically installed by Debian? I ask because my "testing" and "stable" systems all show isc-dhcp-client as installed and running. Thanks! Rick
Re: Alternatives to ISC dhcp-client ?
On Sat, May 7, 2022, at 8:19 PM, Jeremy Ardley wrote: > On 8/5/22 11:14 am, Jeremy Ardley wrote: >> >> >> You can just use systemd-networkd as an IPv4 dhcp client. >> >> > > Of note: Using systemd-networkd you should not use NetworkManager or > networking services. I think both use the ISC dhcp client > > Of further note, I moved to systemd-networkd precisely because the ISC > dhcp client was badly behaved, and no-one at ISC seemed interested in > fixing it. Thanks for the heads up! Can you describe in detail what one needs to do in order to switch over? I.e. what to remove, what to install? What to configure? Thanks! Rick
Re: Alternatives to ISC dhcp-client ?
On Sat, May 7, 2022, at 9:37 PM, Jeremy Ardley wrote: > On 8/5/22 11:27 am, Rick Thomas wrote: >> Thanks for the heads up! >> Can you describe in detail what one needs to do in order to switch over? >> I.e. what to remove, what to install? What to configure? > > This is a recent blogpost of mine showing a more complex installation > including IPv6 delegation. If you just do the bits that refer to IPv4 it > should still work. > > https://jeremyardley.blogspot.com/2022/04/configuring-systemd-networkd-with.html > Jeremy Thanks! Rick PS: I'll also do the IPv6 part, because I'm interested in that too.
Re: Alternatives to ISC dhcp-client ?
On Sat, May 7, 2022, at 7:47 PM, Rick Thomas wrote: > According to the ISC webpage: > >> ISC has ended development on the ISC DHCP client as of early 2022. >> This client implementation is no longer maintained and should not be >> used in production any longer. > > Can anybody recommend a good replacement? > Does anybody know what the Debian PTBs are planning for this? > > Thanks! > Rick Does anybody know what the Debian developers plan to do about this change of policy by ISC? I have a feeling it's going to be a problem that will have to be faced reasonably soon. Rick
Re: OT, Recommendation for low cost laptop
On Sun, Jul 17, 2022, at 1:59 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > On Sun Jul 17 09:16:57 2022 Dekks Herton wrote: > > > john doe writes: > > > >> I'm comtemplating buying a Pinebook pro but I'm not sure if this is > >> better then buying a Windows laptop and putting linux on it. > >> > >> I'm looking for something cheap (max would be around 300 bucks), > >> do you have any suggestions/ideas? > > > > 2nd hand Thinkpad off ebay, craigslist etc, likely easy to upgrade and > > certainly straightforward to install linux. > > Another place to look is your local laptop store. My current laptop, > as well as its predecessor, are refurbished ThinkPads I bought there > for about $300. They run Linux just fine. Or ask your neighbors. Due to Covid, a lot of people are replacing their Windows or Mac machines so they can run Zoom and other "community building while isolated" apps. Most of them don't bother with looking for a good trade-in deal, and have the old computer lying around doing nothing. If you let it be known that you will take it of their hands, upgrade it to run modern software (like Linux) and make it available to charities in the area, often they will donate it to you for free. Anyway, that's how I do it... Rick
failure trying to install bullseye on Cubox-i
I'm experimenting with installing Bullseye on a Cubox-i4Pro I keep around for testing purposes. I followed the instructions at: http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/README.concatenateable_images Then I dd'ed the resulting complete image onto an 8GB microSD card, which I then inserted into the microSD slot in the Cubox-I. When I applied power, I got the attached log on the serial console. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Is this a bug in the installer? If so, what's the best way for me to volunteer to help as a tester in debugging it. Rick screenlog Description: Binary data
Re: failure trying to install bullseye on Cubox-i
On Sun, Jul 17, 2022, at 6:37 PM, Rick Thomas wrote: > I'm experimenting with installing Bullseye on a Cubox-i4Pro I keep > around for testing purposes. > > I followed the instructions at: > > > http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/README.concatenateable_images > > Then I dd'ed the resulting complete image onto an 8GB microSD card, > which I then inserted into the microSD slot in the Cubox-I. When I > applied power, I got the attached log on the serial console. > > Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Is this a bug in the installer? > If so, what's the best way for me to volunteer to help as a tester in > debugging it. > > Rick > Attachments: > * screenlog In case it helps, the two components I used in this experiment are: http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/20210731+deb11u4/images/netboot/SD-card-images/firmware.MX6_Cubox-i.img.gz and http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/20210731+deb11u4/images/netboot/SD-card-images/partition.img.gz On the web page, these files are dated 2022-07-05 15:57 . Any clues are appreciated! Rick
Migrating to a new disk.
OK, I've got a Debian computer where the system disk is showing signs of
flakiness. I want to replace it with a new disk and retire the old one.
Before I do it for real, I'm doing a dry-run on a vmware virtual machine. I
don't *think* the fact that it's virtual should affect my results. But I put
it out there, just incase.
Here's what I've done so far:
*) Set up a VM with one virtual SATA disc drive, and installed Buster on it.
The system has a MBR partitioning with /boot in /dev/sda1 and the rest of the
disk as an LVM volume-group ("tryout-vg") partition in /dev/sda5 with root,
swap, and home as LVs.
*) Added a virtual SATA disk drive and partitioned it the same as above --
/dev/sdb1 is boot and /dev/sdb5 is the LVM partition. However, in order to
have both disks available for mounting (see below) at the same time, the new
drive's LVM volume-group had to have a different name ("new-vg").
*) Used rsync to copy the contents of the boot, root, and home partitions from
the original disk to the new one.
*) Modified the /etc/fstab on the new disk to reflect the names and uuid's of
the partitions on the new disk.
*) Booted the Buster install DVD in rescue mode and ran "reinstall boot loader"
for the new disk.
*) Rebooted and told the BIOS to boot from the new disk. It went to the grub
screen and proceeded to boot.
*) To my surprise, after it booted, I logged in and saw that the root, swap,
home and boot partitions that were mounted were all from the original disk!
So what am I missing? How do I tell grub on the new disk to use the root
partition and volume-group on the new disk?
Thanks for any help!
Rick
Re: Buster with MATE without systemd
I too have been using Debian for over a decade, and I've come to rely on it, so I hear your concern at having to "switch" to something new. But I don't think Devuan is really all that "new". For almost two years I've had Devuan ascii with mate desktop in a VM that I use daily for a variety of jobs. I did it originally as a lark, but over the months, I've come to rely on it. I'm not a developer, so I'm not tuned to the gory details, but from a user point of view, Devuan might as well be Debian -- but without the need for systemd. The only reason I haven't upgraded to beowulf is sheer laziness. But all this talk has gotten me inspired. I'm definitely planning to upgrade to beowulf soon now. I recommend it! Rick
Re: Release status of i386 for Bullseye and long term support for 3 years?
On Mon, Dec 21, 2020, at 3:48 AM, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 06:42:41AM -0700, Charles Curley wrote: > > On Tue, 15 Dec 2020 13:42:37 +0200 > > Andrei POPESCU wrote: > > > > > That is, if you and other list subscribers care about continued i386 > > > support you should probably look into contributing. > > > > And how does one do that? > > > > -- > > Does anybody read signatures any more? > > > > https://charlescurley.com > > https://charlescurley.com/blog/ > > If you have "real" 686 32 bit hardware that you can press into service that > isn't being used: pick up a Debian i386 disk and try reinstalling Debian. > > If you have "real" 686 32 bit hardware - get a copy of a Debian live CD and > boot it - you may face probelms if there isn't a lot of memory. Well, as it happens I just did that! But I didn't have any problems... Details: I recently was given an old IBM ThinkPad T60 1953 with an Intel Core Duo (Yonah) 32-bit processor. Vintage c 2006. Output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo" is attached. First I tried booting the Debian 10.7.0 (Buster) amd64 Live DVD. It said I didn't have the right kind of processor, and I should try the i386 version. So I did. It booted fine and ran a couple of simple commands without incident. Then I rebooted and ran the installer from the same DVD. Again, no problem installing a system without GUI. I then ran tasksel and used it to install the Cinnamon desktop, which is working great. I'll file an installation report soon. After that, I guess I'll try installing Bullseye and file a report on it. Does anybody know if there's an i386 Live DVD for Bullseye? Thanks for all your work! Rickprocessor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 14 model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2400 @ 1.83GHz stepping: 8 microcode : 0x39 cpu MHz : 997.463 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings: 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug: no f00f_bug: no coma_bug: no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon bts cpuid aperfmperf pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr pdcm dtherm bugs: cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2 l1tf mds swapgs itlb_multihit bogomips: 3657.32 clflush size: 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 32 bits physical, 32 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 14 model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2400 @ 1.83GHz stepping: 8 microcode : 0x39 cpu MHz : 997.453 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings: 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug: no f00f_bug: no coma_bug: no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon bts cpuid aperfmperf pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr pdcm dtherm bugs: cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2 l1tf mds swapgs itlb_multihit bogomips: 3657.32 clflush size: 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 32 bits physical, 32 bits virtual power management:
Re: po...@lists.debian.org
This is not the place for a political discussion. Please confine your comments to debian technical questions.
Installing Debian Buster on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive.
I'm trying to install Debian Buster [1] on my Cubox-i4P with an eSATA drive. Everything seems to be fine, but when it comes time to reboot, it boots into the installer again, rather than the installed system. Here's what I did, and what I observed: *) I downloaded the two parts of the SDcard install image from [1] and followed the instructions in the README to create a 4GB (I didn't have anything smaller) SDcard installer. *) I connected the eSATA disk and plugged the SDcard into the Cubox and powered it up. *) It booted off the SD-card into the installer as expected. *) Everything went as expected, until it got to the partition-disks phase. *) I chose to use the eSATA disk as the installation target. I told it to use the whole disk and use the LVM method of partitioning. *) It created the /boot ext2 partition in /dev/sda1 and put root, /home and swap in the LVM on /dev/sda5. This is (I think) exactly what I wanted. *) There was no mention of the SDcard /dev/mmcblk1 (except when initially choosing the target disk -- I did explicitly NOT choose it at this time) *) I allowed it to wipe and re-partition the eSATA disk, which it did without incident. *) Everything proceeded as expected. I chose a minimal (ssh and base packages) in tasksel. *) When it came to "make it bootable" I said go ahead. There was no mention of /dev/mmcblk1 at this stage. *) It proceeded from there without any apparent errors. *) When it came time to reboot, I said go ahead. *) But when the reboot happened, I found myself back in the installer. *) I tried removing the SDcard and rebooting, but it failed to boot -- after power-on nothing happened. What I hoped would happen with the eSATA drive was that the installer would write the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) to the SDcard, and configure it to get /boot, root, /home, swap off the eSATA. What I suspect has happened is that the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) was written to the eSATA drive and so it can't be found by the power-up routine without some reconfiguration to tell it to look at the eSATA, but that isn't happening. Anybody know what I can do to either: 1) Tell the power-up routines to look at the eSATA? or 2) Write the boot firmware to the SD card and configure it to get the rest of the system from the eSATA? Debug logs were saved, and can be provided upon request. Thanks in advance for any help! Rick PS: In a previous attempt, I used a 64GB SDcard without the eSATA disk -- putting everything onto the SDcard. That worked fine (It put the boot stuff on the SDcard) but it's horribly slow due to the very low speed of data transfer to and from the SDcard. [1] http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/
Re: Installing Debian Buster on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive.
On Wed, Jan 27, 2021, at 11:15 PM, Vagrant Cascadian wrote: > On 2021-01-27, Rick Thomas wrote: > > I'm trying to install Debian Buster [1] on my Cubox-i4P with an eSATA > > drive. Everything seems to be fine, but when it comes time to reboot, > > it boots into the installer again, rather than the installed system. > > > > Here's what I did, and what I observed: > > > > *) I downloaded the two parts of the SDcard install image from [1] and > > followed the instructions in the README to create a 4GB (I didn't have > > anything smaller) SDcard installer. > > *) I connected the eSATA disk and plugged the SDcard into the Cubox and > > powered it up. > > *) It booted off the SD-card into the installer as expected. > ... > > *) But when the reboot happened, I found myself back in the installer. > > *) I tried removing the SDcard and rebooting, but it failed to boot -- > > after power-on nothing happened. > > > What I hoped would happen with the eSATA drive was that the installer > > would write the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) to the SDcard, and > > configure it to get /boot, root, /home, swap off the eSATA. > > U-boot can only be loaded from microSD on that platform, as far as I'm > aware. > > You can use the bootloader from the installer image, just delete the > boot.scr and/or extlinux.conf from the partition on the installer image, > or make another partition on the microSD card, and mark it bootable, but > don't put anything on it. Then u-boot should fall back to loading the > kernel+initrd+device-tree off of the eSATA. > > If you interrupt the boot process and get to a u-boot prompt, you should > be able to see the order of devices u-boot tries to boot from with: > > printenv boot_targets > > > Now that bullseye is in the early phases of freeze, please consider > testing bullseye, too, if you can! :) Thanks! This sounds like it ought to work. I'll give it a try. For bullseye, where should I download the latest installer image from? I'd love to give it a try as well! Rick
Re: Installing Debian Buster on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive.
On Thu, Jan 28, 2021, at 12:08 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > On Wed, Jan 27, 2021, at 11:15 PM, Vagrant Cascadian wrote: > > On 2021-01-27, Rick Thomas wrote: > > > I'm trying to install Debian Buster [1] on my Cubox-i4P with an eSATA > > > drive. Everything seems to be fine, but when it comes time to reboot, > > > it boots into the installer again, rather than the installed system. > > > > > > Here's what I did, and what I observed: > > > > > > *) I downloaded the two parts of the SDcard install image from [1] and > > > followed the instructions in the README to create a 4GB (I didn't have > > > anything smaller) SDcard installer. > > > *) I connected the eSATA disk and plugged the SDcard into the Cubox and > > > powered it up. > > > *) It booted off the SD-card into the installer as expected. > > ... > > > *) But when the reboot happened, I found myself back in the installer. > > > *) I tried removing the SDcard and rebooting, but it failed to boot -- > > > after power-on nothing happened. > > > > > What I hoped would happen with the eSATA drive was that the installer > > > would write the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) to the SDcard, and > > > configure it to get /boot, root, /home, swap off the eSATA. > > > > U-boot can only be loaded from microSD on that platform, as far as I'm > > aware. > > > > You can use the bootloader from the installer image, just delete the > > boot.scr and/or extlinux.conf from the partition on the installer image, > > or make another partition on the microSD card, and mark it bootable, but > > don't put anything on it. Then u-boot should fall back to loading the > > kernel+initrd+device-tree off of the eSATA. > > > > If you interrupt the boot process and get to a u-boot prompt, you should > > be able to see the order of devices u-boot tries to boot from with: > > > > printenv boot_targets > > > > > > Now that bullseye is in the early phases of freeze, please consider > > testing bullseye, too, if you can! :) > > Thanks! This sounds like it ought to work. I'll give it a try. > > For bullseye, where should I download the latest installer image from? > I'd love to give it a try as well! > Rick That worked! Specifically, what I did was: *) on a different machine, I mounted the installer SDcard first partition *) renamed boot.scr to oboot.scr *) sync and umount the SDcard. *) inserted it in the Cubox *) powered up and watched it boot from the eSATA disk. Whoopie! Observations: *) => printenv boot_targets boot_targets=mmc0 sata0 usb0 pxe dhcp *) It located the /boot partition on the eSATA drive without any help from me. I assume that means it goes down the list of boot_targets one by one looking for an active bootable partition containing a file called "boot.scr" which it then executes to perform the remainder of the boot process (mostly to load the kernel and initrd , then pass control to them). *) I wonder if it would be possible to change the "boot_targets" environment variable to put "sata0" first? Would that work, if it could be done? If that were done, would it mess up booting from the SDcard when there was no eSATA drive? So now, the next question is: how do we convince the debian installer to recognize that it's installing to the eSATA drive and either set "boot_targets" appropriately, or mark the boot partition on the SDcard as not bootable. I've added "debian-boot" to the CC list of this email. Should I file a bug report? If so, what package should I file it against? Next thing to test -- can I install bullseye the same way? Thanks very much to everyone for all your help! Rick
Re: Installing Debian Bullseye on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive... No ethernet detected
Hi! On Fri, Jan 29, 2021, at 1:03 AM, Holger Wansing wrote: > On https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ > you should look under the daily snapshots. > For armhf that would be > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/ I downloaded the two-part image from [1] dated 2021-01-30 and tried to install it on my Cubox-i4. It booted fine but when it got to the "Detect network hardware" phase, it failed and said: No Ethernet card was detected. If you know the name of the driver needed by your Ethernet card, you can select it from the list. Driver needed by your Ethernet card: and gave a long list of available ethernet drivers. I couldn't find anything that looked like an Atheros 8035 driver, which seems to be the one in use when I boot with a working system. Any suggestions? Thanks! Rick [1] https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/ dated 2021-01-30
Re: Installing Debian Bullseye on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive... No ethernet detected
On Fri, Jan 29, 2021, at 7:18 PM, Rick Thomas wrote: > Hi! > > On Fri, Jan 29, 2021, at 1:03 AM, Holger Wansing wrote: > > On https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ > > you should look under the daily snapshots. > > For armhf that would be > > https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/ > > I downloaded the two-part image from [1] dated 2021-01-30 and tried to > install it on my Cubox-i4. > > It booted fine but when it got to the "Detect network hardware" phase, > it failed and said: > > No Ethernet card was detected. If you know the name of the driver > needed by your Ethernet card, you can select it from the list. > Driver needed by your Ethernet card: > and gave a long list of available ethernet drivers. > > I couldn't find anything that looked like an Atheros 8035 driver, which > seems to be the one in use when I boot with a working system. > > Any suggestions? > Thanks! > Rick > > [1] https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/ > dated 2021-01-30 I tried it again, this time with the components dated 2021-02-06 (today). I was hoping that the problem was transient and might have been fixed in the intervening week, but I still got the same result: "No Ethernet card was detected." Do I need to file a bug report? If so, to which package? If I do, is there any chance it will be fixed before Bullseye is released into the wild? Is there a known workaround that I can apply? Thanks for any help! Rick
Re: OT: Router behaviour
On Thu, Feb 4, 2021, at 4:26 PM, Dan Ritter wrote: > Mark Fletcher wrote: > > First apologies for the off-topic post, but I know this community is > > full of experts on this topic and my ask in the end is a simple one: > > (and you can use Debian to achieve your ends) > > > Can anyone point me at a reasonably accessible guide to the details of > > how IP networks work, in particular the communications that occur > > between router devices that are designed to support home networks? I'm > > computer science trained but from many years ago and if I ever learned > > these specific details I have forgotten them, but I feel equipped to > > understand them. I'm after a certain amount of detail and would prefer > > to avoid adverts or advice of the "just buy our product, plug it in and > > your problems will all be solved" type. > > The most useful single doc is https://lartc.org/lartc.html > which, although omitting more recent developments, is an > excellent foundation in networking and routing aimed at the > small office or family sysadmin. If you want a complete, comprehensive textbook on networking, take a look at David J. Wetherall, Andrew Tanenbaum: "Computer Networks, Fifth Edition" This is e-book, but it's also available in paperback and hardback. https://bellasias.com/product/e-book-computer-networks-fifth-edition-pdf-epub-david-j-wetherall-andrew-s-tanenbaum/?msclkid=6dce151da1951218f101752d64ca293f Enjoy! Rick
Re: Fully automatic installation of Debian made simple
Great! Sounds wonderful. If I want to set up a VirtualBox VM to run this, what packages/tasks do I want to install other than bare-bones Debian? Then what do I do, once I have Debian plus packages installed? I’ve never used Docker before, so please assume I’m a complete newbie at that part of it,,, Thanks! Rick > On May 15, 2019, at 1:37 AM, André Rodier wrote: > > Hello Debian users, > > For those who are interested in fully automatic installation of Debian, > I have published something that you'll find useful. > > It allows you to create a fully automatic Debian installation disk very > easily, using a simple YAML file to describe the system and docker to > build the ISO image. > > For now, there are three flavours you can use: > > - lvm: Simple logical volume on one disk, no encryption. > - raid: Create an ISO image with software RAID and LVM (RAID1, two > disks). > - luks: Create and ISO image with fully encrypted disk (one disk only). > > It has been tested on Debian Stretch only for now. > > Also: > > - AppArmor activated on boot. > - Root password set. > - Your SSH public key is installed for root. > > https://github.com/progmaticltd/debian-iso-builder > > A big thanks to simple-cdd and reprepro, this could not have been > possible without these tools. > > Enjoy! > > -- > André Rodier >
how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
Purely out of curiosity, I'd like to see what's involved in switching a Debian buster system from systemd to sysv init. Please, I don't want to restart or get involved in any of the existing systemd/sysv flame wars. I'm *just curious* to see if it would work? First of all, is this even possible? Second, has anyone done it? If so, how did you do it? Here's what I've discovered so far: Step zero: I fired up a virtual machine and installed stock-out-of-the-box Debian buster with mate on it. I didn't want to have my experiments break any of my production machines! Everything that follows is happening on the VM. Step one: I searched for packages with "sysv" in their names that weren't already installed. Then I looked for one that said it conflicted with systemd. I settled on sysvinit-core. The rival was sysv-rc (though I'm sure there were others I could have tried). The reason I rejected sysv-rc is that it does not seem to conflict with systemd. Am I wrong in assuming that this (conflicting with systemd) is a requirement for something that will replace systemd? Step two: But when I try "apt install sysvinit-core" it wants to delete lots of stuff that seem to have nothing to do with systemd at all. For example it wants to remove a bunch of libreoffice packages, and some mate packages, and a bunch of xserver-xorg packages. More precisely it says they are no longer needed and should be deleted by using "apt autoremove". Somehow that doesn't seem right to me. I’m pretty sure I need those packages. Step three: I tried “apt install sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils” and let it go ahead and delete all the stuff it wanted to. Then I rebooted the system and it came up running the sysv init, but there was a long pause during the boot process while it was trying to start dbus. This eventually timed out and continued and gave me a “login:” prompt, but now I get frequent pauses while it seems to be looking for a non-existent bus daemon. Anybody got any thoughts? Thanks for any help you can offer! Rick PS: It would be really cool (TM) if the Debian installer offered sysv as an option! PPS: I googled a bit and found a Devuan website[1] that had instructions for getting a small number of .deb packages from the Devuan ascii repo and using them to replace the corresponding packages from Debian, but it said to start with Debian stretch, not buster. It also pointed out that gnome (and presumably most/all of the other of the other desktop managers) in Debian nowadays explicitly depend on systemd, so it’s best done on a pure headless server configuration. This explains why sysvinit-core wanted to delete all the stuff like server-xorg and libreoffice. I’d prefer a solution that was pure Debian (i.e. without being dependent on stuff from Devuan[2]) even if it meant being restricted to a headless server config. [1] https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-replace-systemd-with-sysv-init-on-debian-linux [2] Don’t take me wrong, I am very supportive of Devuan. I even have a couple of systems that run it in production, but it does tend to drag a bit behind Debian on bug-fixes and latest-feature updates. This is understandable: it’s a much smaller project than Debian.
[Solved - sorta - part 1] Re: how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
> On Jun 23, 2019, at 2:24 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 05:45:39PM -0700, Rick Thomas wrote: >> >> Purely out of curiosity, I'd like to see what's involved in >> switching a Debian buster system from systemd to sysv init. > > The short version [1]: > > apt-get install -y sysvinit-core That may work when starting from Debian stretch (or a non-gui buster system), but buster with mate is a little bit more complicated. See my next email “part 2”… > >> Please, I don't want to restart or get involved in any of >> the existing systemd/sysv flame wars [...] > > Phew! ;-) So far we’ve managed. Let’s try to keep it that way! > >> First of all, is this even possible? > > See above. It's even easy. But see the somewhat longer version > below. > >> Second, has anyone done it? If so, how did you do it? >> Here's what I've discovered so far: > > [I see you already found out about [1], but Mate goes down the drain] Sad, but I can live with it if necessary. > > That's right. "Modern" desktop environments (Gnome and derivatives, > most probably also KDE) depend these days on systemd. I don't know > how hard those dependencies are -- you'd want to look at Devuan [2] [3] > to see how far they went, if at all, into fixing this. Devuan does seem to have something working — kudos to them! But I like to have a better idea of how much they have to give up to get the job done. > > Since I'm not using a DE, but just a traditional window manager, > I’m a happy Debian user without systemd. Maybe that would work for me too… Which window manager are you using? What’s your preferred method of installing it? > > Cheers > > [1] https://wiki.debian.org/systemd#Installing_without_systemd > [2] https://devuan.org/ > [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devuan > -- tomás
[Solved - sorta - part 2] Re: how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
> On Jun 23, 2019, at 2:24 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 05:45:39PM -0700, Rick Thomas wrote: >> >> Purely out of curiosity, I'd like to see what's involved in >> switching a Debian buster system from systemd to sysv init. > > The short version [1]: > > apt-get install -y sysvinit-core So our goal is to start with a working Debian buster system with the Mate desktop using the systemd init, and convert it to a working buster system with no desktop gui, and using the sys-V init. As Tomas points out, basically all you should have to do is “apt-get install sysvinit-core”, and the rest should be fully automatic. This may have worked with Debian stretch, but it’s a bit more complicated with buster. In particular, there seems to be some parts of the old dbus stuff left around that cause the long pauses I’ve mentioned previously. This may be a bug and should be reported, but I have no idea what package to report it against, or what a suitable proposed fix would be. In any case, the solution I came up with is apt-get --purge install -y sysvinit-core dbus- glib-networking- libgtk-3-0- apt-get --purge autoremove Note the trailing minus-signs on dbus- glib-networking- libgtk-3-0- These packages need to be deleted in the same pass as sysvinit-core is added. Hope this helps somebody in the future… Enjoy! Rick
Re: [Solved - sorta - part 2] Re: how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
Hi Jonas, > On Jun 25, 2019, at 11:20 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > Would be helpful to know if those experiencing long pause in > dbus-depending environments had _no_ dbus installed (and actively > running) or had it running with elogind. How can I tell which situation I have? Thanks! Rick
Re: [Better Solution] how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
> On Jun 25, 2019, at 11:20 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > > Seems this would work as well, with less collateral damage: > > apt install -y sysvinit-core elogind > apt --purge autoremove > This works great and, as noted, is far more elegant. Thanks, Jonas! Rick
Re: [Better Solution] how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
> On Jun 27, 2019, at 12:42 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > > > >> On Jun 25, 2019, at 11:20 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: >> >> Seems this would work as well, with less collateral damage: >> >> apt install -y sysvinit-core elogind >> apt --purge autoremove >> > > This works great and, as noted, is far more elegant. > > Thanks, Jonas! > Rick A warning about all of these solutions: They will remove the package, network-manager. Sometimes this may rewrite the “/etc/network/interfaces” file. You can loose network connectivity after a reboot as a result. Be prepared to login to the console and fix that up manually if it happens. Another work-around is to, before doing any apt stuff at all, put a suitable fragment into the “/etc/network/interfaces.d/“ directory that configures at least one of your network interfaces the way you want it. As an example, on my test system I have: > $ cat /etc/network/interfaces.d/enp0s3 > auto enp0s3 > iface enp0s3 inet dhcp Hope it helps! Rick
Re: Minimial Live Image
> On Jul 11, 2019, at 11:06 AM, J.Arun Mani wrote: > > Hi > > Im planning to install Debian in my (already Linux Mint powered) laptop. But > the ISO size is huge (~2.7 GB), something beyond my per-day bandwidth limit > of 1.5 GB (actually 2 GB, but .5 GB is spent in other personal things). And I > also found that Debian ships with a large pack of softwares and does not have > (official) support for propertiary drivers. > > So what I want is a live bootable minimial ISO with a DE (a basic one is > enough if DEs can be changed easily later) and a basic set of packages with > support for propertiary drivers (is there anyother way to get it if Debian > doesn't provide it officially ?). > > My dear friends, help me, where can I find such ISOs? (No Netinst or Network > boot, because of my Internet speed and other issues) > > Nice day :) > J Arun Mani Hi! I found this [1] 1.3GB image. (“standard” = no DE, just text console. But you can add any DE you want later with “sudo tasksel”.) That’s just barely under your stated daily bandwidth allowance of 1.5GB. Everything else (the images that include a DE GUI) is hovering around 2.5GB. You can also get it from bittorrent at [2]. Bittorrent is recommended if you have a choice, because it minimizes the load on the debian.org servers. Hope it helps! Rick [1] https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/10.0.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso [2] https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/10.0.0-live+nonfree/amd64/bt-hybrid/debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso.torrent
Re: Hibernation takes too long
If 12GB is reasonable (I have no idea, I don’t use “hibernate” myself) here are figures to input to the calculation: SSD sustained write transfer rate is between 30 MB/sec and 120 MB/sec. Closer to 30 MB/sec (or even slower) if it’s a USB-3 thumb drive (even less than that if USB-2); closer to 120 MB/sec if it’s a SATA drive. So: 12GB/30MB/sec = 6.7 minutes 12GB/120MB/sec = 1.7 minutes So 2 minutes is not unreasonable. Rick > On Jul 20, 2019, at 8:14 AM, Shahryar Afifi wrote: > > If bulk storage is the same as mass storage, I have 128 SSD > > On Sat, 2019-07-20 at 09:27 -0400, Carl Fink wrote: >> On 7/20/19 12:43 AM, Shahryar Afifi wrote: >>> Up to 2 Min >>> >>> amd64 >>> buster >>> X61 >>> 6GB dynamic >>> 6GB swap >>> swapness 50 >>> >>> I don't know which log file to loo into... >>> >>> Thank you. >>> >> What are you using for bulk storage? Your system >> has to copy ~12 gigabytes into it. Do the math--is >> that the main reason for your wait? >> >
Re: Hibernation takes too long
You need to add the clause “oflag=sync” on your dd commands. Without it the MB/s numbers are really just measuring how fast you can fill up the RAM cache (for write) or scoop up data from the RAM cache (in the case of read). Here’s an example from one of my machines with a SATA-III SSD and lots of RAM: rbthomas@nuc8:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.77789 s, 604 MB/s rbthomas@nuc8:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 oflag=sync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 4.88158 s, 220 MB/s Hope it helps! Rick > On Jul 21, 2019, at 2:44 PM, Shahryar Afifi wrote: > > Correct! > I attached a screen shot of read write speed. > The 2 min hibernation time is when there is little or no contents > present. If I have many things opened, it would take more.
Re: Hibernation takes too long
And here’s an example where the output media is an SD card: rbthomas@nuc8:/media/rbthomas/99602c92-f887-4578-b6bc-39c91d49c43c/rbthomas$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.48058 s, 2.2 GB/s rbthomas@nuc8:/media/rbthomas/99602c92-f887-4578-b6bc-39c91d49c43c/rbthomas$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 oflag=sync 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 34.044 s, 31.5 MB/s > On Jul 23, 2019, at 1:19 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > > Here’s an example from one of my machines with a SATA-III SSD and lots of RAM: > > rbthomas@nuc8:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 > 1024+0 records in > 1024+0 records out > 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 1.77789 s, 604 MB/s > > rbthomas@nuc8:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 oflag=sync > 1024+0 records in > 1024+0 records out > 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 4.88158 s, 220 MB/s
Re: Virtual Box
> On Aug 2, 2019, at 10:03 AM, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote: > > Given that VBox is no longer in the Buster repositories I tried to > install the Stretch .deb package from the VBox web site. dpkg failed > because of dependency problems, including libvpx4 that is not in the > Buster repositories. > > Anyone have any thoughts? > > Peter HB A little googling found this website https://tecadmin.net/install-virtualbox-on-debian-10-buster/ which tells how to install the Oracle 6.0 VirtualBox using the usual “apt” tools. It talks about using the “add-apt-repository” command, which is not usually installed as part of Buster. I worked around that by simply editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file manually. I’m using virtualbox as described in that webpage as I type. Works great! Hope that helps! Rick
Re: Buster Installation - Partition phase - Inode option to choose - SSD or Mechanical HD
> On Aug 24, 2019, at 4:18 PM, l...@contacte.xyz wrote: > > What would be the «best» to choose for an SSD in an usual desktop environment > ? > What would be the «best» to choose for an mechanical HD in an usual desktop > environment ? I don’t think there’s any difference between SSD and spinning disk (for the particular question of how many inodes are needed). If your planned usage is “typical” then, for either type of hardware, “typical usage” is the right choice. If you have a particular use in mind that is known to involve lots of small files, then “news” might be more appropriate. As a real-world example, here’s a system I set up a couple of years ago (so it’s had enough time to reach an equilibrium state) with “typical usage” (the default). rbthomas@monk:~$ df -ih | grep -v tmpfs FilesystemInodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on udev3.0M 580 3.0M1% /dev /dev/mapper/monk--vg-root 1.8M 258K 1.5M 15% / /dev/sda161K 337 61K1% /boot /dev/mapper/monk--vg-home 5.3M 43K 5.2M1% /home /dev/mapper/monk-download50M 374 50M1% /download /dev/mapper/monk-export 25M18 25M1% /export Enjoy! Rick
Re: Looking for suggestions of a "modern" desktop that runs Debian
Have you looked at a NUC from Intel?
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark.html#@PanelLabel70407
I’ve got a couple of them and I’m very happy.
Rick
> On Sep 5, 2019, at 2:49 PM, Rogério Brito wrote:
>
> Dear people,
>
> As all my computers are quite old so far (including the ones that I
> use to develop my packages and contribute to Debian), I would like to
> get a "modern" desktop that is able to keep up with compiling stuff
> and doing basic web surfing/web and typing texts in Emacs.
>
> Unfortunately, I have assembled computers way, way, way back then and
> I don't know which processors should go with which motherboards and so
> on.
>
> I would gladly appreciate some help choosing a computer (or computer
> parts) that has a configuration along the following lines:
>
> * Is able to run Debian without any problems (I am willing to use
> something that requires firmware from non-free, but not proprietary
> drivers)
> * Is a budget system (I'm short on money, unfortunately)
> * Is silent, with as little fans as possible
> * Has the ability to have 16GB or 32GB of memory (this is one of the
> parts where I am willing to focus spending the money)
> * Has a processor like a modern AMD Ryzen 5 or whatever is similar in
> Intel-land (the 2nd part where I am willing to focus spending the
> money)
> * I don't care too much about video cards; As long as it can drive a
> Full HD monitor, I am satisfied. Integrated card with the CPU is
> perfectly ok with me (and, actually, preferred if that would make the
> final cost of the computer lower).
>
> Any recommendations are more than welcome,
>
> Rogério Brito.
>
> --
> Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFC
> http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
> DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
>
task-print-server in testing seems to have changed it's name to task-print-service -- why?
task-print-server in testing seems to have changed it’s name to task-print-service -- why? Thanks Rick
Re: NAS software for Raspberry Pi that supports full range of client OS (Win-10, MacOS-X, Linux) ?
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020, at 6:45 AM, deloptes wrote: > Rick Thomas wrote: > > The covid-19 situation is giving me lots of free time recently, so I've > > ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 with delivery expected sometime this week. > Can you explain to me what type of storage you intend to setup on the pi4 - > USB3 disks? > Does someone has experience with USB3 disks - may be in raid1 on the Rpi4? > I tried years ago with usb2 disks in raid1 and the results were miserable. I plan to use a 1TB 2.5-inch USB3 disk drive, powered via the USB cable from the Pi, as a first try. If that's successful and the family needs more space for shared files, I plan to move to a USB3 multi-disk box with its own power supply. I'll probably configure the box as a JBOD so I can use software RAID. USB2 disks are, of course, slow by modern standards, but they do work -- as long as you don't overload the bandwidth. Is that what you mean by "miserable".USB3, on the other hand, is plenty fast enough for a NAS driving a 1Gbit LAN -- depending on the speed of the underlying disk drives, of course. I've done this kind of configuration before. If you have specific questions, I'll be happy to try to answer them... Enjoy! Rick
Re: Can I install Debian on Raspberry Pi?
Pure Debian, as noted, does not have the kernel tweaks to take full advantage of the R...pi4B hardware. However, I have found that Raspbian is "close enough" to pure Debian that I can easily exercise all by Debian skills on it with almost no surprises. It's a nice little box! Hope that helps! Rick
Re: Anti-malware for my personal Debian workstation?
On Thu, Apr 23, 2020, at 5:40 PM, David Wright wrote: > On Thu 23 Apr 2020 at 23:58:41 (+0200), l0f...@tuta.io wrote: > > > > "When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything > > > at all." - Futurama > > > > > Could you explain that please? > > If you're like me when you go for your flu shot, you offer your arm > and look the other way. A good nurse will surprise you when they > unexpectedly say, "All done". I used to manage a group of system administrators for an academic department at a major East-coast University. We used to say that "The best sysadmin is the one whose phone number you don't know." The intention being that a good sysadmin will anticipate the problems and fix them before you, the user, even realize the problem is a possibility. You never have to look up their phone number because you don't see any problems. Being that good is hard work! You have to keep up-to-the-minute-and-beyond on every aspect of anything that might affect your users. Attend technical conferences; participate actively in you local professional society chapters; be alert and at your best when you get a trouble call at three in the morning, and so on... Does that help? Rick
Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
I recently did a "apt update ; apt upgrade" and it died for lack of space in /boot when trying to install the latest kernel. I purged a couple of old kernel packages (still present in the 'stable' repo, so they weren't obsolete) to make enough space and tried again. Worked this time, but I would have liked to have the old kernels around as fallbacks just in case of a regression... Here's the disk layout: rbthomas@milli:~$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:00 111.8G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:10 512M 0 part /boot/efi ├─sda2 8:20 244M 0 part /boot └─sda3 8:30 111.1G 0 part ├─debian--vg-root 253:0028G 0 lvm / ├─debian--vg-swap_1 253:10 7.9G 0 lvm [SWAP] └─debian--vg-home 253:20 75.2G 0 lvm /home sdb 8:16 1 239G 0 disk └─sdb1 8:17 1 239G 0 part /media/rbthomas/Spare mmcblk0 179:00 238.3G 0 disk └─mmcblk0p1 179:10 238.3G 0 part /media/rbthomas/Downloads rbthomas@milli:~$ rbthomas@milli:~$ df -HTP | grep -v tmpfs Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/debian--vg-root ext4 30G 9.9G 19G 36% / /dev/sda2 ext2 248M 78M 158M 34% /boot /dev/sda1 vfat 536M 144k 536M 1% /boot/efi /dev/mapper/debian--vg-home ext4 79G 4.4G 71G 6% /home /dev/sdb1 ext4 252G 63M 239G 1% /media/rbthomas/Spare /dev/mmcblk0p1 ext4 251G 63M 238G 1% /media/rbthomas/Downloads rbthomas@milli:~$ What's the best way to increase the size of /boot ? I can easily create a gig or so of space by a shrink/resize of /home, but how do I add that space to /dev/sda2 ? I can't just move up the end of /dev/sda2 = start of /dev/sda3 without backing up and restoring, can I? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Rick
Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
On Sat, May 9, 2020, at 9:10 PM, Charles Curley wrote: > On Sat, 09 May 2020 20:05:48 -0700 > "Rick Thomas" wrote: > > > Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on > > /dev/mapper/debian--vg-root ext4 30G 9.9G 19G 36% / > > /dev/sda2 ext2 248M 78M 158M 34% /boot > > Odd. That should be good for more than three kernels. I have: > > root@jhegaala:~# df /boot/ > Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on > /dev/sda5 226M 92M 119M 44% /boot > root@jhegaala:~# > > with three kernels. > > My /boot is ext4, but I doubt that makes enough difference to matter. > My installation is not EFI. Would that make the difference? The figures above are *after* I deleted the two previous kernel versions. So yes, there's plenty of space there when this is taken. It looks like each kernel/initrd combo takes 75-80 MB so three of them could take as much as 240 MB, just a bit beyond the space available. Stay well and stay safe! Rick
Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
> Consider the time you've spent posing this question, waiting for the > answers, and reading them. Dump and reload might've finished already. True, but I wouldn't have learned half so much and wouldn't have had a third so much had so much fun learning it! Stay safe!
Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
So... Here's another question: Why is the default size of /boot, as created by the installer, so small? Disk (even SSD) is cheap enough these days that the default size could be as much as a GB without great pain. Has this been thought about by the PTBs? Was there a discussion of possibly raising the default? Maybe I missed it... Stay safe and stay healthy! Rick
Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
On Sun, May 10, 2020, at 1:17 AM, David Christensen wrote: > On 2020-05-09 22:05, Will Mengarini wrote: > > * Rick Thomas [20-05/09=Sa 20:05 -0700]: > >> What's the best way to increase the size of /boot? > > By creating a reliable backup and reformatting the disk to > > the new format. I've never found it to be cost-effective > > to try anything else. > +1 Yeah, that's probably what I'll do. Fortunately, it's an amd64 machine, so I'll be able to use GRML to do the work. Enjoy! Rick
Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
On Sun, May 10, 2020, at 3:22 AM, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > On Du, 10 mai 20, 02:02:45, Rick Thomas wrote: > > So... Here's another question: > > > > Why is the default size of /boot, as created by the installer, so > > small? Disk (even SSD) is cheap enough these days that the default > > size could be as much as a GB without great pain. > > > > Has this been thought about by the PTBs? Was there a discussion of > > possibly raising the default? Maybe I missed it... > > A quick search in the BTS reveals #893886 and #951709 (both fixed in > git). Thanks for the pointers, Andrei! Do you think those changes will get into Bullseye before it's released? Rick
Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
On Sun, May 10, 2020, at 12:30 PM, David Christensen wrote: > As for using GRML, I have never heard of it. The Debian Installer can > get the job done. GRML [1] says: "Grml is a bootable live system (Live-CD) based on Debian. Grml includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators. Users don't have to install anything on fixed storage. Grml is especially well suited for administrative tasks like installation, deployment and system rescue. Read more..." There's also Debian Live, which also has all the features I'll need to do a full backup, repartition, and restore. The installer in rescue mode is more limited than either of these alternatives. Rick [1] http://grml.org
Re: Smallest Usable EFI Partition?
On Tue, May 12, 2020, at 3:37 PM, Andrea Borgia wrote: > Il 13/05/20 00:21, Patrick Bartek ha scritto: > > I can't find anything definitive on this question. Some say, 100MB is > > fine; others 215 or 550 is a safe choice. It all seems to be just > > opinions. > I had the same doubts about a year ago and went with the recommendation > of a larger partition, about 500MB... of which only 6% is used. > My office laptop with Windows10 has something in the region of 100MB but > it is not dualboot. > Debian uses about 6MB, MS about 26MB, plus a couple of megs for boot. > If space is really tight you might want to stick with 100MB in total. One thing to keep in mind is that, when the contents are being updated, the EFI partition and the /boot partition if you have one, will need space for two (or even more) copies of stuff. So don't be too stingy! Stay well, stay safe! Rick
Re: Fw: How long will this take?
This means that reads and writes should be on 4KiB boundaries, and writes should be multiples of 4KiB, for optimal performance. As long as those criteria are met, there's no harm and some real benefits of reading and writing larger blocks than the minimum. One example benefit, among several possible, is that the OS overhead of one single 1MiB write will be much less than 256 individual 4KiB writes. (number of system calls performed; overhead inside the OS of merging successive writes to optimize the size of actual disk transfers, etc...) Hope that helps! Rick On Mon, Jun 8, 2020, at 9:47 PM, Matthew Campbell wrote: > fdisk said the minimum and optimal access size for my hard drive was 4096 > bytes. > > name=Matthew%20Campbell&email=trenix25%40pm.me > > > > > > Original Message > On Jun 8, 2020, 7:42 PM, Dan Ritter < d...@randomstring.org> wrote: >> >> Jude DaShiell wrote: >> > Does any optimal formula exist based on hard drive size which minimizes >> > time needed for checking and blanking hard drives in connection with the >> > block size value? >> If the disk firmware offers it, a SMART long read/verify test >> should be close to optimal. Consult smartctl and the disk manufacturer >> for details. >> For conventional spinning hard disks, the optimal write size would be >> a complete cylinder at a time. That varies across the radius of the disk, >> and may not be made available to the OS. >> In lieue of knowing that, writes which are reasonable integer >> multiples of the sector size are very good. 1 MB is probably >> good for most drives. >> For SMR spinning disks,the optimal write size is one complete >> write zone. I've heard that this is standardizing at 256MB, but >> I would want to confirm with the manufacturer. There are a lot >> of interactions with PMR caches. >> For SSD, writing wears out the storage mechanism. A write-all >> test won't test reliability; flaws will be detected and remapped >> without letting the host know. >> -dsr-
Re: Fw: Fw: How long will this take?
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, at 11:05 AM, Dan Ritter wrote: > Matthew Campbell wrote: > > The process is complete. The 4 TB drive has been successfully blanked in > > less than 40 hours using dd. It got done between 11 pm last night and 12 am > > this morning. dd showed an overall average write speed of 28.4 MB/s. It was > > never my intention to start a war. My sincere apologies if I have said or > > done anything to offend anyone. I prefer to test out new hardware after I > > buy it and I prefer to blank new hard drives before partitioning and > > writing out new file systems. Thank you to each of you for your assistance. > > > > I think you stated your issue well, responded to queries, and > reported back with the results. Thanks for being part of the > community. +1 You didn't start the war, Mathew. It was there long before you stumbled into the battlefield. Sadly, any list with more than one participant will have issues about which people will disagree vociferously. There's probably somebody's law that states that observation... Something like, "Whenever the words 'stupid' or 'idiot' occur in a thread, there's nothing to be gained in following it beyond that point." Enjoy! Rick
Re: Disks renamed after update to 'testing'...?
On Mon, Aug 17, 2020, at 4:42 PM, hobie of RMN wrote: > Hi, All - > > My brother has been issuing "mount /dev/sdb1" prior to backing up some > files to a second hard disk. He lately upgraded to 'testing', and it > appears (from result of running df) that what the system now calls > /dev/sdb1 is what he has thought of as /dev/sda1, the system '/' > partition. > > Thanks to the UUID= mechanism, his system still boots properly, but 'mount > /dev/sdb1' is inappropriate now, could even be the path to madness. :) > > Two questions, then: (1) What caused this shift of device naming? And (2) > How do we fix it? Is this something that can be changed in the BIOS? > But, if so, what caused it to change in the first place? > > Thanks for your time and attenton. The /dev/sdx names for devices have been unpredictable for quite a while. Which one is sda and which sdb will depend on things like timing -- which one gets recognized by the kernel first. The best solution is to either use UUID or LABEL when you fsck and/or mount the device. So: 1) Use "df" to find out the device name that the kernel decided to use for your backup disk this time. Let's assume it's /dev/sda1. 2) label that device with the "tune2fs" command (assuming your device contains an ext[234] filesystem. If not, check the man pages for the filesystem you are using.) e.g. "tune2fs -L BACKUP /dev/sda1". 3) then when you want to mount or fsck the device (you do fsck it before mounting it, right?) use "LABEL=BACKUP" instead of "/dev/sdb1". fsck LABEL=BACKUP mount LABEL=BACKUP 4) If you're into typing long strings of random characters, you can instead skip the label step and do fsck UUID=.. mount UUID=.. But that's only for masochists, IMHO. In any case, read the man pages before you try anything, so you'll know what your doing. Enjoy! Rick
Re: trusting .deb packages
On Jul 24, 2018, at 2:41 PM, Matthew Crews wrote: > Personally, I have a low degree of trust for Mega.nz, so caveat emptor. Why do you say that? (serious question!) Have there been reports of problems? Enjoy! Rick
kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency
When booting, I get 12 error messages similar to the following (three groups of four, each group with a different “start” value and corresponding minor device) > Jul 24 03:40:08 small kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target > device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, > logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=33553920 Can anyone tell me what it means and what I should do about it? Thanks! Rick Information that might be useful: > rbthomas@small:~$ lsblk > NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT > sda 8:00 931.5G 0 disk > `-sda1 8:10 931.5G 0 part > |-small-swap 254:0010G 0 lvm [SWAP] > |-small-root 254:1030G 0 lvm / > `-small-home 254:20 100G 0 lvm /home > mmcblk2179:00 3.7G 0 disk > |-mmcblk2p1179:10 512M 0 part /boot/efi > `-mmcblk2p2179:20 2G 0 part /boot > rbthomas@small:~$ sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda > GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.3 > > Partition table scan: > MBR: protective > BSD: not present > APM: not present > GPT: present > > Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT. > Disk /dev/sda: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB > Model: nal USB 3.0 > Sector size (logical/physical): 512/4096 bytes > Disk identifier (GUID): F040A793-41E6-46E6-9147-FED15A526294 > Partition table holds up to 128 entries > Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33 > First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134 > Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries > Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB) > > Number Start (sector)End (sector) Size Code Name >12048 1953525134 931.5 GiB 8E00 Linux LVM > rbthomas@small:~$ > rbthomas@small:~$ sudo lvdisplay > --- Logical volume --- > LV Path/dev/small/root > LV Nameroot > VG Namesmall > LV UUIDbrZiAH-bjpQ-ThUf-cx20-qTNc-uHuL-dcNrA6 > LV Write Accessread/write > LV Creation host, time grml, 2018-07-23 02:10:20 -0700 > LV Status available > # open 1 > LV Size30.00 GiB > Current LE 7680 > Segments 1 > Allocation inherit > Read ahead sectors auto > - currently set to 256 > Block device 254:1 > > --- Logical volume --- > LV Path/dev/small/swap > LV Nameswap > VG Namesmall > LV UUIDUyLz6P-ooDS-hixd-D40U-EHEn-j2ss-xSEHay > LV Write Accessread/write > LV Creation host, time grml, 2018-07-23 02:10:52 -0700 > LV Status available > # open 2 > LV Size10.00 GiB > Current LE 2560 > Segments 1 > Allocation inherit > Read ahead sectors auto > - currently set to 256 > Block device 254:0 > > --- Logical volume --- > LV Path/dev/small/home > LV Namehome > VG Namesmall > LV UUIDqMdtCI-DOBG-G1tK-ur04-mLHX-nccd-vPWPEH > LV Write Accessread/write > LV Creation host, time grml, 2018-07-23 02:11:12 -0700 > LV Status available > # open 1 > LV Size100.00 GiB > Current LE 25600 > Segments 1 > Allocation inherit > Read ahead sectors auto > - currently set to 256 > Block device 254:2 > > rbthomas@small:~$ > rbthomas@small:~$ sudo pvdisplay -v > Wiping internal VG cache > Wiping cache of LVM-capable devices > --- Physical volume --- > PV Name /dev/sda1 > VG Name small > PV Size 931.51 GiB / not usable 32.69 MiB > Allocatable yes > PE Size 4.00 MiB > Total PE 238459 > Free PE 202619 > Allocated PE 35840 > PV UUID 4PuUWe-01xm-mtQE-nEtt-HSXZ-ZRyd-uZypdH > rbthomas@small:~$ sudo vgdisplay > --- Volume group --- > VG Name small > System ID > Formatlvm2 > Metadata Areas1 > Metadata Sequence No 5 > VG Access read/write > VG Status resizable > MAX LV0 > Cur LV3 > Open LV 3 > Max PV0 > Cur PV1 > Act PV1 > VG Size 931.48 GiB > PE Size 4.00 MiB > Total PE 238459 > Alloc PE / Size 35840 / 140.00 GiB > Free PE / Size 202619 / 791.48 GiB > VG UUID SFb0ZB-EeSj-jYmd-F6FJ-7Jdh-imsH-v688ZZ > >
Re: kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency
Alignment ensures optimal use of your drive, sometimes software gets this wrong and compensates by using a larger cache, check cat /sys/block/sd?/queue/optimal_io_size to correct that you have to re format (likely both the GPT/LVM layers) look into --dataalignment and --dataalignmentoffset of pvcreate shareimprove this answer edited Jun 8 '17 at 7:26 answered Jun 8 '17 at 7:18 user1133275 1,932412 • $ cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/optimal_io_size 33553920 33MB for a 2TB USB HDD? 268431360 for a 4TB??? – Tom Hale Jun 10 '17 at 5:17 • @Tom they both should drop to 0 if you fix the alignment – user1133275 Jun 11 '17 at 10:38 • I'm seeing this, but realised that 33553920 / 512 = 65535. Is it possible something's reporting "-1" as optimal IO size in sectors? – Steve Dee Mar 18 at 11:33
Re: kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency
On Jul 27, 2018, at 8:19 PM, David Wright wrote: > On Fri 27 Jul 2018 at 18:46:02 (-0700), Rick Thomas wrote: >> When booting, I get 12 error messages similar to the following (three groups >> of four, each group with a different “start” value and corresponding minor >> device) >> >>> Jul 24 03:40:08 small kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target >>> device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, >>> logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=33553920 >> >> Can anyone tell me what it means and what I should do about it? > > That's the same message as I reported on an MBR disk in > https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/02/msg00466.html > > The post gives full details of the partitioning and the > creation of the encrypted filesystem which precede getting > the messages (in pairs). > > There were no follow-ups. Googling the contents of the subject line of this post gives: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/340484/device-mapper-table-alignment-inconsistency which is slightly helpful. Something else that is interesting is the following from “man pvcreate”: > If a device is a 4KiB sector drive that compensates for windows partitioning > (sector 7 is the lowest aligned logical >block, the 4KiB sectors start at LBA -1, and consequently sector 63 > is aligned on a 4KiB boundary) manually account >for this when initializing for use by LVM. >pvcreate --dataalignmentoffset 7s /dev/sdb Is it possible that I have such a device? Enjoy! Rick
Re: kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency
Here’s something interesting that may be relevant, given the note from “man pvcreate”: > rbthomas@small:~$ lsblk -t > NAME ALIGNMENT MIN-IO OPT-IO PHY-SEC LOG-SEC ROTA SCHED > RQ-SIZE RA WSAME > sda0 4096 335539204096 5121 mq-deadline > 60 1280B > `-sda1 0 4096 335539204096 5121 mq-deadline > 60 1280B > |-small-swap-1 409604096 5121 > 128 128 32M > |-small-root-1 409604096 5121 > 128 128 32M > `-small-home-1 409604096 5121 > 128 128 32M > mmcblk205120 512 5120 mq-deadline > 128 1280B > |-mmcblk2p105120 512 5120 mq-deadline > 128 1280B > `-mmcblk2p205120 512 5120 mq-deadline > 128 1280B > rbthomas@small:~$ Note the alignment values of “-1” for the lvm entries but not for the GPT partition or the whole disk. Why do you suppose that is? Rick On Jul 28, 2018, at 12:26 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > > On Jul 27, 2018, at 8:19 PM, David Wright wrote: > >> On Fri 27 Jul 2018 at 18:46:02 (-0700), Rick Thomas wrote: >>> When booting, I get 12 error messages similar to the following (three >>> groups of four, each group with a different “start” value and corresponding >>> minor device) >>> >>>> Jul 24 03:40:08 small kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target >>>> device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency: physical_block_size=4096, >>>> logical_block_size=512, alignment_offset=0, start=33553920 >>> >>> Can anyone tell me what it means and what I should do about it? >> >> That's the same message as I reported on an MBR disk in >> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/02/msg00466.html >> >> The post gives full details of the partitioning and the >> creation of the encrypted filesystem which precede getting >> the messages (in pairs). >> >> There were no follow-ups. > > Googling the contents of the subject line of this post gives: > > > https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/340484/device-mapper-table-alignment-inconsistency > > which is slightly helpful. > > Something else that is interesting is the following from “man pvcreate”: > >> If a device is a 4KiB sector drive that compensates for windows partitioning >> (sector 7 is the lowest aligned logical >> block, the 4KiB sectors start at LBA -1, and consequently sector 63 >> is aligned on a 4KiB boundary) manually account >> for this when initializing for use by LVM. >> pvcreate --dataalignmentoffset 7s /dev/sdb > > Is it possible that I have such a device? > > Enjoy! > Rick
Re: kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:1: adding target device sda1 caused an alignment inconsistency
On Jul 28, 2018, at 1:28 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Sat, 28 Jul 2018, David Wright wrote: >> On Sat 28 Jul 2018 at 10:57:45 (-0300), Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: >>> On Sat, 28 Jul 2018, Rick Thomas wrote: >>>>> rbthomas@small:~$ lsblk -t >>>>> NAME ALIGNMENT MIN-IO OPT-IO PHY-SEC LOG-SEC ROTA SCHED >>>>> RQ-SIZE RA WSAME >>>>> sda0 4096 335539204096 5121 mq-deadline >>>>> 60 1280B >>>>> `-sda1 0 4096 335539204096 5121 mq-deadline >>>>> 60 1280B >>>>> |-small-swap-1 409604096 5121 >>>>>128 128 32M >>>>> |-small-root-1 409604096 5121 >>>>>128 128 32M >>>>> `-small-home-1 409604096 5121 >>>>>128 128 32M >>>>> mmcblk205120 512 5120 mq-deadline >>>>> 128 1280B >>>>> |-mmcblk2p105120 512 5120 mq-deadline >>>>> 128 1280B >>>>> `-mmcblk2p205120 512 5120 mq-deadline >>>>> 128 1280B >>>>> rbthomas@small:~$ >>>> >>>> Note the alignment values of “-1” for the lvm entries but not for the GPT >>>> partition or the whole disk. >>>> Why do you suppose that is? >>> >>> Keep in mind that you *offset*-align the outer container *only*, and then >>> inside >>> you just keep the size alignment. >>> >>> So, the above ensures correct use of the partitions even if sda1 is >>> unaligned. >>> >>> If you offset-align sda1 to -1, everything inside it should have an offset >>> of >>> zero to keep the alignment correct. >> >> I don't think I fully understand the explanation. Can you point out >> the number(s) that's wrong, and how it should be corrected. > > There is nothing wrong on the table above as far as I can tell, > *assuming* the device does need the -1 alignment. Since sda1 isn't > aligned, everything inside it at the first level must be (and is) > aligned at -1 to compensate. > > Where sda1 aligned at -1, nothing inside it should be, as sda1 would > already provide the required alignemnt to anything inside it. Thanks for the clarification, Henrique! Let me see if I have this right… 1) If I had heeded the warning in “man pvcreate” and set up the physical volume with pvcreate —dataalignmentoffset 7s /dev/sda to accommodate the -1 offset (provided either by the drive itself or the USB enclosure it is in — we don’t know) then all the “-1”s in the above table would be “0”s and I would not be getting the error messages at boot time. Is this correct? 2) But as it is, I did not do that, so when I used vgcreate to make the volume group called “small”, it realized that the partition was out of alignment and compensated — thus causing the alignment of “-1” for all of the logical volumes. And, most importantly, therefor the logical volumes are, in fact, properly aligned and I can stop worrying. Furthermore, the warnings at boot time are just noting that an alignment of “-1” has been applied by the device-mapper and all is well. Is this correct? 3) Or are you saying that the messages are _not_ just warnings: I should go back and re-format the disk to use the “—dataalignmentoffset 7s” option. (I can do this if I do it soon. I don’t have much data on the disk yet.) Thanks, Rick
Re: Swap priority in Debian
On Aug 25, 2018, at 1:15 AM, Subhadip Ghosh wrote: > > On Saturday 25 August 2018 01:17 PM, Dekks Herton wrote: >> Subhadip Ghosh writes: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> I am a Debian testing user. Recently I am experiencing freezing on my >>> Debian system intermittently and during troubleshooting the same, I >>> found out that the I have a swap partition with priority set to >>> -2. But according to the below manpage: >>> >>> https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/mount/swapon.8.en.html >>> >>> swap priority should be between -1 and 32767. I have a swappiness >>> value of 60 but I don't remember seeing the swap being used at all >>> recently, the used swap is always 0%. >> Whats swapon -s say? do you use zsawp or zram? > FilenameTypeSizeUsedPriority > /dev/sda5 partition8203260 0-2 > > I am using zswap. >> >>> My question is, do you think that the -2 priority is stopping the swap >>> partition from actually being used and because of that, the system is >>> getting frozen when the memory usage is high? >> No, it's -2 on my stretch box with zswap enabled and it swaps as one >> would expect. > My buster box says pretty much the same thing. I’m not using zswap. > Filename TypeSizeUsed > Priority > /dev/dm-1 partition 10485756 > 0 -2 I don’t recall ever having seen it actually use any swap, but that may just be me not remembering something that didn’t seem important at the time. Rick PS: I did manage, just now, to force it to swap a small, but non-zero, amount by opening lots of tabs in firefox. So it will use a “-2” swap partition if it has to. For what it’s worth, I noticed that firefox got kinda slow, but it didn’t freeze.
Re: Installing from live
On Sep 17, 2018, at 10:36 AM, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > "netinst" is supposed to be used by more people for installing than > "live", and it is the much smaller download. Indeed, the fact that it is a smaller download is the main reason why netinst is preferred. It’s a good thing to minimize the load on the official Debian FTP servers by shifting the bandwidth to the network of mirrors. It also avoids downloading packages that you don’t actually need for your particular installation. That’s the most common use case, and so it’s the most commonly recommended approach. However, there are lots of use cases where that argument doesn’t work. For example, if your home has limited Internet bandwidth, but you can drive to a library (or your place of work) where the bandwidth is better, it might be better to use the DVD or BD (blue-ray) install image on a USB stick. In this case, you probably want to download the install image with jigdo or bittorrent, since they distribute the bandwidth requirement over the network of volunteer servers and so minimize the load on the official Debian FTP servers. As another example, if this is your first excursion into Linux-land, you probably want to download a “Live” image that you can experiment with. You can then run jigdo or bittorrent on the “live” setup to download the CD/DVD/BD install images you need for your first permanent installation. If the “Live” image also supports installing to your hard drive, that might let you avoid downloading a second install image at all. Hope that helps! Rick
Re: A Very Bad umount
On Sep 11, 2018, at 12:28 PM, Martin McCormick wrote: > /bin/rm: cannot remove > '/var/cache/rsnapshot/halfday.1/wb5agz/home/usr/lib/i386 > -linux-gnu': Transport endpoint is not connected In your rsnapshot.conf file, is “use_lazy_deletes” set to 1? If so, the final delete part of “rsnapshot hourly” may still be going on when you do the unmount. Just a thought… Rick
Re: DNS Key rollover
On Oct 4, 2018, at 11:32 AM, Reco wrote: > On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 02:15:52PM -0400, Default User wrote: >> Hi, Henning. >> >> I am running Unstable, with 4.18.0-2 amd-64 kernel, all updated. >> >> I don't know anything about bind. How do I know what bind version I am >> running, and if I need to do anything regarding the change you mentioned? > > Stretch's bind has this public part of root's KSK: > > # grep -A2 20326 /etc/bind/bind.keys ># This key (20326) is to be published in the root zone in 2017. ># Servers which were already using the old key (19036) should ># roll seamlessly to this new one via RFC 5011 rollover. Servers > > If you have the same - there's nothing to do. > If you don't - DNSSEC will stop working for you in seven days. > If you do not use BIND - there's nothing to do. > > Reco How about if I’m using dnsmasq? I’m running a more or less stock stretch with dnsmasq and this is what I see when I go looking for trust-anchors: cat /usr/share/dnsmasq-base/trust-anchors.conf # The root DNSSEC trust anchor, valid as at 30/01/2014 # Note that this is a DS record (ie a hash of the root Zone Signing Key) # If was downloaded from https://data.iana.org/root-anchors/root-anchors.xml trust-anchor=.,19036,8,2,49AAC11D7B6F6446702E54A1607371607A1A41855200FD2CE1CDDE32F24E8FB5 Which, IIUC, says it’s using root trust anchor ID 19036 extracted on Jan 30, 2014, not ID 20326 extracted any time in the last 12 months. Is there an update I have missed applying? Thanks! Rick
Re: DNS Key rollover for dnsmasq [SOLVED}
H… On further study, it seems that (in Debian Stretch, at least) the root KSK’s used by dnsmasq are taken from the file /usr/share/dns/root.ds, which is provided by the package dns-root-data; and that package seems to be part of the standard Stretch installation. That file lists both keys (the new “20326” and the old “19036”). So it’s all set to go. No need to panic… (-: Enjoy! Rick
Re: DNS Key rollover for dnsmasq [SOLVED}
On Oct 7, 2018, at 3:36 AM, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote: > On 07-10-2018 07:11, Rick Thomas wrote: >> On further study, it seems that (in Debian Stretch, at least) the root KSK’s >> used by dnsmasq are taken from the file /usr/share/dns/root.ds, which is >> provided by the package dns-root-data; and that package seems to be part of >> the standard Stretch installation. That file lists both keys (the new >> “20326” and the old “19036”). So it’s all set to go. No need to panic… (-: > > Where did you get that information from? I found nothing about > dns-root-data in dnsmasq package. > > I'd just add a new trust-anchor to the configuration. Just copy and > paste from https://github.com/imp/dnsmasq/blob/master/trust-anchors.conf > > -- > O que eu temo não e a estrategia do inimigo, mas os nossos > erros > -- Pericles, filosofo grego > > Eduardo M KALINOWSKI > edua...@kalinowski.com.br Hi Eduardo, I got it from “ps auww `prep dnsmasq`” then following up what I saw by looking in /etc/init.d/dnsmasq, which is called by systemd in “/lib/systemd/system/dnsmasq.service” (as is the case for lots of services that still rely on /etc/init.d for startup). Enjoy! Rick
Re: Recommendation on partition sizes
> On Nov 4, 2018, at 1:19 AM, Pascal Hambourg wrote: > > Le 04/11/2018 à 05:45, Andy Smith a écrit : >> You're probably going to receive as many different opinions as there >> are different people responding, but my recommendation in nearly any >> situation is to have a reasonable /boot and swap and then the rest >> of the space inside an LVM volume group. > (...) >> So, if I were you, I'd be doing something like: >> - 512MiB /boot >> - 2 GiB swap, or 16GiB if you intend to use it as a hibernate device >> - Rest as LVM volume group >> - 4 GiB / as logical volume >> - 4 GiB /var as logical volume >> - 50GiB (or whatever satisfies initial demand) /home as logical >> volume > > Why don’t you include the swap in LVM ? You want the swap partition to be encrypted with a random key. Putting it in a LV in the encrypted VG would result in double encryption, which would slow the system down.
Re: how to backup to an encrypted usb drive? [OT: rsync metadata]
>> On 11/14/18, Reco wrote: >>> If you're content with losing all this metadata in your backup - there >>> are rsync, cpio or tar. Or all those ‘backup solutions' based on those. >> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 12:52:57PM -0500, Lee wrote: >> Do I need all that metadata? This is for me at home so it's pretty >> much a single user machine. > On Nov 14, 2018, at 10:26 AM, Reco wrote: > That's for you to decide. I'd say you definitely need it for the backups > of / and /var and can *probably* skip it for /home, but YMMV. Don’t the options for rsync -aAHX preserve all the metadata? Is there something besides -a archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X) -p preserve permissions -g preserve group -o preserve owner -l copy symlinks as symlinks -t preserve modification times -A preserve ACLs (implies -p) -H preserve hard links -X preserve extended attributes ?
Re: how to backup to an encrypted usb drive? [OT: rsync metadata]
> On Nov 18, 2018, at 7:31 PM, Reco wrote: > > Hi. > > On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 11:56:27AM -0800, Rick Thomas wrote: >> >>>> On 11/14/18, Reco wrote: >>>>> If you're content with losing all this metadata in your backup - there >>>>> are rsync, cpio or tar. Or all those ‘backup solutions' based on those. >> >>>> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 12:52:57PM -0500, Lee wrote: >>>> Do I need all that metadata? This is for me at home so it's pretty >>>> much a single user machine. >> >>> On Nov 14, 2018, at 10:26 AM, Reco wrote: >>> That's for you to decide. I'd say you definitely need it for the backups >>> of / and /var and can *probably* skip it for /home, but YMMV. >> >> Don’t the options for rsync -aAHX preserve all the metadata? Is there >> something besides > > Yep, there is at least one thing rsync looses along the way: > > # chattr +i /bin/ping > # rsync -aHAX /bin/ping /tmp > # lsattr /bin/ping > ie--- /bin/ping > # lsattr /tmp/ping > -e--- /tmp/ping > > Reco Fascinating… 1) Are there any other extended attributes that are not copied by rsync? Or is there something special about “immutable”. 2) Is this a bug or a feature? Should there be a bg report filed on this phenomenon? If not, should it be documented in the rsync(1) man page? Does that need a bug report? Enjoy! Rick
Re: Will my reconstructed fstab work?
Sorry to hear of your mishap, Ken ... In regards to possibly making your system un-bootable, I have two suggestions: 1) First make a backup of everything ASAP! (and make plans for frequent regular backups into the future) 2) Always remember that you can boot from the Bullseye install DVD (or USB stick, or whatever) and go into "rescue mode". From there you can chroot (it's one of the menu options) into the root partition and fix whatever problems you encounter with the fstab. If you run into problems with either of those, you can always come back to the list with questions. Good luck! and I hope that helps! Rick On Wed, Nov 2, 2022, at 9:52 PM, Ken Heard wrote: > A few days ago using vim I added to my desktop fstab file a line for a > new portable storage device. in the process I somehow managed to screw > up fstab. Unfortunately I saved the screwed up version of fstab before > I noticed the damage done to it. > > As I had no fstab backup -- to correct later -- I had to reconstruct > fstab using the information produced by blkid for the missing UUIDs. I > think the reconstruction is correct, but I have since been afraid to > close the computer if because of a faulty fstab I would be unable to > reopen it > > I would consequently appreciate help in verifying the essential fstab > lines, numbered 11-20 in the reconstructed fstab quoted below and > thereby assuage my reopening fears. (Lines 26-40 relating to portable > storage devices I checked myself; they all work.) > > Basic Information: two internal hard drives, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, > each divided into two small partitions of equal size. Sda1 is used for > /boot/efi, lines 13 and 15. Partition sdb1, line 17, is currently > unused; in time I will copy to it what is in sda1. Partitions sda2 and > sdb2 form a RAID1, with the five LVM partitions listed in lines 11, 18, > 19 and 20. Operating system is Debian Bullseye. > > If anybody in interested, following the reconstructed fstab quoted > below is quoted further below how the fsab looked right after the screw > up. > > 01 # /etc/fstab: static file system information. > 02 # > 03 # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a > 04 # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name > devices > 05 # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). > 06 # > 07 # Systemd generates mount units based on this file, see systemd.mount(5). > 08 # Please run 'systemctl daemon-reload' after making changes here. > 09 # > 10 # > 11 /dev/mapper/Morcom-ROOT / ext4errors=remount-ro 0 1 > 12 # /boot/efi was on /dev/sda1 during installation > 13 UUID=3020-1029 /boot/efi vfatumask=0077 0 1 > 14 # /dos was on /dev/sda1 during installation > 15 UUID=3020-1029 /dosvfatutf80 0 > 16 # /dos2 was on /dev/sdb1 during installation > 17 UUID=2AF2-0A16 /dos2 vfatutf80 0 > 18 /dev/mapper/Morcom-HOME_crypt /home ext4defaults 0 2 > 19 /dev/mapper/Morcom-VAR /varext4defaults0 2 > 20 /dev/mapper/Morcom-SWAP_crypt noneswapswap 0 0 > 21 /dev/sr0/media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0 > 22 tmpfs /tmptmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=20% 0 0 > 23 UUID=c577-7f18-4443-a77b-c5827f977449 /media/fdr ext2 > user,noauto,noatime 0 0 > 24 UUID=33cebfb3-b568-493f-853b-e1b7ca5cc3a2 /media/fde ext2 > user,noauto,noatime 0 0 > 25 # -e8b57fb2ac09/media/ssda ext4user,npauto,noatime 0 > 0 > 26 UUID=la449167-8497-4471-ae0c-e8b57fb2ac09 /media/phda ext4 > user,noauto,noatime 0 0 > 27 UUID=0fee2d01-2441-4699-a4ae-bb45c417b8ee /media/ssda ext4 > user,noauto,noatime 0 0 > 28 UUID=e26255ab-e6c5-4bcd-941c-7378b7cf4083 /media/ssdb ext4 > user,noauto,noatime 0 0 > 29 UUID=3DB1-1700 /media/fdg vfatuser,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 30 UUID=5966-5502 /media/fdp vfatuser,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 31 UUID=1170-1657 /media/hca vfatuser,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 32 UUID=0E0A-0F26 /media/hcb vfatuser,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 33 UUID=1E82-122E /media/hcc vfatuser,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 34 UUID=1D1F-1032 /media/xca exfat user,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 35 UUID=1909-1458 /media.xcb exfat user,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 36 UUID=6238-3434 /media/xcc exfat user,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 37 UUID=206F-163F /media/xcd exfat user,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 38 UUID=3630-6530 /media/xce exfat user,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 39 UUID=3065-6630 /media/xcf exfat user,noauto,noatime > 0 0 > 40 LABEL=ostree /media/phdc ext4user,noa
Re: PowerBook G4 OS
On Wed, Jan 11, 2023, at 1:02 PM, Bob Crochelt wrote: > On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 09:59:48AM +0100, didier gaumet wrote: >> Le mardi 10 janvier 2023 à 16:32 -0800, Bob Crochelt a écrit : >> > > >> > Thanks to all who replied. I appreciate the help and advice. Think >> > I >> > will just sit tight with the system, as it works fine for what I >> > need: >> > email, a little (slow surfing) and some note writing. >> > >> > I imagine you have saved me many hours of frustration. >> > >> > Regards >> > Bob Crochelt >> >> Hello, >> >> That would leave you with unmaintained software, though, with obvious >> risks accessing the internet (web, mail, etc...) >> >> Debian port for a Powerbook G4 is unofficial and I don't know the >> actual state of this port. >> >> NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD all seem to have an active and official >> port for the PowerPC G4. >> >> > Thanks for this information. I was aware that Jessie is not maintained; > that was the reason for my inquiry. I will look into your suggestions > Regards > Bob Crochelt What I have isn't a powerbook, it's a PowerMac G4 Silver, which may or may-not make a difference. In any case, it runs fine on "sid". Here's what /proc/cpuinfo says about it: processor : 0 cpu : 7410, altivec supported temperature : 35-37 C (uncalibrated) clock : 533.32MHz revision: 1.3 (pvr 800c 1103) bogomips: 66.58 timebase: 33290001 platform: PowerMac model : PowerMac3,4 machine : PowerMac3,4 motherboard : PowerMac3,4 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh detected as : 69 (PowerMac G4 Silver) pmac flags : 0010 L2 cache: 1024K unified pmac-generation : NewWorld Memory : 1536 MB And "uname -a" says: Linux dillserver 6.0.0-6-powerpc #1 Debian 6.0.12-1 (2022-12-09) ppc GNU/Linux Rick
what do I need to add to my sources.list for the new non-free-firmware repository?
I've got a couple of Debian systems that (for various reasons) are running "testing" or "sid". I recently did apt update && apt upgrade && aptitude search '~o' on these machines and found that a number of firmware packages are considered "obsolete", presumably because they are no longer in any of the repositories listed in sources.list. So what do I need to add to my sources.list file to get them back now? Here's what I see: root@kmac:~# aptitude search '~o' i A firmware-amd-graphics - Binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips i firmware-linux - Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel (metapackage) i A firmware-linux-nonfree - Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel (metapackage) i A firmware-misc-nonfree - Binary firmware for various drivers in the Linux kernel root@kmac:~# Any thoughts? Rick
Installer can't find network interface on Intel NUC BOXNUC8i3BEH1
I recently bought an intel NUC BOXNUC8i3BEH1. You can see a description of the product at Newegg: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102213 I’m trying to install Debian Stretch on it debian-9.7.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso and (later) firmware-9.6.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso I made a bootable USB stick the usual way with dd to copy the iso to the stick. It boots fine and loads some preliminary stuff. When it gets to trying to identify the network interface, it fails at that task and drops into a screen with a long list of network drivers for me to choose from. I didn’t know what driver to load (the Newegg description says it uses an Intel networking chip, but I didn’t know which driver was needed by that chip) So I aborted the installation. On a hunch, I then tried to install Ubuntu (ubuntu-mate-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso) and that works fine. The network comes up automatically. So, on Ubuntu, I typed “lspci -v” and searched the output for the network interface. It says that the driver installed for that interface is “e1000e”. A quick check on a working Stretch system shows that the e1000e driver *is* available in Debian. So, I think to myself, “Problem solved — all I have to do is specify the e1000e driver and all will be well!” Not so fast… I boot the Debian “firmware-9.6…” stick and it gets to the list of drivers. I pick e1000e (with is there, along with a bunch of other Intel drivers) and go back to see if it now can see the interface. Nope! It still isn’t seeing the network. What am I missing? What is Ubuntu doing to make this work that Debian doesn’t? Anybody got any suggestions??? Thanks in advance, Rick
Re: Installer can't find network interface on Intel NUC BOXNUC8i3BEH1
> On Feb 13, 2019, at 5:47 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > On Wed, 2019-02-13 at 16:17 -0500, Laurent Dumont wrote: >> I'm not sure if it's the exact same case but I had the same issue with a >> more recent motherboard. Debian failed to detect the network card with the >> E1000 drivers. >> >> I tried an iso with the non free repo without success. >> >> A base Ubuntu iso install was able to detect and configure the network >> driver. >> >> I'll see if I can find the adapter version. It was an Intel based adapter. > [...] > > Unfortunately the various chips supported by e1000e are all subtly > different and each new chip seems to need extra code in the driver. > Debian 9 still has Linux 4.9 and we haven't backported those driver > changes. > > There is supposed to be an optional installer build that uses a newer > kernel version, but that hasn't officially happened yet. > > At this point you might be better off using the alpha release of the > installer for Debian 10 "buster". > > Ben. > > -- > Ben Hutchings > When in doubt, use brute force. - Ken Thompson Thanks, Ben! I’ll give that a try! Rick
Re: Installer can't find network interface on Intel NUC BOXNUC8i3BEH1
> On Feb 13, 2019, at 6:51 PM, Rick Thomas wrote: > > > >> On Feb 13, 2019, at 5:47 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote: >> >> On Wed, 2019-02-13 at 16:17 -0500, Laurent Dumont wrote: >>> I'm not sure if it's the exact same case but I had the same issue with a >>> more recent motherboard. Debian failed to detect the network card with the >>> E1000 drivers. >>> >>> I tried an iso with the non free repo without success. >>> >>> A base Ubuntu iso install was able to detect and configure the network >>> driver. >>> >>> I'll see if I can find the adapter version. It was an Intel based adapter. >> [...] >> >> Unfortunately the various chips supported by e1000e are all subtly >> different and each new chip seems to need extra code in the driver. >> Debian 9 still has Linux 4.9 and we haven't backported those driver >> changes. >> >> There is supposed to be an optional installer build that uses a newer >> kernel version, but that hasn't officially happened yet. >> >> At this point you might be better off using the alpha release of the >> installer for Debian 10 "buster". >> >> Ben. >> >> -- >> Ben Hutchings >> When in doubt, use brute force. - Ken Thompson > > Thanks, Ben! > > I’ll give that a try! > Rick That works! I used the amd64 “alpha5” image. I had to install the non-free firmware to get the wifi to work, but I probably would have done that anyway! Thanks for your help! Rick
Re: Cannot re-install synaptic on Buster.
> On Apr 14, 2019, at 11:03 PM, Reco wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 01:24:32AM -0400, Kieran Smyth wrote: >> For reasons unknown to me, synaptic uninstalled itself about three weeks >> ago. I am using Buster on the desktop, with MATE as my desktop environment. > > Synaptic was removed from testing two weeks ago, see #818366. > >> I like using a GUI frontend to apt, and if anyone can help me get it back >> on my system i'd really appreciate it. > > You're not supposed to use synaptic in Wayland session anymore. Consider > using gnome-packagekit instead. Or try muon. (apt install muon) I don’t know if it is fully wayland compatible, or if it’s just not well enough known to show up on the remover’s radar screens. In any case, I find it’s a good substitute for synaptic. Rick
Re: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
> On May 4, 2019, at 9:28 PM, Mail Delivery System > wrote: > > : host bendel.debian.org[82.195.75.100] said: >550 5.7.1 No attachments allowed (in reply to end of DATA command) > Reporting-MTA: dns; pb-sasl20.pobox.com Hmmm… I was trying to attach the syslog file from a failing install. What’s the approved method for doing that now, since it’s not allowing attachments? Rick
Re: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
> On May 5, 2019, at 1:04 AM, Frank Scheiner wrote: > > Hi Rick, > > On 5/5/19 09:06, Rick Thomas wrote: >> >> >>> On May 4, 2019, at 9:28 PM, Mail Delivery System >>> wrote: >>> >>> : host bendel.debian.org[82.195.75.100] >>> said: >>>550 5.7.1 No attachments allowed (in reply to end of DATA command) >>> Reporting-MTA: dns; pb-sasl20.pobox.com >> >> Hmmm… I was trying to attach the syslog file from a failing install. >> >> What’s the approved method for doing that now, since it’s not allowing >> attachments? > > Did you compress the attachments? > > Strange indeed, maybe that was changed. But no longer allowing > attachments is not that useful. Maybe just an intermediate issue because > of spamming other lists? > > Cheers, > Frank The file was “.zip” compressed on a Mac — not “.gz’ on a Linux. Do you think that makes a difference? Rick
Re: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
> On May 5, 2019, at 12:45 AM, Pierre Frenkiel > wrote: > > On Sun, 5 May 2019, Rick Thomas wrote: > >> >> >>> On May 4, 2019, at 9:28 PM, Mail Delivery System >>> wrote: >>> >>> : host bendel.debian.org[82.195.75.100] >>> said: >>> 550 5.7.1 No attachments allowed (in reply to end of DATA command) >>> Reporting-MTA: dns; pb-sasl20.pobox.com >> >> Hmmm I was trying to attach the syslog file from a failing install. >> >> Whats the approved method for doing that now, since its not allowing >> attachments? >> >> Rick >> > As a check, I try to attach mine > > best regards, > -- > Pierre Frenkiel That seems to have worked for debian-user. Mine was a .zip file, and I sent it to debian-powerpc. Do you think an uncompressed .txt file would have done better? Rick
Re: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
> On May 5, 2019, at 2:34 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz > wrote: > > > >> On May 5, 2019, at 11:33 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: >> >> The file was “.zip” compressed on a Mac — not “.gz’ on a Linux. Do you >> think that makes a difference? > > You should simply not send compressed attachments, especially for text. > > Adrian What do you recommend instead? The original file was 365KB. The compressed file was 48KB. Rick
Re: List attachments (was: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender)
Thanks for the reply! > On May 5, 2019, at 2:55 AM, Brad Rogers wrote: > > There are other places things can be put (own web site, pastebin, etc.) I used to have my own webserver, but the machine I was running it on died. What is “pastebin”? Is it available to everyone? Enjoy! Rick
Re: Installing Debian on iMac
Hi John, and welcome to the Debian community! I assume you have a broadband Internet connection where you will be doing this installation? If so: You’ll want the Mac specific “netinst” installer image[1] that gets most of its software packages from the Debian mirrors on the Web. [1] https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/> Take a look at this wiki page[2] for instructions on making a dual-boot MacOS/Debian setup. The wiki page is aimed at the mac mini but it should mostly carry over for your iMac. Also, you’ll want to read the wiki page[3] for burning an installer CD under MacOS. [2] https://wiki.debian.org/MacMiniIntel [3] https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#record-mac And, of course, you’ll want to RTFM[4] [4] https://www.debian.org/doc/ If you’re not already signed up, you will want to join the debian-user mailing list[5]. That’s where you’ll find lots of friendly, helpful and knowledgeable folks. [5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/ Enjoy! Rick > On May 5, 2019, at 1:52 PM, John Hammack wrote: > > iMac: iMac (24-inch, early 2009), Processor 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mem > 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3, OS X El Capitan ver 10.11.6. > Objective: Install Debian and software development tools (compilers, > interpreters, and support applications for software development.) > Progress: I have searched the internet and have not found instructions I > could follow through to completion. > Experience: Before retirement (1995) I was doing software development on a > Hewlett Packard Unix System ((HPUX). I was then comfortable with the Unix > system, BASH and all. > Excuse: I am now living in The Villages FL and with all these old folks > there is no one here with which I can discuss OS’s etc. > > Comments recommendations appreciated. > > Thanks John > I am 85 and have accumulated rust where brain cells used to be.
Re: List attachments
Thanks, Carl! The free WordPress account sounds very interesting. I’ll check it out. Rick > On May 5, 2019, at 4:28 AM, Carl Fink wrote: > > On 5/5/19 6:13 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: >> I used to have my own webserver, but the machine I was running it on died. >> >> What is “pastebin”? Is it available to everyone? >> >> Enjoy! >> Rick > > Places you can put stuff for others to see, besides Pastebin: > > 1)Many ISP accounts give some free web space, e.g. Panix > > 2)A free Google account allows document sharing. So does a free Microsoft > account. Like them or hate them, most of us have one for convenience's sake. > > 3)You can create a free WordPress account easily. Even if you only blog > every decade or two, you get the ability to upload files and give them URLs. > > 4)Plenty of others > > -- > Carl Fink nitpick...@nitpicking.com > > Read my blog at blog.nitpicking.com. Reviews! Observations! >
Re: List attachments (was: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender)
> On May 5, 2019, at 4:26 PM, David wrote: > > For pastebin purposes within Debian, please use: https://paste.debian.net/ Thanks, David. This sound like exactly what I need. Rick
Re: Easiest Way to forward an email Message from Linux to a Mac
See reply bottom posted... On Sat, Nov 2, 2019, at 10:17 AM, Bob Weber wrote: > On 11/2/19 8:10 AM, Martin McCormick wrote: >> Here is the setup. We are on a private vlan as in 192.168.x.x. All local host names are resolved via hosts files. Messages to go to the big wide world must go through Suddenlink's SMTP smarthost and I definitely don't want to break that. On rare occasions, I want to forward an email to the Mac which normally doesn't send or receive emails. What would be the simplest way to "forward" an email from the Linux box to the Mac's mailer? The Mac only needs to be able to receive, not send any email. Thank you Martin WB5AGZ >> > Why not create a user on the Linux box to receive such emails and have the > MAC client connect to that user on the Linux box. You might have to install a > pop server (popa3d ... easiest to install and configure) or imac server > (dovecot-imapd ... harder to configure and probably more than you need) on > the Linux box if one isn't installed already. > Your MAC would have to have an email client capable of connecting to a pop or > imac mailbox at the ip of the Linux box or host name in the hosts file > corresponding to the Linux box. Hi Martin, The setup Bob describes is exactly what I use for my family. Debian linux box running dovecot receives email from our ISP via "fetchmail" and sorts it out to separate accounts for each family member, who then reads their mail on a Mac or PC using the native OS gui mail-reader on their machine. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions. Enjoy! Rick
Re: Backup Times on a Linux desktop
On Sat, Nov 2, 2019, at 1:30 PM, Konstantin Nebel wrote: > Hi, > > > Anyway from my experience borg is the best and I can recommend it wormly. > > I appreciate you answering in the fullest how you do backups and I used borg > in the past which I can recommend as well. But I really want to focus on how > to trigger the backup in an automated way and not in which tool is recommended > to use. > > > My use case is quite opposite. I shut down the backup server as I do only > > weekly and monthly backups. > > I assume u trigger them manually then? I would like to do them automatically > and hopefully forget about them that they exist and do the occasional check if > they work or not :) For this I use "rsnapshot," which schedules it's backup runs via Linux "cron". It's pretty much "fire and forget" once you've done the configuration details. Hope that helps! Rick
Re: Easiest Way to forward an email Message from Linux to a Mac
On Sat, Nov 2, 2019, at 10:25 PM, elvis wrote: > > On 3/11/19 1:50 pm, Rick Thomas wrote: >> See reply bottom posted... >> >> On Sat, Nov 2, 2019, at 10:17 AM, Bob Weber wrote: >>> On 11/2/19 8:10 AM, Martin McCormick wrote: >>>> Here is the setup. We are on a private vlan as in 192.168.x.x. All local host names are resolved via hosts files. Messages to go to the big wide world must go through Suddenlink's SMTP smarthost and I definitely don't want to break that. On rare occasions, I want to forward an email to the Mac which normally doesn't send or receive emails. What would be the simplest way to "forward" an email from the Linux box to the Mac's mailer? The Mac only needs to be able to receive, not send any email. Thank you Martin WB5AGZ >>>> >>> Why not create a user on the Linux box to receive such emails and have the >>> MAC client connect to that user on the Linux box. You might have to install >>> a pop server (popa3d ... easiest to install and configure) or imac server >>> (dovecot-imapd ... harder to configure and probably more than you need) on >>> the Linux box if one isn't installed already. >>> Your MAC would have to have an email client capable of connecting to a pop >>> or imac mailbox at the ip of the Linux box or host name in the hosts file >>> corresponding to the Linux box. >> >> Hi Martin, >> >> The setup Bob describes is exactly what I use for my family. Debian linux >> box running dovecot receives email from our ISP via "fetchmail" and sorts it >> out to separate accounts for each family member, who then reads their mail >> on a Mac or PC using the native OS gui mail-reader on their machine. >> >> Feel free to ask me if you have any questions. > Hi Rick, > Why doesn't each user use the native reader to get the mail from the ISP? > What is the reason for the extra step? > I've never been able to quite figure out where I would need fetchmail in my > mail setup but every howto seems to mention it, so I am curious to see if I > am missing something. The local mail server is inside the firewall, so it's a bit more private than the ISP. Also, the local machine keeps archives that the ISP would charge money for. It sorts into folders and does other automated activities that are not available from the ISP. The main benefit is that this setup gives us finer grained control than we can get from the ISP. Fetchmail allows me (via cron) to schedule precisely when mail is retrieved from the ISP. Also, the connection starts from inside the firewall, so I don't have to poke a hole in the firewall for SMTP to reach in and deliver mail. It's a trade-off of simplicity vs control. HopeThatHelps Rick
Re: apple mini
On Wed, Jan 8, 2020, at 6:57 PM, ghe wrote: > > > > On Jan 8, 2020, at 07:46 PM, Michael Stone wrote: > > > >> If you need to protect against an attacker willing to examine your HDD > >> with magnetic force microscopy, there is no substitute for physical > >> destruction of the media. > > > > Yes--if single-pass all-zeros erase isn't sufficient, the next step up is > > physical destruction, not multi-pass pattern mumbo-jumbo. > > Back in the analog days, I worked at a college radio station that sent > out radio programs on tape. There was a big box that we passed a reel > of tape over to erase it. That box might do disks too :-) > > Unless there was some magnetic magic written on the disk for the firmware. > > -- > Glenn English Yup! Disk drives need (at least) some pre-formatting information on the media so the drive firmware can tell if it's on the right track. In the old days, you could re-write that information by "formatting" the disk. But these days that's all done at the factory and they don't want the consumer to even know about the existence of such things. Bottom line: If you tried the "big electromagnet" trick with a modern disk drive, you would render it useless. I doubt that's what the OP wanted. Rick
Re: AMD 10.2 netinstall
> Since you have to install the firmware-linux-nonfree that means that > it s not installed! From what I remember > you need to select those packages at the end of the base image > installation. And you must do an "expert" install, in order to see that option. If you do a "Standard" install, you won't get a chance. There's probably something you can put in the boot args that will force it to install the firmware-linux-nonfree package, but I don't know what that is. Rick
Fwd: Re: AMD 10.2 netinstall
The "unofficial" firmware installer iso has a bunch of non-free/proprietary drivers/firmware for various adapters and devices that do not have open-source drivers, but that your machine may need to run correctly. For example, a laptop may have a wi-fi built-in from a manufacturer who is unwilling to release the source code for the wi-fi device's firmware. The "unofficial" installer CD has the necessary firmware in the form of a "binary blob" that can be installed to make the laptop's wi-fi work with Linux. Hope That Helps! Rick - Original message ----- From: Thomas Hilbert To: Rick Thomas Subject: Re: AMD 10.2 netinstall Date: Sunday, January 19, 2020 5:50 PM Good to know about the expert option. So what does the Non-Free, firmware installer get you over the standard all open source installer? On 1/19/20 2:35 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: >> Since you have to install the firmware-linux-nonfree that means that >> it s not installed! From what I remember >> you need to select those packages at the end of the base image >> installation. > And you must do an "expert" install, in order to see that option. If you do > a "Standard" install, you won't get a chance. > > There's probably something you can put in the boot args that will force it to > install the firmware-linux-nonfree package, but I don't know what that is. > > Rick >
Re: Fwd: Re: AMD 10.2 netinstall
Whether you can use the "netinstall" CD depends on whether your device's network connection requires one of those non-free drivers. If it needs a driver that isn't on the CD (which is more likely, the smaller the install medium) to retrieve the drivers it needs... Well, you get the picture. (If not, read "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller... In fact, read it anyway if you haven't already!) Enjoy! Rick On Mon, Jan 20, 2020, at 1:58 PM, Thomas Hilbert wrote: > Hey Rick > > Thanks for that response. What you describe below was my understanding > going into it, but then it didn't load the driver without my > intervention. Perhaps it is because I used the ~350mb netinstaller NOT > the full CD or DVD iso's...though I haven't seen that explicitly > documented anywhere. > > Thanks > > > Tom > > On 1/19/20 9:18 PM, Rick Thomas wrote: > > The "unofficial" firmware installer iso has a bunch of non-free/proprietary > > drivers/firmware for various adapters and devices that do not have > > open-source drivers, but that your machine may need to run correctly. > > > > For example, a laptop may have a wi-fi built-in from a manufacturer who is > > unwilling to release the source code for the wi-fi device's firmware. The > > "unofficial" installer CD has the necessary firmware in the form of a > > "binary blob" that can be installed to make the laptop's wi-fi work with > > Linux. > > > > Hope That Helps! > > Rick > > > > - Original message - > > From: Thomas Hilbert > > To: Rick Thomas > > Subject: Re: AMD 10.2 netinstall > > Date: Sunday, January 19, 2020 5:50 PM > > > > Good to know about the expert option. So what does the Non-Free, > > firmware installer get you over the standard all open source installer? > > > > On 1/19/20 2:35 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > >>> Since you have to install the firmware-linux-nonfree that means that > >>> it s not installed! From what I remember > >>> you need to select those packages at the end of the base image > >>> installation. > >> And you must do an "expert" install, in order to see that option. If you > >> do a "Standard" install, you won't get a chance. > >> > >> There's probably something you can put in the boot args that will force it > >> to install the firmware-linux-nonfree package, but I don't know what that > >> is. > >> > >> Rick > >> >
Re: Fwd: Re: AMD 10.2 netinstall
Hmmm... It looks like you're correct. I just downloaded the "netinst" and "DVD-1" unofficial firmware images and compared the two "/pool/non-free/" directories on the two ISOs. They are identical. Bottom line: You can use either the netinst or the DVD-1 versions without fear of Catch-22. Thanks for the correction! Rick On Mon, Jan 20, 2020, at 8:32 PM, David Wright wrote: > On Mon 20 Jan 2020 at 17:09:33 (-0800), Rick Thomas wrote: > > Whether you can use the "netinstall" CD depends on whether your device's > > network connection requires one of those non-free drivers. If it needs a > > driver that isn't on the CD (which is more likely, the smaller the install > > medium) to retrieve the drivers it needs... > > I'm confused. I thought you were discussing firmware. I was under the > impression that the non-free firmware on the netinstall CD was the > same as that on the DVDs, ie the files under > http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/firmware/
Re: could not resolve deb.debian.org after installing via debian live image
Hi Tamar, I think your problem is that the box is not connected to the internet. The sources.list file left by the install process assumes you will be connected. So take a look at /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the lines that refer to internet sites such as deb.debian.org, Then un-comment the line(s) that refer(s) to the live installer image. Then make sure the DVD is in the drive and mounted. You should now be able to install packages from the DVD. Good luck! Rick On Sun, Feb 2, 2020, at 3:13 AM, Tamar Nirenberg wrote: > Hi, > > I installed Debian 10 on a new server using live > image:debian-live-10.2.0-amd64-gnome.iso The box is not connected to the > internet. > Installation ended successfully, but now when I try to install open-ssh I get > an error saying "could not resolve deb.debian.org" >
Re: could not resolve deb.debian.org after installing via debian live image
I'm not sure myself, but maybe somebody on the list knows? Anybody know what's the procedure for adding a local disk as a repo? Thanks in advance! On Sun, Feb 2, 2020, at 4:15 AM, Tamar Nirenberg wrote: > Hi Rick, > > Thank you for your answer. > > The sources file contains only these lines, no reference to the live > installer image: > > $ cat sources.list > # See https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList for more information. > deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main > deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main > > deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main > deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main > > deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ buster/updates main > deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ buster/updates main > > > Do you know how I can add the USB mount (i did not use a DVD, but a USB > stick) as a source for the apt install? > > Thanks, > Tamar > > > בתאריך יום א׳, 2 בפבר׳ 2020 ב-13:45 מאת Rick Thomas > <rick.tho...@pobox.com>: >> __ >> Hi Tamar, >> >> I think your problem is that the box is not connected to the internet. The >> sources.list file left by the install process assumes you will be connected. >> >> So take a look at /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the lines that refer >> to internet sites such as deb.debian.org, Then un-comment the line(s) that >> refer(s) to the live installer image. Then make sure the DVD is in the drive >> and mounted. You should now be able to install packages from the DVD. >> >> Good luck! >> Rick >> >> On Sun, Feb 2, 2020, at 3:13 AM, Tamar Nirenberg wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> I installed Debian 10 on a new server using live >>> image:debian-live-10.2.0-amd64-gnome.iso The box is not connected to the >>> internet. >>> Installation ended successfully, but now when I try to install open-ssh I >>> get an error saying "could not resolve deb.debian.org" >>> >>
Looking for Debian unofficial install for mac with firmware...
For a friend... Does there exist a Buster Debian amd64 installer for mac with non-free firmware? He has a been given a 2006 vintage quad core MacPro1,1 https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-3.0-specs.html That he'd like to get Linux running on. A live image for the same would be nice too! Thanks in advance, Rick
Re: Looking for Debian unofficial install for mac with firmware...
I notice that the webpage at http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/10.3.0+nonfree/amd64/iso-cd/ mentions a mac image as if it *should* be there, but it's not in the list of files. Is that an oversight, or was there a conscious decision to drop "mac" support with 10.3 ? On Mon, Feb 10, 2020, at 3:17 AM, Rick Thomas wrote: > For a friend... > > Does there exist a Buster Debian amd64 installer for mac with non-free > firmware? > > He has a been given a 2006 vintage quad core MacPro1,1 > > https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-3.0-specs.html > That he'd like to get Linux running on. > > A live image for the same would be nice too! > > Thanks in advance, > Rick >
NAS software for Raspberry Pi that supports full range of client OS (Win-10, MacOS-X, Linux) ?
The covid-19 situation is giving me lots of free time recently, so I've ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 with delivery expected sometime this week. I'd like to use it for a NAS for the home network, so my family can share files without resorting to sneaker-net. We have a full range of clients -- Mac, Win, Linux (mostly debian, but also CentOS and Ubuntu) and I'd like to be able to serve all of them if possible. Can anybody suggest a good NAS package? Debian based is preferable, but almost any Linux will do. I've been looking at Rockstor but I don't see anything there that will run on a Raspberry Pi. Anybody using something they have had good experience with? Thanks in advance, Rick
Re: NAS software for Raspberry Pi that supports full range of client OS (Win-10, MacOS-X, Linux) ?
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020, at 9:28 PM, Charles Curley wrote: > On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 20:43:43 -0700 > "Rick Thomas" wrote: > > > Can anybody suggest a good NAS package? Debian based is preferable, > > but almost any Linux will do. > > I find a combination of plain vanilla Samba and nextcloud do me quite > well. Thanks for the pointer, Charles. It looks very interesting. Nextcloud sounds like it does exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Can you explain a little bit about how "plain vanilla Samba" fits into the nextcloud picture?
Re: NAS software for Raspberry Pi that supports full range of client OS (Win-10, MacOS-X, Linux) ?
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020, at 10:59 PM, Vincent Lammens wrote: > Hi Rick > > You could try openmediavault. It has an iso for the raspberrypi, and > comes with a smb, ftp and ssh system preinstalled, so serving all kinds > of client os's should be no problem. It also has a webgui, and has a few > plugins to add webdav for example. Thanks, Vincent. That looks very interesting. Are there plugins to handle NFS (for Linux clients) and AFP (for Mac clients)? Or (since both of them do speak SMB, whatever it's limitations) is SMB/ftp/ssh considered sufficient for all? Enjoy! Rick
