Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Being Facebook member: How to anon?
On 23/10/17 14:56, Stroller wrote: > There are quite granular settings to allow anyone but friends to see or post > on your timeline - I was quite impressed by how much privacy appears to be > available to users. I suspect this allows you more privacy from you family > and colleagues than it does from Facebook, though. I won't touch facebook. "how much privacy appears to be available to users" - I get the impression that privacy is denied to non-users! How ironic - in order to tell facebook not to track you it's not enough just to have nothing to do with it - you have to create an account and give it loads of info you don't want it to have, in order to tell it not to use that info! One reason I trust Google much more than facebook - at least on Google everything *defaults* to *closed*, rather than defaulting wide open! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] A portage nuisance
On 28/10/17 15:52, Andrew Savchenko wrote: > On Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:58:13 +0100 Peter Humphrey wrote: >> > On Fri, 27 Oct 2017 12:52:54 - >> > Helmut Jarausch wrote: >> > >>> > > I have a problem with emerge for a long time. >>> > > Sometimes I need to (re-)emerge many packages like in an >>> > > emerge --emptytree @world >>> > > >>> > > Because I use several overlays, there are problems with a lot of >>> > > packages. >>> > > Unfortunately, emerge shows me just the first problem (like a missing >>> > > USE-flags) and then terminates. >>> > > Is there any means to let emerge go and report several (all) problems >>> > > which are independent of each other? >> > >> > EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--keep-going" ? > No, --keep-going allows to continue as long as possible after a > build failure. Helmut asks about dependecies resolution failures, > e.g. in some package REQUIRED_USE is not met, or circular > dependency occurs and so on. What I would like - a bit like --keep-going - is some option that tries again. When I do an "emerge -u" it sometimes blows up with this massive load of dependency failures. So what I end up doing is emerge a few packages that look like they're going to work, and then try my full update again. After several cycles through this, suddenly everything works. So my spec for what I would like is basically, as each package successfully resolves its dependencies, add it to a "try again" list. If the current list blows up in dependency hell, restart the emerge with just the packages in the "try again" list. When you haven't updated for a while and you've got a lot of packages, this "emerge what you can" approach certainly seems to work for me, it would just be nice if it was automated because it can take a lot of attempts (and time) before the system finally succeeds in updating itself. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] A portage nuisance
On 28/10/17 23:45, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
>> emerge -u world
>> > A will be emerged with options ...
>> > B will be emerged with options ...
>> > C will be emerged with options ...
>> > D is blocked by E
>> > F will be emerged with options ...
>> > G is blocked by H
>> > Giving up, too many circular dependencies
>> > emerge A B C F
> Ah, man, this is where your mistake is. You are assuming that it
> is possible to get a correct dependency subgraph without building
> full correct dependency graph first. This is not possible and this
> is math. While the approach you described abode may work in some
> practical cases, it will be busted in general case.
>
> The key moment here is that graph's root node may be changed during
> dependency recalculation based on _how_ conflict is solved, the
> same as all other nodes may be reordered. And dependencies which
> appear to be valid before conflict is resolved may became invalid
> after, consider the following dep tree:
>
> A
> / \
> B C
> |
> !{D,E}
>
> - B and C depends on A;
> - D conflicts with E and both depend on C;
>
> You assume that !{D,E} conflict can be skipped and A, B, C canbe
> emerged. But let's assume that you selected D later, but D depends
> on F and F conflicts with A[some_flag]. So you'll have to choose
> some alternative to A or change its USE flags, this may require to
> rebuild the whole dependency tree (and build order may change as
> well). In order to prevent dozens (sometimes hundreds or even
> thousands) of useless rebuilds and to avoid leaving intermediate
> tree in the utterly broken state emerge fails if it can't build the
> dependency graph.
EXCEPT.
My "emerge A B C F" will presumably then fail with those conflicts, and
it will loop again and just do an "emerge A".
I'm not saying "prune the graph first time, then just emerge
everything". I'm saying "prune the graph, and try again with the reduced
set".
Thing is, I have always found that deleting blockers "emerge -C1", and
emerging everything that I can get to emerge, is almost guaranteed to
end up with a system where everything eventually emerges.
The problem I have is that, if I delay updating (or something like kde
with its gazillions of packages is upgraded), I end up with maybe 300
packages to be emerged. Trying to sort that mess out is a nightmare
especially when emerge starts blowing up with circular dependencies and
stuff, and old packages blocking new ones - "A version 2 is blocked by A
version 1" etc etc. And all too often deleting the current version A
(and the other packages - slated for replacement - that depend on A)
fixes the problem.
I think we're having a misunderstanding here. If emerge does what I'm
asking for, and leaves the system in a broken state (as you seem to
think it will), then that's a serious bug in emerge. You seem to think
I'm asking emerge to prune the dependency tree - I'm not. I'm asking for
it to prune the package list - if it can't sort out dependencies, drop
that package from the package list and then, when it's got a list of
packages that it thinks will work, go back to the start and try to
emerge just those (calculating a new dependency tree).
In other words, I'm asking emerge to automate what I do - look at the
output, find a subset of packages that I think will work, and then ask
it to try again with just those packages. I would be very surprised if
it iterated repeatedly down to the null set.
As for doing useless rebuilds, isn't that MY call, not yours? What is
most valuable - my time, or my computer's time? As it stands, I have to
babysit an emerge - calculating the full graph bombs, so I have to try
to emerge a small subset, which might bomb, and when that works I try
again with the full set that bombs, so I have to iterate again, ad
nauseam ... I like to work on the principle "if the computer can
automate what I do, then it should ..."
What would you recommend as the best way (for somebody who's knowledge
of gentoo is patchy) of dealing with the situation when an emerge blows
up with loads of circular dependencies finishing with the message "too
many errors, giving up"? As opposed to my way of "emerge what I can,
then see what more emerges", which I have always found eventually fixes
everything.
Cheers,
Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 29/10/17 11:21, Dale wrote: > Power failures aren't as often the past few years anyway. I could > almost make it without a UPS BUT I do like having that extra > protection. Mine has some serious surge protection in it plus > brownout/over voltage protection/warning as well. While I have a fairly > decent power supply in this rig, I didn't buy the cheapest thing out > there, having a little extra is nice. May save my bacon one day. ;-) Depends where you live. Are you in the States? I'm in the UK and powercuts are almost unheard of AT THE MOMENT. But we keep getting dire warnings that our generation is going down, while demand is going up, and they are on the verge of crossing ... Dunno what's going to happen then, but we tend to get trips and cuts, not brownouts, so we could be in for a nasty shock in the not too distant future :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 29/10/17 19:11, Mick wrote: > BTW, perhaps in UK cities general and unpredicted power cuts are relatively > rare and brownouts don't occur often. Out in the sticks the infrastructure > is > so neglected power cuts and brown outs can be a weekly occurrence. I just > bought yet another UPS to protect my TV and media devices, having suffered > catastrophic failures in the past. :-( That looks like infrastructure failure, not plain insufficient power which is what we are apparently heading for. Certainly the "explosions" one is "old news" - where I worked suffered this sort of failure in the early 90's. The story as I understood it was some crooks went down a manhole to try and blow their way into a Lloyds Bank vault. Unfortunately, between them and the vault was a - somewhat overloaded - 50KV supply line. When the charge went off, this shorted for some 5 miles of cable :-( It's too long ago now, I think it happened on a Sunday night so we came in to work to no power. They got an emergency rig up and running Monday afternoon, one phase back by about Wednesday, and everything back to normal the following Monday. This was the Kings Road in London! But the new feature is just "not enough power" - that really will be a problem! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 30/10/17 23:28, Mick wrote: > The regulator does not hold the budget, central government departments do and > the regulator cannot (or will not) control abnormal profits privatised > utilities are making year after year. However, the regulator will engage > enthusiastically in the a theatre of regular reviews of market conditions, in > an attempt to convince consumers and tax payers the most gratuitous abuse of > power is kept in check. Quite often that's the government's fault too ... The reason British Telecom made obscene profits for YEARS after they privatised was because they inherited terrible infrastructure that cost a lot of money just to keep going. And the reason it cost so much was that every time the General Post Office tried to put money aside to replace said infrastructure, the Government (the sole shareholder) declared a large dividend and took it away. The alternative was for the GPO to borrow, but every time they did that the Treasury said "that money is part of Government Borrowing. We're committed to reducing government borrowing so you're not allowed to borrow". So BT made gazillions because a brand new exchange, with a ten year warranty, probably cost about two years' maintenance of the exchange it replaced. And because BT were quite visibly cutting prices (not by much!) but the new infrastructure was reducing costs so much faster, their profits soared. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 30/10/17 23:42, Rich Freeman wrote: > If the big banks thought that investing for the long term would make > them more money they would do it. They have no loyalty to the > companies they invest in. If they can invest in a company one month, > and make more money by investing in a competitor that will put them > out of business the next month, they will. I'm not sure why a "long > term investor" wouldn't do the same if they could make money doing it. > They have money for the long-term, but that doesn't mean that they > have to keep it in once place. The banks have nothing to do with it. The fund managers are rewarded for beating the index. They are NOT punished for missing the index. That means a fund manager who is bang on the average will get a bonus every second year. Paid for with investors' money. The quickest way for day traders to make a profit is to predict what the big boys are going to do (easy if you understand that most of them are index trackers who have little choice where to invest) and beat them to it. Buy shares that you have good reason are going to join the index next week, and dump them as soon as they do. Sell shares short that you think are going to be dumped from the index, and buy them back afterwards. Easy money! The thing about investing is to remember that the big boys are simply gambling with your money. If you can, do a Buffet, buy stocks you understand, and hang on to them. They'll go up. Imho the quickest way to stabilise the market and kill a lot of these shenanigans would be to demand that pension funds invest in companies that pay good dividends, well covered. In other words, if a company earns 50p/share and pays a 10p dividend, then the dividend "is covered 5 times". That means the pensions can't invest in speculative, highly geared companies. Which means those companies ARE going to invest in themselves, and will be good, solid companies unlikely to go spectacularly bust. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 30/10/17 23:32, Rich Freeman wrote: > Often there are elements of a traditionally public service that aren't > natural monopolies which can be outsourced for a benefit. Electrical > generation is often a case of that, but as I suggested you do need to > ensure you're paying to have extra capacity online. Exactly. The infrastructure should be a commonhold - the householders jointly own the wires in town sort of thing. Then they can buy from any generator, who rents the wires to deliver. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 31/10/17 00:09, mad.scientist.at.la...@tutanota.com wrote: > > the issue is with plugging one thing, into another, into another and > then into the wall, most outlet strips are cheap, they don't use proper > sockets and often have/develop a significant resistance, which creates a > hazard etc. In the UK at least also, we have ring mains. These are rated at 30 Amps, from which you can take a 13 Amp feed from any socket. Once you start taking power over multiple leads the wiring has more resistance, plugs introduce resistance, etc, and the voltage can drop rapidly. (It is mandatory, according to code, if you hard-wire a feed off a ring you must separate it with a 16 Amp fuse.) > > > There are actually multistage devices that can protect low voltage lines > (i.e. control lines on a transmitter tower) from a direct lightning > strike assuming they have a good enough ground connection. of course > it's likely to destroy the surge arrestor, which isn't cheap, but it > protects far more expensive equipment when it self sacrifices. > I've never seen one, but I would have thought a motor/generator pair with a hefty flywheel would provide very good surge/spike/whatever protection, and provide nice clean power. Plus, it would be unlikely to burn out if you had to provide protection from several big consecutive shocks, like a lightning strike. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Alternatives to knutclient
On 31/10/17 23:29, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Tue, 31 Oct 2017 17:33:53 + > Wols Lists wrote: > >> In the UK at least also, we have ring mains. These are rated at 30 Amps, >> from which you can take a 13 Amp feed from any socket. Once you start >> taking power over multiple leads the wiring has more resistance, plugs >> introduce resistance, etc, and the voltage can drop rapidly. > > I've never seen that, nor heard of it. It sounds like a major fire risk too, > which the wiring regs would never countenance. Sorry, no, I meant plugging one extension lead into another ... exactly what you are NOT supposed to do. > >> (It is mandatory, according to code, if you hard-wire a feed off a ring >> you must separate it with a 16 Amp fuse.) > > I don't recognise that either. It sounds like a special case to me. And > where do I buy a 16A fuse? > Well, I've got several scattered over my house ... and my father-in-law has at least one in his fuse box! You would have thought it was easy to take a spur off of a socket that's part of a ring main, but believe me, as an amateur sparky it's NOT! They sell special points - often with a switch - to take a feed off a ring, and they all have a - mandatory - 16Amp fuse. Or they might take a standard 13Amp fuse. My father-in-law has a spur coming off his fuse box, and that has a 16Amp fuse or circuit breaker, rather than the standard 30Amp. I did a bit of wiring for him ages ago, and when I saw it, my immediate reaction was "what the heck's that!" and I refused to touch it until I'd worked out what was going on - very sensible advice with electric! >> I've never seen one, but I would have thought a motor/generator pair >> with a hefty flywheel would provide very good surge/spike/whatever >> protection, and provide nice clean power. Plus, it would be unlikely to >> burn out if you had to provide protection from several big consecutive >> shocks, like a lightning strike. > > Just think of the noise though, and the expense. > Why should it be noisy, or expensive? Okay, you're turning electrical energy into kinetic and back again, but a computer draws typically 2Amps max. A box like that to provide clean power shouldn't be too bad. (Actually, using something like that as the PSU to step down to 12V or 5V might be a good idea in areas of dirty power ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: systemd fails to mount nfs4 mounts
On 01/11/17 20:25, Daniel Frey wrote: > On 10/29/2017 08:15 AM, Daniel Frey wrote: >> Come to think of it, I'm going to look back and see if there was an >> update around the time I started having problems. Maybe there was a >> regression of some sort. >> > > So I bought a large SSD, and cloned to it. I'm not stuck with IMSM any > more, but systemd still doesn't mount properly. Now that I don't have to > deal with mdadm, I went back to openrc, and all is will. Although... it > did take me a while to get rid of networkmanager. > What's the problem with mdadm and openrc? That said, I've just been troubleshooting a right pain in the neck with SUSE, Windows, and systemd on my laptop. ANY trouble with your hard drives, and systemd dumps you in the recovery console. Windows WON'T SHUT DOWN PROPERLY most of the time. And something messed up /home. Easy enough to fix, when I eventually found out the cause. Run fsck on /dev/sda8. Re-configure windows to tell it "shut down does NOT mean hibernate, damn you!", and finally reboot actually got me into SUSE proper. But I wish they'd document - and fix!!! - how to get systemd to mount drives properly!!! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?
On 22/11/17 14:11, Tsukasa Mcp_Reznor wrote: > > You won't get build failures or dependency problems, portage is built to > handle emerging multiple packages that do not depend on each other > simultaneously. > it will not ever build a dependency and the main program at the same time. Are you sure? You *shouldn't* get problems, but I'm sure I have hit that problem, and I think it's down to buggy ebuilds. Starting the emerge again fixes it, because cocked-up dependencies will sort themselves out first time round, and the second time the problem has gone away. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Looking for a pre-compiled Linux distribution
On 23/11/17 18:45, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > On 23/11/17 19:11, Helmut Jarausch wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'd like to recommend a Linux distribution to someone who needs an as >> simple Linux distribution as possible. >> Since I am going to help that person from time to time, it should be >> as similar as possible to Gentoo. >> >> Which distribution would you recommend. > > Arch Linux is similar. Just imagine you have "emerge", except there's > only binary packages. When you install it initially, you're left on the > command line with nothing installed except base packages, much like Gentoo. > How close is Slackware to that description? If you want a minimal distro that has everything you could want, but is easy to install and maintain, Slackware probably fits the bill (a Slack live CD is my preferred tool in my toolkit for recovering broken systems :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Setting up fetchmail to feed postfix
On 24/11/17 15:39, Peter Humphrey wrote: > Is there any guidance on setting up fetchmail on Gentoo to operate in this > way? I've searched in likely places but the Gentoo docs are long out of date > and others don't help much, so I still don't know what to add to /etc/ > conf.d/fetchmail, nor whether I need a ~/.fetchmailrc or an /etc/fetchmailrc > file (no sample comes with the ebuild). If you run fetchmail as a daemon, then you need /etc/fetchmailrc. If you run it manually yourself, then you need ~/.fetchmailrc Read the docu, in particular the bit about whether or not to delete mails from the server. Set it to NOT delete mails, then you can test it knowing that you won't lose anything. I believe it keeps a log file of what it's downloaded, so for testing purposes you may want to find and delete that. And if you run it with the --verbose option, it'll tell you what it's doing. I generally pipe that through the "tee" command, so I can see whether it's doing what I expect, then I can examine the output in more detail to check. Beyond that, I would say you're doing a right thing. fetchmail is good software. The only reason I'm not using it is MySQL broke, which took out my virtual usernames, which broke postfix and fetchmail delivery :-( And I've never got round to fixing MySQL. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Setting up fetchmail to feed postfix
On 26/11/17 18:46, Ralph Seichter wrote: > Does NeoMutt perhaps suppress dupes based on message ID? Thunderbird > obviously does not. Thunderbird has an add-on that will delete duplicates. I make regular use of it :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 27/11/17 22:30, Bill Kenworthy wrote: > Hi all, > I need to expand two bcache fronted 4xdisk btrfs raid 10's - this > requires purchasing 4 drives (and one system does not have room for two > more drives) so I am trying to see if using raid 5 is an option > > I have been trying to find if btrfs raid 5/6 is stable enough to use but > while there is mention of improvements in kernel 4.12, and fixes for the > write hole problem I cant see any reports that its "working fine now" > though there is a phoronix article saying Oracle is using it since the > fixes. > > Is anyone here successfully using btrfs raid 5/6? What is the status of > scrub and self healing? The btrfs wiki is woefully out of date :( > Or put btrfs over md-raid? Thing is, with raid-6 over four drives, you have a 100% certainty of surviving a two-disk failure. With raid-10 you have a 33% chance of losing your array. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 01/12/17 17:14, Rich Freeman wrote: > You could run btrfs over md-raid, but other than the snapshots I think > this loses a lot of the benefit of btrfs in the first place. You are > vulnerable to the write hole, The write hole is now "fixed". In quotes because, although journalling has now been merged and is available, there still seem to be a few corner case (and not so corner case) bugs that need ironing out before it's solid. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?
On 05/12/17 10:09, Peter Humphrey wrote: >> I assume using a ramdisk would help with this? I wouldn't want to do a >> > SSD as I assume it would excessively wear by doing compiles. > I use tmpfs, like this: > > $ grep tmpfs /etc/fstab > tmpfs /var/tmp/portage tmpfs noatime,uid=portage,gid=portage,mode=0775 > 0 0 > tmpfs /tmp tmpfs > noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=1777 0 0 > > If a tmpfs fills up, the excess gets swapped out, but with 32GB RAM here I > haven't yet seen any swap used at all - not even in an emerge -e world. Same here. Note that tmpfs defaults to half ram, so that would give you a 16GB /var/tmp/portage. With 16GB ram here, that would probably cause things like emerging libreoffice or firefox or gcc to abort. My fstab has these lines ... note the SIZE option ... # glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for # POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). # (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will # use almost no memory if not populated with files) shm /dev/shmtmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0 portage /var/tmp/portagetmpfs size=30G,mode=0777 0 0 tmp /tmptmpfs size=10G,mode=0777 0 0 My swap partitions are twice max ram, so I currently have two 32GB partitions giving me 80GB total ram and swap. (My new system when I get it working maxes out at 64GB ram so I'll have 256GB swap and (currently) 16GB ram) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?
On 05/12/17 13:07, Peter Humphrey wrote: >> (My new system when I get it working maxes out at 64GB ram so I'll have >> > 256GB swap and (currently) 16GB ram) > I've halved my original 4GB swap to 2GB since it never seems to be used. I'm > not brave enough to do away with it altogether though. I've just had a long thread with someone on the SUSE list who refuses to believe that the "twice ram" rule ever existed. This despite someone else actually describing the algorithm (from which one can see where the rule comes from), and me pointing out that (after Linus stripped out all the "awful" optimisation code) the early vanilla 2.4 kernels enforced this rule by crashing if you broke it. Swap was rewritten as a result of that, but I've never heard whether the fundamental algorithm was changed, so I still provision my systems on the assumption it's true. Disk is cheap ... my 4TB drives cost about £110, so that makes 128GB for swap cost, what, £3? I'll probably never need it, but hey, at that price :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?
On 05/12/17 21:56, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Tue, 05 Dec 2017 10:09:56 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: > >> $ grep tmpfs /etc/fstab >> tmpfs /var/tmp/portage tmpfs >> noatime,uid=portage,gid=portage,mode=0775 0 0 >> tmpfs /tmp tmpfs >> noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=1777 0 0 > > Or you could set PORTAGE_TMPDIR to /tmp to save the second mount. > Dunno why portage puts this stuff in /var/tmp, rather than /tmp, but do be aware of what the standard says ... Stuff in /tmp should be cleared at shutdown/boot. Stuff in /var/tmp should survive a shutdown/boot. Of course, if, like me you've put /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs, then of course it won't survive a reboot, contrary to spec ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?
On 06/12/17 15:34, Alan McKinnon wrote: > - contents of /tmp are not expected to survive the invocation of the > program that created them > - contents of /var/tmp are not expected to survive a reboot That sounds completely wrong, actually. The contents of /var/tmp are expected to survive a system crash, as that is where vi, emacs, libreoffice et al are expected to store their recovery logs. Not much point putting the logs somewhere where they will be deleted by the very occurrence they are intended to protect against ... And yes, the rules for /tmp are "don't expect to find anything you put there will be there a few minutes later ..." :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?
On 06/12/17 15:34, Alan McKinnon wrote: > Those guidelines you mention about what /tmp and /var/tmp are "for" are > probably from the FHS. On the whole, I tend to agree they are good ideas > but the proper wording is more like this (from memory, being far too > lazy after a day's work to actually look something up): > > - contents of /tmp are not expected to survive the invocation of the > program that created them http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#TMPTEMPORARYFILES > - contents of /var/tmp are not expected to survive a reboot > http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARTMPTEMPORARYFILESPRESERVEDBETWEE > Which is different from what you said. Except that /var/tmp is exactly the opposite of what you said :-) Not surprisingly, if you follow > that through, you can run rm -rf /tmp/* in a cron every minute and > nothing should ever break. Or, every file in /tmp can be anonymous (just > an inode without a dentry giving it a name) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 07/12/17 09:52, Richard Bradfield wrote: > I did also investigate USB3 external enclosures, they're pretty > fast these days. AARRGGH !!! If you're using mdadm, DO NOT TOUCH USB WITH A BARGE POLE !!! I don't know the details, but I gather the problems are very similar to the timeout problem, but much worse. I know the wiki says you can "get away" with USB, but only for a broken drive, and only when recovering *from* it. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 07/12/17 14:53, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: > When I configured my kernel the other day, I discovered network block > devices as an option. My PC has a hotswap bay[0]. Problem solved. :) Then I > can do zpool replace with the drive-to-be-replaced still in the pool, which > improves resilver read distribution and thus lessens the probability of a > failure cascade. Or with mdadm, there's "mdadm --replace". If you want to swap a drive (rather than replace a failed drive), this both preserves redundancy and reduces the stress on the array by doing disk-to-disk copy rather than recalculating the new disk. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 07/12/17 20:17, Richard Bradfield wrote: > On Thu, Dec 07, 2017 at 06:35:16PM +0000, Wols Lists wrote: >> On 07/12/17 09:52, Richard Bradfield wrote: >>> I did also investigate USB3 external enclosures, they're pretty >>> fast these days. >> >> AARRGGH !!! >> >> If you're using mdadm, DO NOT TOUCH USB WITH A BARGE POLE !!! >> >> I don't know the details, but I gather the problems are very similar to >> the timeout problem, but much worse. >> >> I know the wiki says you can "get away" with USB, but only for a broken >> drive, and only when recovering *from* it. >> >> Cheers, >> Wol >> > > I'm using ZFS on Linux, does that make you any less terrified? :) > > I never ended up pursuing the USB enclosure, because disks got bigger > faster than I needed more storage, but I'd be interested in hearing if > there are real issues with trying to mount drive arrays over XHCI, given > the failure of eSATA to achieve wide adoption it looked like a good > route for future expansion. > Sorry, not a clue. I don't know zfs. The problem with USB, as I understand it, is that USB itself times out. If that happens, there is presumably a tear-down/setup delay, which is the timeout problem, which upsets mdadm. My personal experience is that the USB protocol also seems vulnerable to crashing and losing drives. In the --replace scenario, the fact that you are basically streaming from the old drive to the new one seems not to trip over the problem, but anything else is taking rather unnecessary risks ... As for eSATA, I want to get hold of a JBOD enclosure, but I'll then need to get a PCI card with an external port-multiplier ESATA capability. I suspect one of the reasons it didn't take off was the multiplicity of specifications, such that people probably bought add-ons that were "unfit for purpose" because they didn't know what they were doing, or the mobo suppliers cut corners so the on-board ports were unfit for purpose, etc etc. So the whole thing sank with a bad rep it didn't deserve. Certainly, when I've been looking, the situation is, shall we say, confusing ... Cheers, Wol Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 07/12/17 21:37, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: > Ooooh, I just came up with another good reason for raidz over mirror: > I don't encrypt my drives because it doesn't hold sensitive stuff. (AFAIK > native ZFS encryption is available in Oracle ZFS, so it might eventually > come to the Linux world). > > So in case I ever need to send in a drive for repair/replacement, noone can > read from it (or only in tiny bits'n'pieces from a hexdump), because each > disk contains a mix of data and parity blocks. > > I think I'm finally sold. :) > And with that, good night. So you've never heard of LUKS? GPT LUKS MD-RAID Filesystem Simple stack so if you ever have to pull a disk, just delete the LUKS key from it and everything from that disk is now random garbage. (Oh - and md raid-5/6 also mix data and parity, so the same holds true there.) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 07/12/17 22:35, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: >> (Oh - and md raid-5/6 also mix data and parity, so the same holds true >> > there.) > Ok, wasn’t aware of that. I thought I read in a ZFS article that this were a > special thing. Say you've got a four-drive raid-6, it'll be something like data1 data2 parity1 parity2 data3 parity3 parity4 data4 parity5 parity6 data5 data6 The only thing to watch out for (and zfs is likely the same) if a file fits inside a single chunk it will be recoverable from a single drive. And I think chunks can be anything up to 64MB. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 09/12/17 16:58, J. Roeleveld wrote: > On Friday, December 8, 2017 12:48:45 AM CET Wols Lists wrote: >> On 07/12/17 22:35, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: >>>> (Oh - and md raid-5/6 also mix data and parity, so the same holds true >>>> >>>>> there.) >>> >>> Ok, wasn’t aware of that. I thought I read in a ZFS article that this were >>> a special thing. >> >> Say you've got a four-drive raid-6, it'll be something like >> >> data1 data2 parity1 parity2 >> data3 parity3 parity4 data4 >> parity5 parity6 data5 data6 >> >> The only thing to watch out for (and zfs is likely the same) if a file >> fits inside a single chunk it will be recoverable from a single drive. >> And I think chunks can be anything up to 64MB. > > Except that ZFS doesn't have fixed on-disk-chunk-sizes. (especially if you > use > compression) > > See: > https://www.delphix.com/blog/delphix-engineering/zfs-raidz-stripe-width-or-how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-raidz > Which explains nothing, sorry ... :-( It goes on about 4K or 8K database blocks (and I'm talking about 64 MEG chunk sizes). And the OP was talking about files being recoverable from a disk that was removed from an array. Are you telling me that a *small* file has bits of it scattered across multiple drives? That would be *crazy*. If I have a file of, say, 10MB, and write it to an md-raid array, there is a good chance it will fit inside a single chunk, and be written - *whole* - to a single disk. With parity on another disk. How big does a file have to be on ZFS before it is too big to fit in a typical chunk, so that it gets split up across multiple drives? THAT is what I was on about, and that is what concerned the OP. I was just warning the OP that a chunk typically is rather more than just one disk block, so anybody harking back to the days of 512byte sectors could get a nasty surprise ... Cheers, Wol Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 09/12/17 23:36, Rich Freeman wrote: > you instead compute 5 sets of parity so that now you have 9 sets of > data that can tolerate the loss of any 5, then throw away the sets > containing the original 4 sets of data and store the remaining 5 sets > of parity data across the 5 drives. You can still tolerate the loss > of one more set, but all 4 of the original sets of data have been > tossed already. Is that how ZFS works? Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 09/12/17 12:08, Alan McKinnon wrote: > I'm all in favour of Lennart-bashing, but let's keep the bashing to what > he's responsible for. As far as I can tell, the most egregious thing he's responsible for is for wanting a well-designed system that works! Face it, linux is a hodge-podge of things thrown together, and held together with baling wire and sealing wax. Lennart doesn't want a system where a small failure in one place cascades and brings down a load of stuff elsewhere. Granted he's not necessarily the most politic of people, and has ruffled a lot of feathers, but I'd much rather a system he's cleaned up, than a system where everything hangs together on a knife-edge. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 10/12/17 15:07, Rich Freeman wrote: >> > Is that how ZFS works? >> > > I doubt it, hence why I wrote "most parity RAID systems seem to > operate just as you describe." So the OP needs to be aware that, if his file is smaller than the chunk size, then it *will* be recoverable from a disk pulled from an array, be it md-raid or zfs. The question is, then, how big is a chunk? And if zfs is anything like md-raid, it will be a lot bigger than the 512B or 4KB that a naive user would think. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 10/12/17 10:13, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > I've no idea how good systemd is. It's not been through the normal > process of choice and selection that other successful packages have. It > was forced on people. But being forced to have a binary system log, > being forced (so I have heard) to have an http server running, , > doesn't make it an attractive package for me. Oddly enough, although the details are different, that passage I've quoted pretty accurately describes how I feel about Gnome ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 11/12/17 22:29, Neil Bothwick wrote: >> I don't want a binary logging daemon either: that means having to learn >> > a special purpose utility to be able to read its logs, and, in general, >> > not being able to read that log from a remote machine. > "journalctl" is just the same as "less /var/log/messages" so here's not > much to learn unless you want to use the search features. Reading the log > from a remote machine is easy, using either SSH or HTTP, whichever you > prefer. My one complaint about the systemd journal is that there is not, > AFAIK, a standalone reader. If I want to boot from a live CD, I can only > read the logs if it is a systemd live CD, or I chroot into the original > system. Unless someone knows different... If the log isn't binary, what is it? Plain text? Well, I certainly can't read it just by looking at the disk surface! Yes, I know I'm being facetious, but there's no such thing as plain text on a computer. And I'm well aware of five or six or more binary text encodings - from the folowing list I think about the only one I haven't used is EBCDIC ... Okay, I said EBCDIC. Then there's ASCII - is that parity off? parity on? parity set? Then there's lines separated by - or is that ? or is that ? And that's just the versions I know of and have met ... There's no such thing as "plain text", as anybody using samba or ftp between different types of system will testify to their cost with trashed and broken files that screwed up in transfer ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: btrfs raid 5/6
On 12/12/17 10:15, Neil Bothwick wrote: > That means every write has to be encrypted 4 times, whereas using > encryption in the filesystem means it only has to be done once. I tried > setting encrypted BTRFS this way and there was a significant performance > hit. I'm seriously considering going back to ZoL now that encryption is > on the way. DISCLAIMER - I DON'T HAVE A CLUE HOW THIS ACTUALLY WORKS IN DETAIL but there's been a fair few posts on LKML sublists about how linux is very inefficient at using hardware encryption. Setup/teardown is expensive, and it only encrypts in small disk-size blocks, so somebody's been trying to make it encrypt in file-system-sized chunks. When/if they get this working, you'll probably notice a speedup of the order of 90% or so ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 12/12/17 18:55, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > You seem to know systemd reasonably well - maybe you've got it > installed and you're using it. Please tell me whether my suspicion > above (that systemd builds stuff into the system that is likely to be > superfluous to a user, and possibly forces its use on its users) is well > founded. If you want to "check things out", it's a lot easier to check out an *init system built on systemd* than one built on SysVInit. Dunno about OpenRC. Yes, systemd itself is a lot bigger than init itself. Yes, systemd plus service files is smaller (MUCH smaller) than the equivalent init plus scripts. The other big "problem" that many people moan about is that systemd takes over things like system time, system name, cron, etc etc etc. But having dealt with a whole variety of linux and unix systems, it's nice to know that systemd has standardised where the host name is stored. It's nice to know that how to set system time is standard across distros. Cron? Well the whole point of systemd is to start services as required, and cron merely starts services as required where "as required" is defined by time, so why not merge the two? The big problem, as I see it, with systemd is that if the boot fails for any reason it dumps you into a rescue shell. I prefer the old behaviour of dumping you into a running system with broken services. But given the choice I'd much rather have neither! :-) On my SuSE (systemd) laptop, I have a bunch of problems, of which systemd is minor. The network won't resume properly after suspend (nothing to do with systemd afaict), the video driver is broken and I suspect that is what drives system load over 6 (on a dual-core system) so response time is measured in minutes. The screen itself stops working at random. All that I suspect is down to a broken i915 or whatever it is Intel driver (which has a bad rep in the kernel - a nightmare seeing as it seems to be the default Intel laptop video setup :-( etc etc. The two big problems I really can lay at systemd's feet is that the boot occasionally fails and says "dumping you into plymouth console" but doesn't - this goes away with a reboot ... hey reboots aren't supposed to fix problems in linux!, and Windows has this infuriating habit of ignoring my command to shutdown, instead suspending to disk. As my Windows partitions automount in linux, this causes the mount to fail, and systemd won't boot the system. So I spend/waste half an hour trying to force Windows to shut down properly! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 13/12/17 00:02, Neil Bothwick wrote: >> and Windows has this infuriating habit of >> > ignoring my command to shutdown, instead suspending to disk. As my >> > Windows partitions automount in linux, this causes the mount to fail, >> > and systemd won't boot the system. So I spend/waste half an hour trying >> > to force Windows to shut down properly! > Can't you change this with fstab settings. I see a similar behaviour when > trying t mount NFS shares that aren't there, but it gives up trying after > 90s and gets on with booting the computer. I've tried ... Systemd and mounting anything other than local linux hard drives gives me a migraine ... Yes I *should* be able to tell it to just forget about drives it can't mount while booting. Yes I *should* be able to tell it to just forget about drives it can't access while shutting down. Yes I *should* be able to tell it to do what I want, but it seems that no matter what I tell it, it randomly refuses to boot or shut down because of a hiccup with a Windows or network mount :-( And worse, every fix for one problem simply causes a different problem! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 13/12/17 15:17, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Wed, 13 Dec 2017 14:01:38 +0000, Wols Lists wrote: > >>> Can't you change this with fstab settings. I see a similar behaviour >>> when trying t mount NFS shares that aren't there, but it gives up >>> trying after 90s and gets on with booting the computer. >> >> I've tried ... >> >> Systemd and mounting anything other than local linux hard drives gives >> me a migraine ... >> >> Yes I *should* be able to tell it to just forget about drives it can't >> mount while booting. Yes I *should* be able to tell it to just forget >> about drives it can't access while shutting down. Yes I *should* be able >> to tell it to do what I want, but it seems that no matter what I tell >> it, it randomly refuses to boot or shut down because of a hiccup with a >> Windows or network mount :-( > > Have you tried adding x-systemd.mount-timeout= and/or nofail to the > options in fstab? See man systemd.mount. > > Quite likely. And ditched thanks to the guaranteed hang on shutdown as a result, I think. Every "fix" causes a different problem elsewhere, ime :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?
On 15/12/17 01:16, Marc Joliet wrote: > [ Just to be clear: autofs is a Linux kernel feature, systemd just exposes it > in an easy to use way. That is, BTW, a theme with systemd. ] Likewise, cgroups. I believe Lennart is regularly "blamed" for this, but it's been in the kernel a looonngg time, long before systemd. Just not with any easy way of using it. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Choice of TLD for internal network
On 19/12/17 13:57, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > There are no safe, free names to use for an internal network. On the one > hand, RFC 8244 makes a decent argument that this is a good thing, > because it guarantees that every hostname is globally unique (so if I > copy/paste a URL to you, it goes the same place on your machine as it > did mine). On the other hand, I hate the idea of paying some bureaucrat > to be able to use my own network. Which was why I liked Demon as my ISP. They had a customer domain and assigned you a name on it. Whether you used it as a host or domain name was up to you. Most ISPs now assume you are a client and don't give you proper internet :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Choice of TLD for internal network
On 20/12/17 02:12, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Wednesday, 20 December 2017 01:09:30 GMT Neil Bothwick wrote: >> On Wed, 20 Dec 2017 00:33:08 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: It's not about political correctness but perspective. The good guys intervene, the baddies interfere. It's like the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter. >>> >>> We could mince words all day. >> >> No we couldn't, that would make us politicians... > > Have I touched a raw nerve? :) > Sounds like it :-) Unfortunately, life is politics (with a small "p"). As for people "doing good", I prefer to call busy-bodies "do gooders". They go out looking for people to "help", and are usually very "Politically Correct". On the other hand, people "doing good" are those who see a problem, ASK THE PEOPLE AFFECTED WHAT THEY WANT, and muck in and help. As opposed to Politicians, who see a problem, come up with some solution that doesn't work, and then expect everyone else except them to implement it! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [was: What can cause printer to crop top of page?] /etc/papersize is ignored
On 29/12/17 16:13, Alan McKinnon wrote: > The only "correct" place for papersize nowadays is in whatever the user > is using to get something to print. And there are lots of those. > Something like CUPS ought to make it all so much easier but I find CUPS > just makes my life insanely difficult. So I mail my docs to my wife and > she prints them from Windows for me Exactly! I think the problem is all the layers of indirection and pipes. If you *pipe* a print job, it is very difficult to pass metadata such as papersize along. So the only place the printing back end can get this information from is the defaults. And if you've got something like a photo-printer when half the time the paper is different from the default, you're up a gum tree ... and of course you can't have the app change the defaults because you can't guarantee that by the time that job hits the printer some other app hasn't come along and changed them to something different ... It would be fine, of course, if all apps used the CUPS printer dialog, but my experience is that a lot of cross-platform apps use their own because CUPS isn't there for a lot of their target market ... on Windows they can guarantee the windows dialog, on Apple they can guarantee CUPS, but on linux? It's *usually* - but not always - there so they need to be able to cope if it's missing, so they just assume it isn't ... (Plus, of course, so much development is done for the American market, so they don't realise how hard it is to get a change like A4 to stick :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [was: What can cause printer to crop top of page?] /etc/papersize is ignored
On 30/12/17 12:55, Alan McKinnon wrote: > [2nd random OT factoid] > It's the "world series" because the first sponsor was a newspaper "News > of the World" iirc (plus some typical US bravado) Actually it was the New York World. So actually imho it was originally perfectly legit. As usual, however, things change, meanings change, and now it gives completely the wrong impression. [3rd random OT factoid] The News Of The World was a British tabloid, which shut down after the phone hacking scandal - a lot of their stories were obtained by hacking into celebrities, politicians, royals voicemails, and while it was very hard to prove it was also blatantly obvious that journalists were acting under pressure, if not actual orders, from the very top. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [was: What can cause printer to crop top of page?] /etc/papersize is ignored
On 31/12/17 10:34, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Sun, 31 Dec 2017 02:26:26 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: > >>> Actually it was the New York World. So actually imho it was originally >>> perfectly legit. >> >> I don't agree. In that case it should have been called the New York >> World Series. > > If they were paying for it, they could call it what they wanted. I assume > the paper was generally known as "The World" otherwise it would have been > a waste of marketing money. > > Actually, I believe it WAS originally known as The New York World Series. Then presumably some marketeer decided that was too much of a mouthful, and dropped the "New York" rather than "World" :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] old kernels are installed during the upgrade
On 02/01/18 19:26, Stroller wrote: > >> On 2 Jan 2018, at 11:54, Kruglov Sergey wrote: >> >> Now I have gentoo-sources-4.14.8-r1 installed. >> After "emerge --ask --update --deep --with-bdeps=y --newuse @world" command >> emerge installs old kernel in NS (after first update 4.12.12, after second >> update 4.9.49-r1). >> How can I fix it? >> There is sys-kernel/gentoo-sources in my world set. > > Remove sys-kernel/gentoo-sources from your world file - I believe you can do > this using the emerge command, but am unsure of the right syntax; you can > just edit /var/lib/portage/world and delete the appropriate line.D > > Now `emerge -n =sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.14.8-r1` - "This option can be > used to update the world file without rebuilding the packages." > > This pins your kernel version at 4.14.8-r1 and you can update when, in > future, you decide it's time to update your kernel, without being nagged > about it every time a new version is release or you emerge world. > > For this reason it's always best to emerge kernels with an equals sign, > pinning them at some specific version, IMO. > Why??? > This suggestion may provoke responses that the kernel is important and you > should update it to ensure you get security updates - look at the attack > vectors, you're probably sitting behind a NAT router, with very few ports > exposed to the internet. > > It's adequate to update your kernel every 3 months. > You should also check the CVEs every time there's a new kernel! What this completely misses, is that gentoo-sources merely DOWNLOADS THE LATEST KERNEL SOURCE. So updating gentoo-sources every time does nothing to change the kernel you are running. Just leave gentoo-sources in your world file, and don't necessarily compile and update your running kernel just because gentoo-sources has had an update. I normally do not clean out kernels from my grub.conf until I've built up enough to be annoying, so downgrading a broken kernel is just a quick edit away ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: old kernels are installed during the upgrade
On 02/01/18 22:58, Adam Carter wrote: > AMD coder's patch to disable the new code (to avoid the performance hit) > where he states the issue doesnt exist on AMD processors; > https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2 Read LWN, specifically the links to the people who covered the bug. It's a flaw in speculative forward processing, where the security does not travel with the speculative processing. So user code can trigger a page fault that references kernel code, causing that page to be retrieved. OOPP. AMD keeps security context with the code, causing an attempt to exploit the bug to fail with "invalid security context". And as I understand it the code can be disabled with either a compile time option or command line switch to the kernel. The relevant code is called KAISER, which forces kernel and user address space into different contexts, and causes a nasty context-switching overhead on both Intel and AMD cpus. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] old kernels are installed during the upgrade
On 03/01/18 21:21, Stroller wrote: > Meanwhile, I've seen security vulnerabilities go unfixed for literally weeks > in the bug tracker, so I don't see the significance of a vulnerability an > attacker is unlikely to be able to reach. The sites I visit do not make me > fear my kernel being attacked via the browser. > > This thread is not for arguing about security, which is an old discussion and > which has been done to death. Everyone has their own opinions, and I'm not > going to add any more. > > This thread is about how to fix OP's problem, and that's what I addressed. If > you install kernels by specific version, as I suggest, then you're free to > update them manually as often as you wish. And heaven help you if you think emerging a specific version of gentoo-sources will update the kernel you're running. Because Linux certainly won't. Hint: changing the current version of gentoo-sources does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to your running system, so why not emerge them all? Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] old kernels are installed during the upgrade
On 03/01/18 21:39, Stroller wrote: >> What this completely misses, is that gentoo-sources merely DOWNLOADS THE >> > LATEST KERNEL SOURCE. So updating gentoo-sources every time does nothing >> > to change the kernel you are running. > I don't know why you think I missed that. Because you're banging on like downloading the source is the same thing as installing a new kernel - which it's not. > > If you `emerge gentoo-sources` then updates of them will appear every time > you --pretend update world until you allow them to be emerged, hence my use > of the word "nagged". > Which is why I just let them appear and clutter up /usr/src :-) > If you want to install them, that's your prerogative, but just allowing them > to be automatically emerged fills up your system with unwanted uncompressed > kernel sources, consuming huge amounts of space. > I take your point - you're paying for storage by the meg, and a quick du -sh tells me a kernel is approx 1G - ouch. But is the OP like you, or like me - about to upgrade from a home system that already has 6TB of storage ... > 20GB should be ample space for an operating system IMO, but between /usr/src > and /usr/portage it's pretty easy to consume a quarter of that. I remember when it fitted on an 8" floppy :-) It was bad enough installing Slack from a 30-floppy set ... What would be nice, would be if "emerge --depclean" had the smarts to recognise that /usr/src/linux pointed to the current active kernel, and didn't wipe that when it cleaned out everything else :-) That way, at most you could have the current and latest kernel sources available pretty easily. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] old kernels are installed during the upgrade
On 03/01/18 22:09, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 04/01/2018 00:02, Stroller wrote: >> >>> On 3 Jan 2018, at 21:55, Wols Lists wrote: >>> >>> What would be nice, would be if "emerge --depclean" had the smarts to >>> recognise that /usr/src/linux pointed to the current active kernel, and >>> didn't wipe that when it cleaned out everything else :-) That way, at >>> most you could have the current and latest kernel sources available >>> pretty easily. >> >> You've jogged a long-hibernating memory - the accidental removal of the >> current sources tree in an accident like this may be the exact reason why I >> refuse to allow kernel versions to be actively emerged. > > I think that's a mountain and a molehill. You still have the image in > /boot, config in /boot or in the running kernel, libs in /lib/modules > and the bootloader is intact. > > Delete the sources? > - Re-emerge them. 90 seconds. > - Re-compile using existing config. 20 minutes > > So deleting the sources for the running kernel is a doh! moment. But no > biggie, and certainly not cause for changing your routine (all in my own > not at all humble opinion, of course) > But it's a royal pain, especially if you don't realise that's what's happened, because a general emerge is likely to have a lot of grief. Dunno how many ebuilds actually refer to /usr/src/linux for some of their header files, but I doubt it's negligible. It's certainly caused me grief in the past. (Yes I think they're not supposed to, but what's that saying about theory and practice?) I don't like it when well-known problems cause general breakage that is likely to cause havoc for unsuspecting users... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] microcode applied?
On 08/01/18 13:52, Rich Freeman wrote: > There is also a lot of discussion on lkml about the right fix. We > might very well end up seeing both AMD- and Intel-specific fixes with > conditional logic. The two vendors don't really seem to be > coordinating on this. Intel is pushing patches that apparently don't > work on AMD, or aren't necessary on AMD. AMD for its part hasn't been > pushing much in public at all, but has made a few list posts, and they > have that mystery microcode update. Probably not much point co-operating. The *internals* of AMD chips and Intel chips are very different. I suspect both of them have a RISC core with an x86 instruction set interpretation layer, but that's where the similarities end ... Bit like expecting a turbo-prop engine company to co-ordinate their designs with a piston engine company. The two engines might look very similar on the outside, but the internal machinery bears no resemblance whatsoever one to the other. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT: cleanup after USB backup drive unplugged?
On 12/01/18 15:39, Grant Edwards wrote: >> I usually also include a check to ensure that some file/directory >> > exists which I expect to be on the drive, which prevents the backup >> > script from dumping a full backup into your mountpoint if it isn't >> > mounted (possibly on a filesystem with insufficient space - > Yep, that's being done. The backup won't attempt to run if the > external drive isn't mounted. Dunno quite how it works, but you could automate everything through udev. When I stick something in, KDE offers to mount it for me, in /run/media/$USER/abcd-efgh. I think that last bit is unique to the media, and the same every time, so you could make udev detect that something's been plugged in and, if it's your backup drive, auto-run the backup. Or, of course, if your backup expects the drive at that location, it simply refuses to run if that location doesn't exist. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: USB3 external storage HD's
On 18/01/18 18:45, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > On 18/01/18 20:33, the...@sys-concept.com wrote: >> Do those External Storage work with Linux (USB3)? >> I don't want to install any ventor-software, I just want one that plugs >> and play. >> >> Any recommendations? > > My USB 3 stick works fine, at its full advertised speed (190MB/s read, > 100MB/s write.) So an HD should work fine though. There's no third-party > drivers needed. > Just don't even think of using a USB drive for RAID :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: USB3 external storage HD's
On 18/01/18 21:22, mad.scientist.at.la...@tutanota.com wrote: > if you're going with external drives use laptop drives, or build a JBOD > with good cooling. in any case, monitor drive temperatures, in my > experiance anything above 100F is asking for a short life, bellow or at > 100F drives new and old are happy for over a decade which seems like a > long time, but most of us have data on older machines with older drives > somewhere in the house and most don't back that up or back it up often > enough. also note that most usb adapters don't even allow smart access, > so the only way to see if the drive's hot is to feel the enclosure which > is not terribly accurate or usefull. it's also really nice to be able > to run smart diagnostics and have the os monitor the smart status which > most versions of linux will do, don't know about winblows, haven't run > that since xp. https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-2 There's an article about this on LWN, which is where I picked this up, but unfortunately it's currently subscribers-only and I'm not a subscriber, so I can't post a link to that. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Libreoffice-5.4.2.2 fails to start
On 20/01/18 01:11, the...@sys-concept.com wrote: > On 01/19/2018 05:25 PM, the...@sys-concept.com wrote: > [snip] >> >> The strange part is that on the same box I created a new "user" and >> Libreoffice works just fine. >> But it will not work when I log in. >> >> I've deleted the folder setting. /home/joseph/.config/libreoffice/ >> and copied the same folder from new user directory back to my directory. >> Libreofice still will not start. >> >> Joseph > > Additional information. > When I try to start soffice help I'm getting this error > > soffice --help > X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication. > > (process:24269): dconf-CRITICAL **: unable to create file > '/var/run/user/1000/dconf/user': Permission denied. dconf will not work > properly. > LibreOffice 5.4.2.2.0 40m0(Build:2) > > This error does not show up when I run it as new user that I just created. > > This is intuition, not knowledge, but /var/run is, I think, stuff that should appear when you log in, and disappear when you log out. Log out, log in as root (or su from another user) and see if /var/run/user/1000 exists. Rename it to something else in case you need the contents, and then see if libreoffice works. If everything seems okay, get rid of the old version (My system has multiple users, I'm the only person logged in, and folder 1000 (my user-id) is the only one there. I guess somehow some old file has got "stuck" and needs deleting.) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] UEFI-fails to boot
On 25/01/18 10:54, Dan Johansson wrote: > But when I boot without the USB-key inserted I always "lands" in the > Built-in EFI Shell - NO sign of GRUB. > > Any suggestions where I have gone wrong? Well, in your position I wouldn't be trying to load grub. I've got a new mobo (with a Ryzen 3 :-) but that won't POST at the moment, so I'm going to be in your position very soon building a new UEFI system. But what I think you're supposed to do is use UEFI to load the linux kernel directly ... not sure how you do that yet :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT] A little help for non-native English speakers
On 03/02/18 08:43, Peter Humphrey wrote: > Having so many words derived via French from Latin, English is also a > romance language to some extent. I know it's officially classed as a > Germanic language, but I can't see why. There seems to be no Teutonic > influence to speak of. Few words in common, very different sentence > structure, ... Cow, Sheep, ... I think there are a lot of words in common. Not that I have any personal experience, but I've come across several reports that British soldiers stationed in West Germany after the war had no difficulty talking with Germans who spoke Platt-Deutsch (or however that is spelt). Modern English is an evolved mess of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon, and seeing as the Normans (Norse-Men) were really Vikings not Franks ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: /var/tmp on tmpfs
On 10/02/18 18:56, Kai Krakow wrote: > role and /usr takes the role of /, and /home already took the role of /usr > (that's why it's called /usr, it was user data in early unix). The Actually no, not at all. /usr is not short for USeR, it's an acronym for User System Resources, which is why it contains OS stuff, not user stuff. Very confusing, I know. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Closing TAB of Firefix stops Video/Audio playback system wide...
On 26/02/18 06:33, R0b0t1 wrote: > On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 12:13 AM, R0b0t1 wrote: >> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 10:07 PM, wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> whenever I close a TAB of Firefox the playback of video or/and audio >>> ist stopped for seconds. After that it starts, where it has stopped >>> before. >>> >>> I am using Firefox with alsa (compiled locally via emerge). >>> > > Sorry, my brain was off. But - doesn't Firefox use pulseaudio by > default, with no option for ALSA? > > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661 > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056 > Not on gentoo, I believe. I've never got round to configuring PulseAudio, which means I believe it is not installed, but Firefox sound works fine. Yes I think stock Firefox assumes you have PulseAudio, but the gentoo version doesn't. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is --changed-deps going to be *that* useless?
On 27/02/18 17:43, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > The --changed-deps flag, on the other hand, is a crutch for when > developers make in-place edits to ebuilds and don't make the necessary > revision bump. I believe the --changed-deps flag is ALSO for USERS who want to change settings on their computer. If I emerge a new utility program (such as lame), I will change my global flags to tell other programs to use it. That is what --changed-deps is for - so the programs that were originally compiled without support will be re-compiled with support. No ebuilds have been changed anywhere ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Best *SIMPLE* firewall?
On 01/03/18 00:26, Rich Freeman wrote: > Like everybody around here I prefer a FOSS implementation, > and would trust it more due to the "many eyes" philosophy, but I'd > stop short of saying that the Windows software firewall is > particularly insecure. Bear in mind that "many eyes" only works when said eyes are looking in that direction. The crucial take-away is that "many eyes" does not make products any better, it just means that when a bug is found, it's a lot easier to find the solution. Because any interested party can look for it rather than hitting a notice "Kein Eintritt!" Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] [okey..] [OT] Best *SIMPLE* firewall?
On 01/03/18 09:56, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Wednesday, 28 February 2018 23:11:12 GMT Nils Freydank wrote: > >> PS: What about the "suspected spam" in your subject? Is that a bug in the >> ML software or does that one come from you? > > I don't see that. Are you sure it isn't you? :) > I see it too. Intermediate mail-servers are prone to assume mailing lists are spam. I had great trouble with yahoo and a mailing list - it kept filing all the ham (from mailing lists) as spam, and left all the spam (mostly yahoo advertising crap :-( in the inbox. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Printer
On 01/03/18 10:33, Roger Cahn wrote: > Hi, > > For my birthday (!) my children want to offer me a multifunction > printer, copier. > > I ask you for an idea which one they could buy. > > For example: Multifonction A3 HP Officejet Pro 7612 > > -gentoo amd64 compatible > > -inkjet color (4colors) > > -ethernet > I use these people https://www.ijtdirect.co.uk/?sct=printerdeals As you're in France it shouldn't be a problem, just watch for the currency conversion. They've been about for years dealing in refurbished kit, although I think these printers are new. All our lasers have been Dell, and there's been minimal problems with them. Our current one is the Dell 1765 multi-function, which isn't on the list :-( I think our current printers are the 4th and 5th we've had from them. HPs and Epsons are allegedly linux-friendly. One thing to look out for - do you do a lot of scanning? One of the reasons I like the Dells is that they have what I call "push scanning" - configure them to connect via Samba, then you can put the original in the feeder, select "scan" on the front panel, and the scan appears automagically on the computer. With both HP and Epson, you usually have to put the document in the scanner, then go to the computer and run the scan software. A pain in the arse. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Printer
On 01/03/18 17:41, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Thursday, 1 March 2018 15:29:39 GMT Neil Bothwick wrote: >> On Thu, 1 Mar 2018 15:10:58 + (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote: For my birthday (!) my children want to offer me a multifunction printer, copier. I ask you for an idea which one they could buy. >>> >>> I despise all inkjets, but maybe that's just me. >> >> It's not. > > +1 I agree ... (but see below) > >>> I'd pick mono laser over any inkjet. > > I had an inkjet but I didn't use it much, so every time I came to use it the > jets were blocked. Eventually the condition was terminal. I now use only my > trusty old Kyocera FS-1020D mono laser. > I think modern ink-jets are rather better. The one we've got now seems okay - the very first one I've been any where near happy with. It's not perfect, but the photos are better than a laser, and my wife prints card which the laser printer chokes on. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Printer
On 01/03/18 15:43, Grant Edwards wrote: > If I cared about scanning, I'd be very tempted to spend enough money > to get a network-connected printer that just e-mails me a PDF document > or writes it to a network file server. Make sure you check the specs. Either it'll be expensive, or it probably won't do it. My Dells have been the only printer/scanners I've had that do it - HP's don't, Epsons don't ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Printer
On 01/03/18 22:08, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Thu, 1 Mar 2018 17:56:15 +0000, Wols Lists wrote: > >>> If I cared about scanning, I'd be very tempted to spend enough money >>> to get a network-connected printer that just e-mails me a PDF document >>> or writes it to a network file server. >> >> Make sure you check the specs. Either it'll be expensive, or it probably >> won't do it. My Dells have been the only printer/scanners I've had that >> do it - HP's don't, Epsons don't ... > > That's not correct. My HP laser AIO can scan to email, a network folder > or a USB stick. > > I've seen printers advertised as scanning to email and network folders, and it turns out you need to control it FROM THE COMPUTER. (I saw the adverts, downloaded the manual, and there was no mention of doing from the front panel, but copious explanation of how to use the computer software.) My Dell, you need the computer to configure it, but then everything is controlled from the printer front panel. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Printer
On 01/03/18 22:08, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Thu, 1 Mar 2018 17:56:15 +0000, Wols Lists wrote: > >>> If I cared about scanning, I'd be very tempted to spend enough money >>> to get a network-connected printer that just e-mails me a PDF document >>> or writes it to a network file server. >> >> Make sure you check the specs. Either it'll be expensive, or it probably >> won't do it. My Dells have been the only printer/scanners I've had that >> do it - HP's don't, Epsons don't ... > > That's not correct. My HP laser AIO can scan to email, a network folder > or a USB stick. > > Just downloaded an AIO manual (3050 series). It says the functionality is Windows only, and needs to be configured using a Windows program. Okay, that's probably bullshit, but ... The Dell is programmed via its web interface, and will scan to any CIFS share. But as I say, I'm sure when I've investigated in the past, it's always required software on the computer to do the scan or email - oh - the AIO manual says they can scan TO AN EMAIL PROGRAM. They can't "scan to email" as I understand it ... it sounds like it fires up Outlook or whatever, and sticks the scan in as an attachment. It doesn't sound like it will talk to an email server and send an email with the scan attached. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: A new AMD CPU weakness?
On 17/03/18 13:53, Fast Turtle wrote: > So ask > youself, why in hell they needed more then 4M? I could see 8M being a > selling point but 64M - hell the first computer I build only had 16M > (that was a 386 system). Because buying new 8Mb chips is expensive, and 64Mb is cheaper? Seriously, newer memory comes in larger packages and is cheaper. (How much does a 4K CMOS chip cost nowadays :-) Compare the price of DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] List of Intel CPUs that wont get Meltdown/Spectre fixes
On 05/04/18 17:54, Rich Freeman wrote: > I > haven't checked recently but the last time I looked at it even my > current Ryzen CPU doesn't have a microcode fix out yet for lfence. Is lfence a meltdown problem? Because afaik Ryzen doesn't need a fix for meltdown, it's not vulnerable. As for Spectre, it's inherent in modern CPU design. There IS no fix, other than going back to the drawing board and scrapping years of optimisation, making computers maybe 30% slower :-( I don't think Spectre IS fixable. Sure we can play whack-a-mole, but unless we rip up the lawn and replace it with concrete, the problem will simply come back in another guise. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question
On 05/04/18 18:53, Mick wrote: > On Thursday, 5 April 2018 18:12:06 BST Peter Humphrey wrote: >> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote: > >>> But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's >>> English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is >>> considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the >>> Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century. >> >> Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because >> it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's >> English with Received Pronunciation? > > Quite. As far as accents goes my understanding is they are essentially one > and the same and were shaped by the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha German > accents of the English Royals and their courtiers. The way I see it, the > Saxons won the pronunciation war over the Vikings. :-) > Not necessarily :-) Because dialect is a lot more than pronunciation. It's also spelling, and vocabulary. To some extent I was thinking of what I believe is called "the great fricative shift", and the frenchification of our spelling in the 17/18 hundreds. (My daughter has moved to Yorkshire, so we have the occasional head-scratch when she comes out with dialect words, although her accent reverts almost instantly to South-London when we're around. Her husband's family hail from further north so they can be hard to understand. And my interest in Scottish and pre-Norman history has given me an understanding of where English has come from, which has nothing to do with where most people think it came from - the Saxons speak English, the Angles speak Scots, and the Scots speak Gaelic ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question
On 05/04/18 18:12, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote: >> > On 05/04/18 09:57, Peter Humphrey wrote: >>> > > Indeed, and that's more-or-less how I see the usual American insistence >>> > > on >>> > > a comma before the "and" before the last item in a list, even though it >>> > > gets in the way and introduces ambiguity - the infamous Oxford comma. >>> > > >>> > > But that's a whole new can of worms. >> > >> > I think we should table that ... > Do you mean shelve it? In this country, tabling something means putting it on > the table - for discussion. > Didn't you look at my email address :-) But yes I know the meaning depends on nationality, which is exactly why I said it ... :-) (Oh - and the meaning in both languages is actually a lot closer than most people realise, as was explained to me somewhere ...) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Bootloader hangs without a keyboard
On 08/04/2018 00:18, Marc Joliet wrote: Hi list I have a bit of a weird issue. I recently acquired a used server (Fujitsu Primergy TX140 S1) via a friend of mine. I have Gentoo installed on it now and overall it works fine save for one perplexing issue [0]: The bootloader hangs when booting without a keyboard attached. I tried it with both GRUB and systemd-boot (which works nicely in combination with kernel-install); both only work with a keyboard attached. GRUB hangs when the countdown starts, while systemd-boot hangs when the cursor first appears, but before the boot entries are listed. In both cases the cursor freezes. I can't help with a solution, but this is actually quite a common problem. I remember ages ago copious reports of computer rooms with these boxes that share one keyboard, mouse and screen amongst several computers, and there were loads of complaints about systems refusing to boot. Go in ti the bios settings, and see if there's something about keyboards. I really can't remember but there was something about a missing keyboard triggering a bios boot error - cue all the jokes about "keyboard missing, press F1 to continue". Actually, if you search on that message, you might find something ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: emerge colors and light background
On 19/04/18 16:28, John Blinka wrote: > My sympathies to the OP. I fought against dark terminal backgrounds > for years (paper is white and ink is black, right?), tweaked all the > colors through every mechanism I knew of, and never did arrive at a > satisfactory result. Paper is reflective, and ink absorbs light - the opposite of a screen, where the background is dark and the text emits light. You do know green is a primary colour, right? I'm not saying you're wrong to want a light background and dark text, but there are good reasons for why a screen defaults to the opposite of paper. (And defaults don't work for everybody :-) Cheers, Wol (The three *subtractive* primaries are the well-known red, yellow and blue. The three *additive* primaries are red, *green* and blue. Probably (one of) the reasons why old terminals were "green screen".)
Re: [gentoo-user] Mammoth emerge ...
On 03/05/18 16:22, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Thursday, 3 May 2018 15:58:44 BST Mick wrote: > >> Is there anything I can do with the existing laptop and its limited >> resources to speed up chromium's emerge? > > All I can suggest is to build a package in a chroot on a speedier machine and > transfer it to the laptop. That's how I cope with a very slow 32-bit single- > core Atom box. > Is distcc still there? I set that up ages ago, and when it was working it worked great. Trouble is, I think it got messed up in an emerge and I never set it up again. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Spectre-NG
On 09/05/18 19:18, Martin Vaeth wrote: > As mentioned, I wonder why gcc/clang do not yet support this > horribly slow but spectre-safe option. It can't be that hard to > implement in the actual code-producing back-end. Given the response by the gcc team to security people complaining that gcc was optimising out security-sensitive code (namely, a two-fingered salute near enough), I doubt the gcc team would have any interest in optimisations that SLOWED DOWN the resultant code. I suspect that might be one of the forces driving the kernel towards CLANG - a development team that is not obsessed with performance at the expense of breaking any code that uses undefined features. Unfortunately, when dealing with hardware, one is forced to rely on undefined features. A strong point of C, until the compiler decides to go "rogue" on you ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] [Maybe OT]: Instability of system
On 21/05/18 10:08, Mick wrote: > PS. I use Corsair PSUs and always spend more on them to make sure it is not > the cheapest model. A middle of the range modular unit comes with Japanese > capacitors and has not caused me problems in various builds. In cheaper > models I've ended up replacing the capacitors without waiting for the PSU to > fail first - cheap PSUs always fail on me at the end. And always check whether the power rating is INput or OUTput. The cheaper brands might quote input to make it look like the psu is better than it is. I'm sure I've come across a couple. Look for one that quotes OUTput, and preferably is over-spec'd - the further it is from max output (within limits) the better it will perform. Stick a 500W in a computer that wants 350W, for example ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] NFS and user IDs
On 09/06/18 05:42, Ian Zimmerman wrote: > Is there _any_ way around the need to keep the user IDs matched on NFS > clients and servers? > > Or, is there any other remote filesystem (other than the one originally > made by Microsoft) that avoids that chore? Which filesystem do you mean? Do you mean SMB/CIFS? Because that is NOT originally an MS product, and unlike many things they stole, they never bought it. Read up on the history. Allison and whoever wrote Samba because they wanted to talk to DEC. Only later did they realise that MS had copied the same protocol. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] NFS and user IDs
On 11/06/18 09:54, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Wol's lists wrote: > >> On 09/06/18 18:09, Rich Freeman wrote: > ... >>> downsides as well, in particular it is certainly more complex and at >>> work we practically forbid any kind of windows ACLs at anything other >>> than the top mount level because it is so hard to control. >> >> Windows is better than POSIX?! That doesn't say much for POSIX then, >> seeing as I feel Windows ACLs are overly complex and difficult! > > Well, "Windows ACLs" is the only ACL system that is standardized (as part of > the NFSv4 standard). The old proposal in POSIX.1e from 1993 from Sun has been > withdrawn in 1997 since the customers did not like it. > Ummm - just because it's standard doesn't mean it's any good :-) This version I'm talking about dates from about 1983. The company making it went bust in 1991. I've just had a quick look at the NFS v4 RFC, and almost the first thing I see is DENY entries. These ACLs don't have deny, because it's pointless. And DENY is exactly why I think Posix/Windows ACLs are confusing and hard to use. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] [Maybe OT]: Instability of system
On 11/06/18 20:11, R0b0t1 wrote: > AMD is an American company based out of California. However rereading > the post I notice he is using Euros, in which case there are likely > even stronger guarantees of fitness for a particular purpose. I > suppose it doesn't help that the seller seems to have gone bankrupt. Apologies, but I am lucky to have an excellent memory, and I do get a bit grumpy sometimes when another poster has either not read or forgotten information that was mentioned earlier. As for AMD being American, reading Wikipedia I see they are, but I was under the impression they were German. (The OP is in Germany despite their anglo-saxon sounding name.) However, I note that they were in a joint venture with Siemens, which I guess is where I got that impression. Maybe (having gone fabless) a lot of their chips are produced by Siemens in Germany - I don't know. (And I'm sitting on a system - which I haven't yet managed to boot successfully - where my supplier too has gone bust :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] NFS and user IDs
On 12/06/18 09:44, Joerg Schilling wrote: > Wols Lists wrote: > >> On 11/06/18 09:54, Joerg Schilling wrote: >>> Well, "Windows ACLs" is the only ACL system that is standardized (as part >>> of >>> the NFSv4 standard). The old proposal in POSIX.1e from 1993 from Sun has >>> been >>> withdrawn in 1997 since the customers did not like it. >>> >> Ummm - just because it's standard doesn't mean it's any good :-) > > Is is a result of a common discussion. At the same time, when Sun introduced > NFSv4 ACLs, IBM and Apple did the same for their local filesystems. > >> This version I'm talking about dates from about 1983. The company making >> it went bust in 1991. > > What are you talking about? Pr1me. Okay, I don't remember most of the dates accurately, but Pr1mos 19.4 had a working Access Control List setup. I was using that on their Pr1me-2250 machines, at a company I left in 1984. (Wikipedia says the 2250 was released in 1982. I can't find a date for 19.4.) > > IIRC, the first ACLs have been on VMS in the late 1980s. > >> I've just had a quick look at the NFS v4 RFC, and almost the first thing >> I see is DENY entries. These ACLs don't have deny, because it's >> pointless. And DENY is exactly why I think Posix/Windows ACLs are >> confusing and hard to use. > > Your text looks confusing. You claim DENY entries and no DENY entries in the > same paragraph without explaining what you are talking about. The RFC talks about deny entries. Pr1me ACLs didn't have deny, because it doesn't make sense in that context. > > Jörg >
[gentoo-user] Something's messed up my mimetypes
While I appreciate it's a damn sight more powerful than Windoze's braindead file extension system, it feels to me like mimetypes are a rogue chainsaw sometimes ... How do I find out what mimetypes are associated with an application? Going the other way is a simple "System Settings" options, except that (a) I don't have a clue what half these mimetypes are, and (b) I don't fancy going through ALL of them one by one looking for the program in question. Oh - and I searched the web which kindly pointed me to the config file .local/share/applications/defaults.list - except it doesn't exist ... All I want to do is find out what extensions Kate has tagged itself onto - what it thinks it's going to do with a dot-iso I *do* not know! Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Backup questions
On 08/08/18 04:43, Dale wrote: > Howdy, > > > I just bought two external drive enclosures. One is sort of a spare but > I do plan to do some backups on it, mostly pictures from my camera. In > one of the enclosures I put a single 6TB drive that I found on ebay. It > has about 7,000 hours on it so it should have some life left yet and it > passed the smartctl tests. It is USB but it transfers fast. Now to > some questions. I use rsync. Command looks something like rsync -auv > /source/ /destination/. If I backup the config files in my home > directory, should I also include the --delete option? If after a > upgrade for example a config file is deleted, because it is no longer > needed, or renamed, should the old file be removed or is there a reason > to keep them on the backups? Adding the --delete option isn't a problem > command wise BUT I wonder if it can cause a problem at some point. > Thoughts on that. I plan to use the --delete option for videos since if > I deleted one, it is likely broken or something. Biggest question is > about config files. > May I suggest using btrfs for your backup drive? One MAJOR caveat - DO NOT let the drive fill up - a combination of snapshots and drive-full has been known (quite often) to trash the file system. But provided you make sure it doesn't go above about 80% you should be fine. You can add an option to rsync such that it will back up "in place". In other words, if only 1K is changed in a 1M file, it will overwrite that 1K. So when you back up, the procedure is to take a snapshot, then run rsync with both "in place" and "delete". This will give you the space economy of incremental backups, combined with the utility of full backups - each snapshot is a full backup as of that date, but each new snapshot only increases disk usage by the changes since the last. And you reclaim space by deleting old snapshots. > On the second enclosure I currently have a 160GB drive. It's big enough > for my camera pictures. I would like to backup up my pics to it and > then put the drive somewhere besides in the house. I have a couple > external buildings that would be safe as far as rain etc but they are > not cooled, even tho it gets close to 100F and humid, real humid, here. > My question is this. Is it safe to store a drive in that sort of > environment? I could see the building getting close to outside temps > during the day. I do put a heater in it to prevent freezing during the > winter. I usually set the heat to 40F. I'm hoping someone has some > real world experience on storing in this sort of environment and not > just a text book theory. One reason I want to put them elsewhere, house > fire. Even a huge power strike could cause problems if plugged in. We > do get lightening strikes here. Maybe not as many as some but our fair > share. The 6TB and 3TB drive may join this one as well. > A drive that's shut down will take more mistreatment than one that is running. So no worries on that score. Plus heat causes far less problems than people think, although yes it's best avoided. Do your outbuildings have power? Do you have a fridge (or possibly freezer) out there, or could you find an excuse for one - a wine-store maybe :-) What you really want is some form of insulation that will prevent rapid fluctuations in temperature, and sticking your drives (in sealed bags) in a wine fridge would probably be near ideal. I had a cellar for my wine, and daily fluctuations were near nil even though there was a maybe 20C variation between summer and winter. That's what you want to aim for. Or maybe if you can dig a mini-cellar in one of your outbuildings :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Backup questions
On 14/08/18 12:42, John Covici wrote: > I use sanoid/syncoid to back up using zfs. Its great, keeps snapshots > for as long as I want them (I use 80 days for now). And it keeps > hourlies for the last couple of days as well, so I could roll back in > case of a problem. Very nice if you use zfs. I don't think btrfs is > ready for prime time -- its been under development for a while, but I > am scared to use it -- I did try once, but got nowhere. btrfs is pretty reliable apparently unless you stress it in ways where it is known to be flaky ... and it's now SUSE's default root filesystem ... Basically, DO NOT use raid, unless it's raid 1. DO NOT let the disk fill up if you're using snapshots. I think one of the reasons it's still got a bad rap, is a lot of SUSE installs fell over pretty badly. And the reason they fell over is that the developers forgot a lot of users don't have powerful machines ... The SUSE defaults were to enable snapshotting for upgrades and updates. And not to check the size of disk allocated to / ... :-( so it was not unusual for an update to snapshot, install, run out of disk and BM :-( Made worse by the fact that when they realised this, they didn't try to fix it retrospectively, leaving a lot of time-bombs out there just waiting to go off. Fortunately, when I hit this, I had spare disk I could add to the volume and it promptly sorted itself out, but a simple dedicated root should not fill up a 10GB partition (or was it 80? I'm not sure ...). But no, a lot of people have trashed their disks trying to recover from a disk full scenario :-( Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] backing up a partition
On 25/08/18 10:04, Philip Webb wrote: > Thanks for the replies : > it looks as if 'tar' mb adequate, but I'll think re it & make a test. > Search for the thread "Backup questions" by Dale 8/8/18. That has a load of ideas, and depending on your host filesystem you have other options. For example, btrfs can clone a filesystem to backup media. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Update circle
On 01/09/18 10:39, Peter Humphrey wrote: >> I wish there was a portage option that said "don't give up, just emerge >> > what you can". > There is: --keep-going > There isn't ... "keep going" says "don't stop once you've started". What I want is "start anyway". If emerge hits a load of dependency conflicts, it refuses to start emerging. Instead of giving up, I want it to emerge anything that doesn't conflict. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Trouble on the horizon!
On 25/09/18 05:49, Mark David Dumlao wrote: > On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 6:34 PM Nikos Chantziaras wrote: >> >> On 24/09/2018 13:11, R0b0t1 wrote: >>> On Mon, Sep 24, 2018 at 11:01 AM, Nikos Chantziaras >>> wrote: To me it looks like youtubers and some sites trying to make money through clickbait? >>> >>> If you had not heard of it elsewhere the Linux code of conduct was >>> amended. It makes the CoC similar to those of other projects where >>> there are a number of (usually nontechnical) contributors who identify >>> as a champion of social justice. >>> [...] >> Well, if kernel developers are fine with that, then I don't see how >> that's relevant to anyone who isn't a kernel dev. If they want to adopt >> social justice politics, that's really their prerogative. >> If you read LWN, actually a lot of kernel devs aren't fine with it - they didn't have any say, and don't like it. > > Actually, social justice politics didn't seem to have anything to do > with the CoC > adoption. It was more of Linus taking a backseat (due to how he self-assessed > his vacation behavior) and pretty soon after, they adopted CoC, most likely as > some kind of "standardization" > > Barely a week has passed since the CoC though, and already there are political > manuevers to oust high-profile kernel devs How are they going to achieve that? As has been pointed out, if Linus continues to trust them, and treat them as lieutenants, there's nothing the SJWs can do. There's also been comments that - actually - one person in particular who's been a bit of an SJW is actually in breach of the CoC herself, so those manoeuvres could backfire spectacularly. > to the point that some contributors > have started talks on exercising their copyright privileges and > withholding their > code. Which they have a right to do, by the way, if they feel the foundation > has betrayed them. Withholding their code FROM WHOM? > > So as esr has put it: >> First, let me confirm that this threat has teeth. I researched the relevant >> law >> when I was founding the Open Source Initiative. In the U.S. there is case law >> confirming that reputational losses relating to conversion of the rights of a >> contributor to a GPLed project are judicable in law. I do not know the case >> law >> outside the U.S., but in countries observing the Berne Convention without the >> U.S.’s opt-out of the “moral rights” clause, that clause probably gives the >> objectors an even stronger case. > > (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8139) > > This is not a little online trollfest that only affects kernel devs. > This can affect > literally everything. Biblical proportions, dogs and cats living together, > etc. > As we know from the SCOG case, pretty much everything is judicable in American law, even when they have absolutely no case. Are you telling me that I can withdraw YOUR right to use my code, just because I dislike what some random 3rd party with no relationship to either of us has done? Surely that pretty blatantly falls foul of estoppel. Although of course that didn't stop SCOG ... Where's PJ when you need her ... As for "moral rights", I don't think that actually grants any extra rights or anything. It mostly says that if I am the author of something, I can NOT sign away my right to be credited as such. You can buy the copyright off me, at which point I have no rights to benefit further from the work, but you cannot buy the right to be credited as the author - that is not for sale under "moral rights" law. (Oh - and the linux trademark is apparently Linus' personal property, so that throws another hand grenade onto the table ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions
On 09/11/18 01:16, Dale wrote: > Howdy to all, > > I have a interesting problem coming up. Currently, I have two 3TB > drives for my /home mount point. A lot of this is videos but some pdf > files and other documents as well plus a photo collection of family > stuff etc. > > Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% > Mounted on > /dev/mapper/Home2-Home25.4T 3.7T 1.8T 68% /home > > I've got a little over 25% or so of usable space left. At that point or > shortly thereafter, it could start causing some issues according to what > I've read anyway. Either way, shortly after that, being full will > certainly be a issue. I'm full up on my motherboard SATA ports. Even > if I buy a larger drive or drives, I'd have to unplug one to move things > over and likely repeat that a few times. I could do that and likely > will have to anyway but I'm trying to think a little farther ahead. > Currently I have the more important stuff backed up to a external single > 6TB USB drive, previous thread on that. I'm trying to come up with a > plan that allows me to grow easier and without having to worry about > running out of motherboard based ports. > Rich's ideas sound good. I'm in a similar situation to you - I'm about to outgrow my existing 3TB setup, but I've got a new 4TB lined up waiting to go (if I can get it to POST). Small consumer grade SATA expansions are about £35, you should be able to get a card that does port multiplier for that money, so that's 8 SATA drives on that card. Watch out - while I would recommend them, some cards are advertised as "2 SATA, 2 eSATA". That's only two ports, that can be jumper-switched between SATA or eSATA. Great for backup or disaster recovery as well as expansion. Then think about how you're going to lay your filesystem out. My system currently has three partitions (/, /var and /home). Mirrored (md raid 1) onto a second 3TB drive, giving me 6TB total. Actually, not very conducive to future expansion. The new system is going to have the bare-metal drives set up as one huge partition (actually not quite true - they'll be a 3TB and a 1TB for practical reasons). The 3TB partitions will be raided into a raid 5 with one of the old drives. The 1TB partitions will be raid 1 (system and home, basically). I'll then put lvm on the two raids before actually partitioning that to give me /, /home, and anything else I want. At this point, I can now replace any of the drives, grow my raid, my lvm, or my partitions, at any time and underneath a running system (okay, I don't have hotplug so I'd have to shut down the system to physically swap a drive over, but ...). And I'm thinking about btrfs, but the one thing you have to be really careful with that is snapshots running out of space. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Scanners, sane and driver support question
On 12/11/18 08:36, Neil Bothwick wrote: > I bought an HP_Color (their spelling, not mine!) LaserJet MFP M476dw a > few years ago. It does duplex printing and scanning and just works. A > full set of toner cartridges isn't cheap, but they last well. Looking at the front of mine, it's a Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdn. Nice beast, but a full set of cartridges costs more than the printer did! I went for that over its cheaper brother because when I factored in the extra life of the starter cartridges, that seemed to cover the extra cost. So far it looks good. Just two niggles - this machine is well out-of-date so CUPS doesn't seem to know about this model, and for some reason I've set up scanning for three accounts successfully, but the fourth just doesn't want to work :-( Again, went for HP because they seem solid and reliable. Used to have a Dell, but it was a "get a free printer if you buy 3 sets of cartridges". Very good deal but the first one broke before it used all its cartridges, and its replacement (fortunately, used the same cartridges) broke shortly after it had run through all the cartridges. So I thought "sod it, go for an HP with maintenance etc". Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] data recovery advice needed
On 17/12/18 19:32, Jack wrote: > ddrescue has now been running for almost 22 hours, and it's been 47 > seconds less than that since its last successful read. Doesn't sound good. Just to throw my tuppence-worth of bad news into the mix, are your drives in USB enclosures? I really don't trust USB and hard drives, I'd guess maybe 80% of my drive failures have been that combination :-( I've currently got two drives, in USB caddies, that I want to try and salvage, and at some point soon I'll be buying an external eSATA adaptor - that does NOT enclose the drives to give free airflow. The other thing is, if you're having trouble reading the drive, could it be the USB bus that's playing up? Again, I'm very wary of large amounts of data over USB, it just doesn't seem to work for me. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Thank you for your insight.
On 28/12/18 21:49, R0b0t1 wrote: > As I am sure you are aware, under US law there is no contract if both > sides have not provided consideration. This leaves us in the strange > place of gratis licenses being suggestions. Please note (and this is apparently settled case law in the US) consideration != money. The licensOR benefits by gaining access to other works (in particular, if I modify a GPL'd work my consideration is access to the work I modified), therefore as soon as two copyright holders are involved, both are deemed to have received consideration in the form of the other person's work. And if the law said "consideration must be money", how would the barter economy work? Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Firefox, downloading files and odd behavior.
On 07/01/19 10:46, Dale wrote: > From what I've read, that can be overcome. If you get say a SMART > message that a drive is failing, Yup, I have to agree that SMART isn't always reliable, but if you *monitor* it, it should give plenty of warning of the recording medium failing ... > just remove that drive or remove the > whole LVM setup and use something else until a working drive setup can > be made. Once ready, then move the data, if the drive still works, to > the new drive. That is basically what I did when I swapped a smaller > drive for a larger one. I moved the data from one drive to another. It > did it fairly quickly. Someone posted that it may even be faster to do > it with LVM's pvmove than it is with cp or rsync. I don't know how true > that is but from what I've read, it moves the data really efficiently. Point is, it works at a different level. Both cp and rsync are NOT guaranteed to copy your filesystem accurately - mine is full of hard links and that will give both those two a hard and nasty time. LVM copies the block device underneath the file system, so it is less efficient in that it will copy 3GB if you have a 3GB partition, but it is far simpler in that it neither knows nor cares what the file system is doing at the next level up. Give a file-system like mine to "cp -a" and it'll bring the system to its knees trying to keep track of where everything is. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Firefox, downloading files and odd behavior.
On 10/01/19 00:55, Dale wrote: > Just how do you do backups? If cp -a and rsync would not work > correctly, what do you use? I'm just curious now. ;-) RAID. I know it's not meant as a backup, and if anything happens to the computer it could take out both drives, but at the moment I have two 3GB drives mirrored, and I do copy stuff to archival DVD. So if anything goes wrong I'm in trouble ... :-) That said, I'm someone for whom things seem to "just work" - until I lend stuff to someone who believes a good bash with a hammer is the fix for any technical gremlin :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Firefox, downloading files and odd behavior.
On 10/01/19 12:28, Mick wrote: > What about 'rsync -H' or 'tar --hard-dereference'? Don't they cater to hard > links in the fs? rsync and cp are both quite happy with hardlinks. They just keep a table of them in memory ... a 3TB disk full of hard links will fill your memory ... Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] USB mouse disconnecting
On 13/01/19 18:19, Dale wrote: > I just wanted to mention in case this is bigger than just a mouse > issue. One may want to look deeper. I'm running the latest openSUSE stable on my laptop, and while it has other issues, it seems to lose USB (and hence mouse) on boot every now and then. I haven't attempted debugging it because unplugging and replugging is a permanent fix - until the next time. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] OT scripting - strip zero if between period and digit
On 23/01/19 07:37, Alexander Kapshuk wrote: > On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 9:05 AM Paul Colquhoun > wrote: >> >> On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 5:52:57 PM AEDT Alexander Kapshuk wrote: >>> On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 5:20 AM Adam Carter wrote: >> François-Xavier > > My bad, it should be: > > sed 's/0*\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\1/g' > > (tests are indeed needed!) Many thanks François. This is almost right, but it is also stripping zeros that follow a letter, and I only want it to strip zeros that are proceeded by a period. There are no leading zeros in the first octet of the IP so that case does not need to be handled. Does the \1 refer to what's in the ()'s? So anything that one would wont to carry through should be inside the ()'s and anything that's outside is stripped, right? >>> Would something like to do the trick? >>> echo 198.088.062.01 | sed 's/\.0/./g' >>> 198.88.62.1 >> >> In a word, no. >> >> echo 198.088.0.01 | sed 's/\.0/./g' >> 198.88..1 >> >> >> -- >> Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC. http://andor.dropbear.id.au/ >> Asking for technical help in newsgroups? Read this first: >> http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro >> >> >> >> > > How about this one? > > echo '198.088.0.01 > 198.088.062.01' | sed 's/\.0\([0-9][0-9]*\)/.\1/g' > 198.88.0.1 > 198.88.62.1 > I've just done a bit of digging, and would this work to match an octet? [0-9][0-9]?[0-9]? I know ? normally matches a single character, but apparently in this syntax it means "0 or 1 occurrence of the preceding expression". So that will detect a number consisting of at most three digits. I thought there must be a "detect a single optional character" operator ... :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Emerge --sync source
On 06/03/19 17:39, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Up to now, I've never had a HDD or SDD fail on me. :-) I hope that > when this does eventually happen, I'll be prepared. I don't think I've had one of mine fail. I have, however, done recovery jobs on two drives that did fail that I managed to revive long enough to get the data off. And I currently have a second drive that is properly dead, whose owner has asked me to destroy it to make sure that nothing can be recovered off it (the first drive I had in that state was a 60 *G*B drive, which tells you that it was a long time ago). Drives are reliable. Drives do last a long time, and I think many drives have been upgraded before they failed. But nowadays, drives are so large that people don't fill them up and upgrade, so they are used a lot longer, and you're seeing them fail more often. I think I've handled five dead drives (friends and acquaintances) in my career and I'm sure others have seen a lot more. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] NVM on Gentoo Linux?
On 31/03/19 02:12, Tamer Higazi wrote: > Can somebody of you give me a good starting point ? > I think it has something todo with systemrescuecd which I would prepare > on a USB stick and ... ... ... > Well, ... Personally I'd leave Windows on the slow disk to discourage you from using it ... :-) Are you trying to replace a 2.5TB hard drive with a 2TB SSD? You can't fit a quart into a pint pot! Anyways, recreate the partitions on the SSD, then copy them using dd. Assuming your SSD is the new sda and your old drive is sdb, dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda1 MAKE SURE you get the drives right, or you'll trash the system! Make sure also that the new partitions are the same size or larger than the partitions you're going to replace. Then live-boot into the new drive, and re-install EFI or whatever it is you do to boot off that. I'm planning to migrate my system soon, but I'm going to do that a bit differently. I'll dd my home partition across (I've got hard-links galore, so a cp or rsync or whatever will have massive conniptions). Then I'll re-install gentoo, re-emerge all my programs, and re-create etc/passwd and all the other configuration stuff - I haven't really messed about with most of my config, so that isn't a problem. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] NVM on Gentoo Linux?
On 31/03/19 09:08, Andreas Fink wrote: > On Sun, 31 Mar 2019 08:38:43 +0100 > Wols Lists wrote: > >> I'm planning to migrate my system soon, but I'm going to do that a bit >> differently. I'll dd my home partition across (I've got hard-links >> galore, so a cp or rsync or whatever will have massive conniptions). > > What's wrong with an "rsync -aH"? This preserves hard links (given that the > target system > supports them. It chews up RAM like it's going out of fashion? > > I honestly don't think that a dd is necessary. I have copied several times > from one > harddisk to another with different harddis partition sizes, but with enough > free space on > the target. > > I do the copying by booting a live usb stick, then I mount the source and the > target > partitions, and issue the rsync command (If you need extended attributes to > be synced > too, then there is an option for rsync too, e.g. ACL). > rsync -aH --numeric-ids /path/to/source /path/to/target/ > If I'm booting off a live-CD or similar, then I'm not worried about the system being available for use, and streaming the data at a level BELOW the file system is far more efficient and quicker. Seriously, I'm worried that the number of hard links could push the system into thrashing, at which point an rsync will appear to die ... (been there done that). Brute-force copying the partition just seems so much easier than worrying about the contents of the file system on it. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] NVM on Gentoo Linux?
On 31/03/19 17:05, Rich Freeman wrote: > I believe that it can resize partitions and so on, at least > for the linux-oriented ones. I'm not sure if it can resize NTFS. When I resize my Windows partitions (rarely) I use linux tools to do so. (btw, my 2.5TB /home is pretty full :-) Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Picking out a printer. Questions.
On 26/04/19 18:00, Dale wrote: > Grant Edwards wrote: >> On 2019-04-22, Dale wrote: >> >>> On the question of ethernet. [...] Do I plug the printer into the >>> router or do I have to connect it to the puter itself? I think I >>> read somewhere ages ago, on this list most likely, that you plug it >>> into the router. >> Yes, that's how it's usually done. >> >>> That way all puters hooked to the router can access it. >> Exactly. >> > > > Picking last reply. I got the printer, removed all the shipping stuff, > did the normal setup and got a test page printed from CUPS, in color. > I'm taking this from the CUPS printer page that shows the connection. > It printed from Kwrite and shows as ready for other programs as well. I > would like someone to confirm that this is the best way to have this set > up. I googled and can't find a howto for this. Most everything I found > referenced .rpm and .deb stuff. > Picking the last reply :-) > > > The only way I could find to print is using the ipp thingy, at least it > was the first way I could print successfully. Still, is this the proper > way? I believe ipp stands for "Internet Printing Protocol", so although I might still call it "plug and pRay", I think that is the new modern standard. > > Oh, it is connected by ethernet to my router. I figured I would use > that from the start since I may end up putting my printer in another > room which would require a longer cable. > Good call. All my printers are networked. They run (or used to) a small lpd server in firmware, so in effect they are a "small computer plus locally attached printer" on your network. > Only printed the test pages but they look neato!!! I hope to give this > thing a test drive once I know it is set up correctly. > > Thanks to all for the help. This may be the best printer I've ever > had. :-D > Just don't expect it to last as long as you hope ... there was a thread somewhere recently where they were discussing long-lived printers, and it was noticeable that there were almost NO printers mentioned between about 5 and 10 years old mentioned. Old printers are tanks that go on and on. New ones seem to just about outlast the extended warranty and then die. Covering the same sort of topics as everyone else, but ... inks. A lot of modern ink-jet inks are permanent once dried, so they no longer run like they once did. They also don't dry up in the cartridge like they once did. That doesn't stop them being more expensive than vintage champagne! But I would NOT refill toner cartridges myself - buy remanufactured ones. Toner is nasty stuff. Think of it as wax - it's stuck electrostatically to the paper then melted on. If you spill it it makes one heck of a mess - wipe it up with tissue paper and then clean it down with COLD water. If you wash your hands in hot water it will print onto them ... :-) Cost - I found a cheap laser printer for £50. I think I did the maths and worked out that even if you threw it in the bin after using up the starter cartridge, it was cheaper than an equivalent ink-jet! Bear in mind that your typical ink-jet cartridge struggles to do a pack (ream) of paper, your typical (nowadays) laser cartridge does about a box of paper. And unfortunately, yes, if you want photos then use an ink-jet. And use the expensive manufacturer inks and paper too ... Brother printers - that's what my mum uses mostly ... Usage - a laser should be fine up to a box of paper a month. Sounds like you'll be nowhere near that. Just try not to go mad - a boss of mine years ago looked at the "X pages per annum" figure for some - they were dot-matrix back then - printers we had and said "why are they always breaking, we don't do that many pages". I said in response "yep, we don't do that many per year, but we do do near enough the entire year's allowance over two months!" If you stay under one pack of paper every two to three days you'll be fine. I've always bought "buy X cartridges and get a free printer" jobs before, but having recently binned a broken printer along with far too many spare cartridges, I've changed tack. I had a b&w duplex printer, along with a colour printer/scanner, and I've now replaced both with a powerful little workstation, a M477fdn. Laser colour, duplex print, duplex scan. The starter cartridges have lasted about six months, including two newsletter print runs (which paid for a new high-capacity b&w cartridge). I now need to replace the colour cartridges, but seeing as HP offer a free 3-year warranty provided you only use HP cartridges, I'm going to fork out for them. That *should* see out the warranty, and at £300 for the printer and £400 for a fresh set of cartridges, that's not too bad for three years. Once the warranty's gone, I'll use compatibles, and if the printer breaks I'll have saved enough for a new one. Laser printers cost up front, but once I've paid for this set of cartridges I'm probably set up for a couple of years. Just don't expect modern las
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Picking out a printer. Questions.
On 28/04/19 00:37, Dale wrote: > I'm no networking guru by any stretch, I'm sure others would agree with > that, but that's my thinking. After all, if you have a printer with the > same IP, how would it know mine from yours unless it is local only? > From my understanding, 192.168.*.* addresses are always local only IPs. Google for RFC 1918. There are two other network ranges, one of which is 10/8. The idea is that 192.168/24 gives you 256 class C addresses, then there's a class B address, can't remember what it is, and 10/8 is a class A address. All of these are defined as "not routeable over the public network", so any interface between two networks is supposed to drop any such packets. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: New Intel CPU flaws discovered
On 17/05/19 06:19, Andrew Udvare wrote: >> On May 17, 2019, at 01:14, Adam Carter wrote: >> >> The classic one is where OPS haven't noticed that disks in a RAID array have >> died years ago... > > This really happened? > It's probably more common than you think. Can't tell (don't really know) the details, but I was told a story first hand about someone who went in to the computer room and asked "what are those flashing red lights?" Cue massive panic as ops suddenly realised that (a) it was the main billing server with terabytes of critical information and (b) the two flashing lights meant their terribly expensive raid-6 disk array was now running in raid-0! Cheers, Wol
