The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

I've been working on speeding up a system of mine, and I read an article on IBM's site about using data=journal to speed up disk performance. I went into fstab, tagged that onto the end of the options and rebooted.

Now the partition is read only for some bizarre reason, anyone know why this would be?

# ? Sep 20, 2008 20:55

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# ? May 16, 2024 10:19

AzraelNewtype: Nov 9, 2004; 「ブレストバーン！！」

pretend to care posted:

So how risky is it REALLY to enable writing to NTFS drives?

And, if it's really bad, can I convert my NTFS drives to something that Linux could write through via Samba? I want to make this box my fileserver, but if I can't map drives and write to them, it's pointless.

You got a couple of answers to this but they seem to have missed a point that you seem to be confused on. If your only concern with writing onto an NTFS formatted drive on a linux machine is over a network, NTFS write has no relevance here. Samba lets you use SMB/CIFS to mount those drives over the network, and the machines on both ends write in their own formats based on data sent using one of the network file transfer protocols I mentioned. Neither computer touches the hardware directly. If this isn't what you meant, I don't know why you brought up Samba at all. If it is, a working Samba installation will get you golden.

# ? Sep 20, 2008 22:35

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

Ashex posted:

I've been working on speeding up a system of mine, and I read an article on IBM's site about using data=journal to speed up disk performance. I went into fstab, tagged that onto the end of the options and rebooted.

Now the partition is read only for some bizarre reason, anyone know why this would be?

No idea why that would be, but have you tried umounting it and remounting as readwrite?

# ? Sep 20, 2008 23:41

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

celestial teapot posted:

No idea why that would be, but have you tried umounting it and remounting as readwrite?

I wasn't able to since it was the root partition, ended up booting off a live disc and removing the option. Was rather strange since I couldn't even unmount it in recovery console. This is an ubuntu desktop system, but I don't know why that would matter.

# ? Sep 20, 2008 23:43

celestial teapot: Sep 9, 2003; He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God."

pretend to care posted:

So if I want to, say, run Utorrent and save files directly to an Ubuntu mounted NTFS drive that I've mapped, I shouldn't have any problems?

If you are doing what I'm doing, which is using a secondary box as a file server that you save your torrents to across the network, then there is no reason to have the partitions formatted as NTFS. Format them using some linux filesystem (I like XFS for big partitions, but whatever) and then share them normally through smb. Your windows box will not know the difference at all, and your data will be safe + secure.

# ? Sep 20, 2008 23:44

raven77: Jan 28, 2006; Nevermore.

I hope it's okay if I share a few brief thoughts on OpenSuse 11.0.

http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org
http://en.opensuse.org/Documentation#User_Documentation

I just started using it on Friday, but holy poo poo it's really very polished and easy to use. I come from the background of being a Ubuntu user and while it's generally worked fine with my computer, I've just been frustrated at times with certain things either not working well between releases or updates, or they will work, but it's absurdly hard to get to that point.

But I have been amazed at how simple it is to get things in general to work. Three things I've had trouble with in Ubuntu are printing to a network printer, using my wireless card and getting streaming videos/DVD playback to work with Ubuntu. In OpenSuse, these things either "just work", or there's enough easily found documentation to get it to work quickly. The best part is their documentation, honestly, and there are quite a few package installs that you can find available as "one click links" that will install those things directly to your system, no further hassle required. I highly recommend it to anyone who isn't happy with their current Linux distro, or if you just want to try something new.

# ? Sep 21, 2008 00:13

AzraelNewtype: Nov 9, 2004; 「ブレストバーン！！」

Ashex posted:

I've been working on speeding up a system of mine, and I read an article on IBM's site about using data=journal to speed up disk performance. I went into fstab, tagged that onto the end of the options and rebooted.

Now the partition is read only for some bizarre reason, anyone know why this would be?

Could you possibly link to this article? The first one I ran across was from 2001 when ext3 was new and interesting. Most modern filesystems are journaled by default, ext2 being the most common linux un-journaled filesystem. Unless your whole box is running ext2 I don't think this would actually accomplish anything anyway, unless I'm grossly mistaken.

# ? Sep 21, 2008 00:51

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

Ashex posted:

I wasn't able to since it was the root partition, ended up booting off a live disc and removing the option. Was rather strange since I couldn't even unmount it in recovery console. This is an ubuntu desktop system, but I don't know why that would matter.

You can remount something with a single mount command.

Something like
mount -o rw,remount /

# ? Sep 21, 2008 03:27

Neslepaks: Sep 3, 2003

Feral Integral posted:

Hi, I need help using rsync to copy my files from my old pc to my new one. First thing I wanted to do was copy all my steam game stuff over so I wouldnt have to redownload everything. This is the command I used:
code:
rsync -r -a -v -e "ssh -l User" 192.168.1.101:/cygwin/c/Program\ Files/Steam /~
I keep getting:
code:
rsync: link_stat "/cygwin/c/Program" failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link_stat "home/User/Files/Steam" failed: No such file or directory (2)

You have to double-quote for ssh, because it's interpreted once by the local shell and again by ssh or the remote shell or whatever. 'a\ b' or a\\ b, etc.

# ? Sep 21, 2008 14:31

Harokey: Jun 12, 2003; Memory is RAM! Oh dear!

I want to compile something that wants libmysqlclient. I have the the library installed, but its in /usr/lib/mysql. The package also created a /etc/ld.so.conf entry that should add /usr/lib/mysql to the library path. However when I try to compile something with -lmysqlclient i get a linker error.

If I compile with -L/usr/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient, everything is happy.

Why does /etc/ld.so.conf really tell where LD should look for libraries. (I've run ldconfig)

# ? Sep 21, 2008 20:32

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

AzraelNewtype posted:

Could you possibly link to this article? The first one I ran across was from 2001 when ext3 was new and interesting. Most modern filesystems are journaled by default, ext2 being the most common linux un-journaled filesystem. Unless your whole box is running ext2 I don't think this would actually accomplish anything anyway, unless I'm grossly mistaken.

This is the article I was looking at. all data=journal should do is tweak the way journaling is done from what I know.

Edit: I looked at the date and it is 2001 >.<

waffle iron posted:

You can remount something with a single mount command.

Something like
mount -o rw,remount /

Ah, thanks for that. I didn't realize you could do that.

Ashex fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Sep 21, 2008

# ? Sep 21, 2008 20:40

covener: Jan 10, 2004; You know, for kids!

Harokey posted:

I want to compile something that wants libmysqlclient. I have the the library installed, but its in /usr/lib/mysql. The package also created a /etc/ld.so.conf entry that should add /usr/lib/mysql to the library path. However when I try to compile something with -lmysqlclient i get a linker error.

If I compile with -L/usr/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient, everything is happy.

Why does /etc/ld.so.conf really tell where LD should look for libraries. (I've run ldconfig)

Generally, ld.so (the runtime linker) consults this configuration but ld does not.

There are some times when a shared library is required implicitly during linking and ld.so.conf is consulted by ld, but it's kind of a last-ditch effort.

# ? Sep 21, 2008 22:35

Harokey: Jun 12, 2003; Memory is RAM! Oh dear!

covener posted:

Generally, ld.so (the runtime linker) consults this configuration but ld does not.

There are some times when a shared library is required implicitly during linking and ld.so.conf is consulted by ld, but it's kind of a last-ditch effort.

So how does ld know where things are? Does it just have /usr/lib/ hardcoded in?

# ? Sep 21, 2008 23:26

covener: Jan 10, 2004; You know, for kids!

Harokey posted:

So how does ld know where things are? Does it just have /usr/lib/ hardcoded in?

A short list of system directories specified at ld build time (i.e. a flavor that knows about /usr/lib64), then the usual suspects wrt command line parameters, and hints baked into the objects you're linking (sometimes)

# ? Sep 21, 2008 23:51

Harokey: Jun 12, 2003; Memory is RAM! Oh dear!

So then really the only solution is modifying the configure script/make files?

# ? Sep 22, 2008 02:39

nonathlon: Jul 9, 2004; And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

An init.d type question:

We're a small research lab, running a website via Zope on a Redhat server. So far so, so simple. Unfortunately, our IT section is a bit trigger-happy about shutting down or restarting our server (network maintainance, system upgrade, testing the UPS etc. etc.). The server gets started up again but the zope server doesn't start up automatically. So about once a fortnight I find out from someone that our website is down for several days.

Solution: obviously I should put a script in /etc/init.d to start and shutdown the zope server. And indeed, the zope daemon (zopectl) obeys the right syntax (e.g. zopectl start). So I thought a symbolic link from init.d to the controlling script should do it. Nope: reboot the server, zope doesn't come up. Clearly there's something I'm missing. Any ideas or pointers?

A possible complexity is that the zope server runs in a normal user account under that user, for security purposes. I played around with setuid but that hasn't had any visible effect.

# ? Sep 22, 2008 10:56

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

Simply placing a script in init.d won't get you anywhere

you're operating under the assumption that those scripts are all called on system startup, which isn't quite true -- that's really just a central clearinghouse for init scripts, and what's important is that they get symlinked into the /etc/rc*.d directories (where the * is a number corresponding to the system runlevel, e.g. 3 for nongraphical multiuser, 2 for single user, 5 for graphical multiuser, stuff like that [don't quote me on those exact numbers]).

On RedHat these symlinks are managed with /sbin/chkconfig so read up on that and you should be all set

you just need to tell it to add your new script to the default runlevels.

# ? Sep 22, 2008 13:40

covener: Jan 10, 2004; You know, for kids!

Harokey posted:

So then really the only solution is modifying the configure script/make files?

Unless the makefile blows, it's probably as simple as setting LDFLAGS before/while calling make.

# ? Sep 22, 2008 14:37

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

outlier posted:

Solution: obviously I should put a script in /etc/init.d to start and shutdown the zope server. And indeed, the zope daemon (zopectl) obeys the right syntax (e.g. zopectl start). So I thought a symbolic link from init.d to the controlling script should do it. Nope: reboot the server, zope doesn't come up. Clearly there's something I'm missing. Any ideas or pointers?

If it's a debian server, use update-rd.cd

# ? Sep 22, 2008 15:44

Mr. Eric Praline: Aug 13, 2004; I didn't like the others, they were all too flat.

bitprophet posted:

Simply placing a script in init.d won't get you anywhere you're operating under the assumption that those scripts are all called on system startup, which isn't quite true -- that's really just a central clearinghouse for init scripts, and what's important is that they get symlinked into the /etc/rc*.d directories (where the * is a number corresponding to the system runlevel, e.g. 3 for nongraphical multiuser, 2 for single user, 5 for graphical multiuser, stuff like that [don't quote me on those exact numbers]).

On RedHat these symlinks are managed with /sbin/chkconfig so read up on that and you should be all set you just need to tell it to add your new script to the default runlevels.

RH init scripts have to be chkconfig ready, which is done with a line like # "chkconfig 2345 80 4" or some such. It's unlikely that zopectl will work as-is. (It'll work from init, but not managed with chkconfig.)

Here's the options:
1. ln -ls /path/to/zopectl /etc/rc3.d/99zopectl; ln -s /path/to/zopectl /etc/rcX.d/K01zopectl (Where X is all the shutdown runlevels: 0, 6, and S.)

2. echo "/path/to/zopectl start" >> /etc/rc.local

3. The correct way: Copy /etc/init.d/xxx to /etc/init.d/zope. (xxx = some simple script like gpm)
Edit the new script to work with zopectl. I find it easier just do this than to write from scratch.
Use chkconfig to enable the new script.

4. The other correct (and easiest) way: Find someone else's copy of an init script, and use chkconfig with that.

# ? Sep 22, 2008 19:09

ExileStrife: Sep 12, 2004; Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!

I want to add a very specific command to sudoers:

code:

kill -9 `ps -a | grep "abcdefg" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{ print $1 }'`

It should be runnable by anyone in group abcd, so I'm trying this line:

code:

# Allow members of group abcdto kill abcdefg
%abcd ALL = kill -9 `ps -a | grep "abcdefg" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{ print $1 }'`

Trying to close visudo reports an error on the line with the comment, however (it's definitely the line with the command, because if I comment it out then it doesn't complain). What is wrong?

# ? Sep 22, 2008 19:26

covener: Jan 10, 2004; You know, for kids!

ExileStrife posted:

%abcd ALL = kill -9 `ps -a | grep "abcdefg" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{ print $1 What is wrong?

you need the full path to kill, or it interprets it as an sudo Cmd_Alias.

# ? Sep 22, 2008 19:36

ExileStrife: Sep 12, 2004; Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!

Ah, thanks.

# ? Sep 22, 2008 21:17

nonathlon: Jul 9, 2004; And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

chryst posted:

RH init scripts have to be chkconfig ready, which is done with a line like # "chkconfig 2345 80 4" or some such. It's unlikely that zopectl will work as-is. (It'll work from init, but not managed with chkconfig.)

Here's the options ...

Many thanks - although I'd googled heavily for advice, I hadn't found anything that collected all the necessary bits in one place. (I asked one of the our IT staff about it and he looked confused and said "It should just work." Gee, thanks.)

# ? Sep 23, 2008 10:42

Bluecobra: Sep 11, 2001; The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Are there any articles that talk about the performance implications of different hardware RAID levels specifically in Linux/RHEL? I have an 8 SAS-disk server at work and I was thinking about using a RAID-1 array for the OS and RAID-10 array for the application that it will be running. Would it just be easier to make one big RAID-10 array and install everything on that. Every book I looked at seems to skip over hardware RAID during the installation chapter. Any suggestions?

# ? Sep 23, 2008 15:40

Dobermaniac: Jun 10, 2004

I'm setting up a ventrilo server for a few people who play WoW. There won't be more than 8 people, but I want to be able to run it inside of a virtual computer. I'm going to be using VMware server. I just really want to find a low requirement distrobution that is basically command line only. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm currently attempting to install gentoo, but it seems like a pain.

# ? Sep 27, 2008 18:56

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

Dobermaniac posted:

I'm setting up a ventrilo server for a few people who play WoW. There won't be more than 8 people, but I want to be able to run it inside of a virtual computer. I'm going to be using VMware server. I just really want to find a low requirement distrobution that is basically command line only. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm currently attempting to install gentoo, but it seems like a pain.

Gentoo's absolutely not worth the effort for that purpose, especially when running on virtualized hardware. I'd say to go with Debian or Ubuntu Server Edition (they're essentially the same thing except that Ubuntu has newer/more packages, with the tradeoff of being less stable), as their base install can be pretty bare bones and console only, the package management is second to none, and they're extremely popular so chances are good packages will exist and/or support for any problems you encounter, will be easier to find.

Another decent alternative is Arch Linux, which also has a good package manager, is console-only by default, and is probably a tiny bit speedier than Debian (not that you're going to notice). It's less popular/widespread and is less mature, but I used it for a while and it was good stuff.

# ? Sep 27, 2008 20:32

I Hate Admin !!: Jan 19, 2007; by Nutt Hogg

Okay, how the gently caress do I disable the loving stupid loving sticky windows in the latest version of Ubuntu? I have installed the advanced display options application, and have turned off edge resistance, edge attraction, and everything else that could be related.

It won't loving die, and it's basically the most irritating "feature" in the history of computers.

# ? Sep 28, 2008 20:08

crab avatar: Mar 15, 2006; iÅ§ KÃ«3Å, cÄ§ gÃ¸Ã i- <Ecl8

FugeesTeenMom92 posted:

Okay, how the gently caress do I disable the loving stupid loving sticky windows in the latest version of Ubuntu? I have installed the advanced display options application, and have turned off edge resistance, edge attraction, and everything else that could be related.

It won't loving die, and it's basically the most irritating "feature" in the history of computers.

Are you running loving Compiz? Turning off the loving Snapping loving Windows plug-in disables the loving snapping.

# ? Sep 28, 2008 23:45

I Hate Admin !!: Jan 19, 2007; by Nutt Hogg

jegHegy posted:

Are you running loving Compiz? Turning off the loving Snapping loving Windows plug-in disables the loving snapping.

Yeah, except it loving doesn't.

Turning Wobbly Windows off makes the snapping stop. However, there is apparently no way to have Wobbly Windows without Irritating Snapping Windows.

I Hate Admin !! fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Sep 29, 2008

# ? Sep 29, 2008 00:05

Luppertime: Jun 27, 2007; Smell it.

FugeesTeenMom92 posted:

Yeah, except it loving doesn't.

Turning Wobbly Windows off makes the snapping stop. However, there is apparently no way to have Wobbly Windows without Irritating Snapping Windows.

There is an option under the preferences for Wobbly Windows called "Snap Inverted." If that's checked, uncheck it. Worked for me.

# ? Sep 29, 2008 07:20

ndrz: Oct 31, 2003

Is there a way to make a program restart if it crashes?

For example, I use the command

code:

synergyc 192.168.1.77

to connect my laptop which runs linux to my xp desktop. I'm using a custom build of Synergy on the laptop because of a problem the normal synergy client has with hardy heron, and while this build fixes the problem, it causes synergy to periodically crash.

Is there a way that I can make synergy instantly restart if it terminates?

# ? Sep 29, 2008 18:00

JoeNotCharles: Mar 3, 2005; Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

coldfire07 posted:

Is there a way to make a program restart if it crashes?

For example, I use the command
code:
synergyc 192.168.1.77
to connect my laptop which runs linux to my xp desktop. I'm using a custom build of Synergy on the laptop because of a problem the normal synergy client has with hardy heron, and while this build fixes the problem, it causes synergy to periodically crash.

Is there a way that I can make synergy instantly restart if it terminates?

while true; do synergyc 192.168.1.77; done

(Assuming synergyc doesn't put itself into the background, this'll wait till one ends before starting another one. If it puts itself into the background, through, this'll start hundreds of them at the same time.)

# ? Sep 29, 2008 18:08

dont skimp on the shrimp: Apr 23, 2008

JoeNotCharles posted:

while true; do synergyc 192.168.1.77; done

(Assuming synergyc doesn't put itself into the background, this'll wait till one ends before starting another one. If it puts itself into the background, through, this'll start hundreds of them at the same time.)

I think you could use a simple script with pidof to get the PID of synergyc, then simply check ps if that pid is running. If it isn't, start synergyc and use pidof to grab the new PID.

Or something like that.

# ? Sep 29, 2008 18:28

ndrz: Oct 31, 2003

Zom Aur posted:

I think you could use a simple script with pidof to get the PID of synergyc, then simply check ps if that pid is running. If it isn't, start synergyc and use pidof to grab the new PID.

Or something like that.

Oh, cool, good idea. I threw together a script that does this, and it works great. Thanks!

JoeNotCharles, synergyc does put itself into the background, so that wouldn't work, but I used the while true part

# ? Sep 29, 2008 19:11

bitprophet: Jul 22, 2004; Taco Defender

Look into 'supervise', or (maybe, although it's more of a backgrounding tool) 'nohup'.

# ? Sep 29, 2008 22:41

doogle: May 24, 2003

I recently installed ubuntu 8.04 on my dell laptop. This is my second linux install ever and the first one with a gui. Specs:

2.0 core 2 duo
Nvidia Geforce 6600GT
3gb ram
30gb ext3 partiton/3gb swap
broadcom b43 internal wireless b/g
zd1211rw USB wireless b/g

I have to use the USB wifi to get internet (its a wifire adapter, I get about another 100 feet in range over the built in one). About half the time ubuntu boots, it freezes completely after I open firefox or sometimes just as it connects to the AP. When it freezes, Num Lock and Caps Lock flash on my keyboard and nothing accepts input.

I've looked on google and I've seen a couple instances of ubuntu crashing, but from what I've seen they have still been able to move their mouse and ctrl+backspace.

Any idea as to what could be causing this?

# ? Sep 30, 2008 10:36

Mr. Eric Praline: Aug 13, 2004; I didn't like the others, they were all too flat.

noskillz posted:

When it freezes, Num Lock and Caps Lock flash on my keyboard and nothing accepts input.

Flashing lights + freeze mean kernel panic. It's pretty similar to a BSOD, and is usually a bad driver or hardware. If you're in console mode, you'll see some info dumped to the screen.

Here's the first Google hit on troubleshooting panics.
http://rhcelinuxguide.wordpress.com/category/linux-kernel/

# ? Sep 30, 2008 14:26

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

Ive been trying to dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 on a macmini and followed this guide:
http://blog.costan.us/2008/04/ubuntu...-mac-mini.html

but im st ill having problems. I can get up to step 9 where it instructs me to:

quote:

9# On the last install screen, click Advanced, and replace (hd0) with (hd0,2). This is necessary so that Grub installs in the right place.
10# Upon rebooting, go to EFI Console in rEFIt. It will offer to update the MBR to reflect the EFI partition table. Accept. Then the Mini will reboot again.

When I go to manually partition for ubuntu it shows 3 partitions and three free spaces between them. so Ubuntu would be installed on sda3. Im not sure if the grub should be installed there or what.

Is this guide telling me that it should be placed on the root partition of ubuntu or somewhere else? Because Ive tried putting it on sda3 (there was no hd0,2 option) but when I try to boot to the ubuntu partition it says something like "no bootable device found". Then again, going into the EFI console doesnt magically update the MBR for me tho....

# ? Sep 30, 2008 21:20

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# ? May 16, 2024 10:19

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

rugbert posted:

Ive been trying to dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 on a macmini and followed this guide:
http://blog.costan.us/2008/04/ubuntu...-mac-mini.html

but im st ill having problems. I can get up to step 9 where it instructs me to:

When I go to manually partition for ubuntu it shows 3 partitions and three free spaces between them. so Ubuntu would be installed on sda3. Im not sure if the grub should be installed there or what.

Is this guide telling me that it should be placed on the root partition of ubuntu or somewhere else? Because Ive tried putting it on sda3 (there was no hd0,2 option) but when I try to boot to the ubuntu partition it says something like "no bootable device found". Then again, going into the EFI console doesnt magically update the MBR for me tho....

I believe you skipped the step for partitioning.

quote:

8. Start installing Ubuntu. Choose manual partitioning, delete the big FAT32 partition that Boot Camp created (leave the EFI partition alone though), and create the root and swap partitions in the free space.

The final screen Will have the spot where you point it to the install destination for grub. Also, broken link.

Ashex fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Sep 30, 2008

# ? Sep 30, 2008 21:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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