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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Chuu: Sep 11, 2004; Grimey Drawer

Longinus00 posted:

Ask the vendor why they don't use a database?

The wikipedia pages for filesystems includes things like file number limits. A cursory look shows that ext4 handles up to 2³², ZFS goes up to 2⁴⁸, and btrfs up to 2⁶⁴. As always you should really test this out yourself, creat a simple script to spam out files in a structure not unlike that application until the FS starts throwing errors.

The vendor's product is a database, I'm just abusing it pretty badly. I really can't speak badly of it because if NTFS' limit was 2⁴⁸ or 2⁶⁴ instead of 2³²-1 I would be happy with the current performance.

# ? Jan 26, 2013 05:58

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# ? May 13, 2024 11:04

hackedaccount: Sep 28, 2009

Longinus00 posted:

As always you should really test this out yourself, creat a simple script to spam out files in a structure not unlike that application until the FS starts throwing errors.

Yeah you'll want to do this because as Bob eluded to in his post the problem usually isn't the file system itself, it's all the commands/utilities/tools that access the file system. Wonder how many decades it takes to fsck a file system with tens of millions of files.

The other idea is to ask the vendor which file systems the recommend or support. With a wacked out product like this I'm sure they have some experience with what works and what doesn't.

# ? Jan 26, 2013 06:00

JHVH-1: Jun 28, 2002

Kaluza-Klein posted:

Ah, that did it!

Now it kernel panics :/. Sigh.

Sometimes you need to use mkinitrd from chroot to make sure the drivers are there and there are plenty of other reasons why it could screw up. I used to add panic=10 to the grub options when I was doing these things remotely without a way to remote power cycle a machine. It just reboots again if it fails.

# ? Jan 26, 2013 09:03

JHVH-1: Jun 28, 2002

Chuu posted:

I've been working with a vendor product that creates lots of files. We're talking tens of millions in a single directory, potentially more than a billion over a tree.

I've experimented with their product on Windows and NTFS surprisingly deals with it fairly well, once you tweak some settings. The problem is NTFS has a hard limit of ~4.2 billion files per volume, which this solution could realistically hit.

They do have a linux version, so I'm trying to find information on various linux filesystems to see if they would handle this directory structure better. Does anyone know a page that gives a good overview of linux filesystems, and specifically what their hard limits are? Is there a specific filesystem that jumps out as the obvious one to use?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

Common filesystems to use are at least ext4, but for more performance xfs, jfs, reiserfs

# ? Jan 26, 2013 09:06

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

Yeah you should tune the filesystem you put it on to have lots and lots of inodes. You'll probably run into inode limits long before any actual file system hard limits.

You should also look into kernel parameters involving inodes.

# ? Jan 26, 2013 09:33

JHVH-1: Jun 28, 2002

Oh yeah forgot about the kernel options you can tune using sysctl

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt

# ? Jan 26, 2013 19:29

Grabulon: Jul 25, 2003

I'm using rrdtool to plot some graphs, and I'm wondering if there are any downsides to never consolidate datapoints? I currently sample every 15 minutes and save the data for a year, and I'm thinking of extending it to five years. I probably never have to know the exact values in 15 minutes intervals from five years ago, but it would be nice to have the option of granularity. Anyway, the size of the database will obviously be larger, but are there any other downsides?

# ? Jan 27, 2013 20:11

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Grabulon posted:

I'm using rrdtool to plot some graphs, and I'm wondering if there are any downsides to never consolidate datapoints? I currently sample every 15 minutes and save the data for a year, and I'm thinking of extending it to five years. I probably never have to know the exact values in 15 minutes intervals from five years ago, but it would be nice to have the option of granularity. Anyway, the size of the database will obviously be larger, but are there any other downsides?

Disk I/O skyrockets if your RRDs get too big.

# ? Jan 28, 2013 02:33

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Holy god drat am I getting frustrated by trying to put together videos on Ubuntu. Recording the footage and audio is no problems at all, I can clean up the audio using Audacity so that's no drama either, but when it comes to finally assembling everything near every solution I've used is ridiculously unstable to the point where I experiences crashes after 10 actions or so.

Has anyone have any experience with a stable video editing setup on Linux, or am I just gonna have to bite the bullet and get set up on PC or Mac for video editing?

# ? Jan 28, 2013 06:31

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Cinelerra is rock stable, even it doesn't look pretty.

# ? Jan 28, 2013 06:33

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Suspicious Dish posted:

Cinelerra is rock stable, even it doesn't look pretty.

Alright, I'll give it another try. Admittedly I never really gave it a fair shake compared to the other simpler editors, but they're just driving me nuts with how crashy they get once you have a decent number of clips on there.

# ? Jan 28, 2013 06:45

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

drat GTK. Why are all the GTK3 themes so ugly? You either get "I'm a Mac!"-inspired rounded corners gradients everywhere or ridiculous dark themes with 4px scrollbars. Why can't we have nice flat minimalist things like Mist?

Some voodoo has made Firefox and most other things obey GTK2 on my laptop, though I suspect this is because it was probably last wiped and reinstalled from an Arch install medium circa 2009 and the accumulated cruft has just forced it to look okay, aside from whatever I did to restore the horrible default X11 cursor set.

# ? Jan 28, 2013 18:52

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

fivre posted:

drat GTK. Why are all the GTK3 themes so ugly? You either get "I'm a Mac!"-inspired rounded corners gradients everywhere or ridiculous dark themes with 4px scrollbars. Why can't we have nice flat minimalist things like Mist?

My GTK+3 scrollbar has no gradients. It's a simple, minimalistic rounded corner scrollbar.

# ? Jan 28, 2013 19:04

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Suspicious Dish posted:

My GTK+3 scrollbar has no gradients. It's a simple, minimalistic rounded corner scrollbar.

Buttons do though, and rounded corners are THE DEVIL.

# ? Jan 28, 2013 19:25

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Here's something to start with:

CSS code:

* {
    border-radius: 0;
    background-image: none;
}

.button {
    border-image: none;
    border: 1px solid @borders;
    background-color: @button_gradient_color_a;
}

.button:active {
    background-color: shade(@borders, 0.95);
}

.linked .button {
    border-left-style: none;
}

.linked .button:first-child {
    border-left-style: solid;
}

Put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

Suspicious Dish fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jan 28, 2013

# ? Jan 28, 2013 19:55

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

fivre posted:

Buttons do though, and rounded corners are THE DEVIL.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/FlatStudio?content=154296

enjoy

# ? Jan 28, 2013 20:22

mmm11105: Apr 27, 2010

Already asked this in the Ubuntu thread (as that is what I plan on using), but it's not really Ubuntu specific, so I guess I'll ask here too.

I need to get a linux partition set up for some development stuff. Right now I have an SSD running Windows and big HDD for data (with some empty space for linux). What's the best way to install Linux on that bit of the HDD without getting in the way of my normal Windows booting? Ideally I'd just get a quick GRUB screen that defaults to Windows or (even better) use the nice new Windows 8 bootloader.

Also, I remember hearing stuff a while back about using VMWare or VirtualBox to load up a partition as a virtual machine too (so you can boot in or visualize)? Anyone have experience with this?

# ? Jan 29, 2013 03:20

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Can anyone suggest a good bitmap font for Linux? GNOME Terminal won't let me use ProFont for some reason.

# ? Jan 29, 2013 15:40

text editor: Jan 8, 2007

Bob Morales posted:

Can anyone suggest a good bitmap font for Linux? GNOME Terminal won't let me use ProFont for some reason.

Terminus, Neep, and MonteCarlo are some of my non-profont favorites

# ? Jan 29, 2013 16:05

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; ~~Just wear the fucking mask, Bob~~

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Just found gohu - http://font.gohu.org/

# ? Jan 29, 2013 16:28

Adult Sword Owner: Jun 19, 2011; u deserve diploma for sublime comedy expertise

I just got a position as a junior Linux sysadmin (RHEL workstations and desktops, a few laptops). Anyone have a recommended "cheat sheet" I can have around for less common problems?

# ? Jan 30, 2013 08:07

JHVH-1: Jun 28, 2002

Saint Darwin posted:

I just got a position as a junior Linux sysadmin (RHEL workstations and desktops, a few laptops). Anyone have a recommended "cheat sheet" I can have around for less common problems?

I collect all my howtos and bookmarks and crap I ever end up finding after research into organized directories so you have things grouped by like filesystem/recovery, mail servers, web servers etc.
Doing that and saving all my 1 liners into a text file with comments saved me a lot of time going back and finding some solution to a problem I googled 6 months ago.

# ? Jan 30, 2013 08:59

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Saint Darwin posted:

I just got a position as a junior Linux sysadmin (RHEL workstations and desktops, a few laptops). Anyone have a recommended "cheat sheet" I can have around for less common problems?

emacs

# ? Jan 30, 2013 09:00

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Saint Darwin posted:

I just got a position as a junior Linux sysadmin (RHEL workstations and desktops, a few laptops). Anyone have a recommended "cheat sheet" I can have around for less common problems?

http://www.serverfault.com

# ? Jan 30, 2013 14:18

Goon Matchmaker: Oct 23, 2003; I play too much EVE-Online

Saint Darwin posted:

I just got a position as a junior Linux sysadmin (RHEL workstations and desktops, a few laptops). Anyone have a recommended "cheat sheet" I can have around for less common problems?

http://www.google.com and http://support.redhat.com

Redhat's support is generally quite good.

# ? Jan 30, 2013 15:58

Adult Sword Owner: Jun 19, 2011; u deserve diploma for sublime comedy expertise

I was already using those sites, I meant an actual physical cheat sheet, but if those are all I have to use that's fine.

# ? Jan 30, 2013 21:20

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Saint Darwin posted:

I was already using those sites, I meant an actual physical cheat sheet, but if those are all I have to use that's fine.

If it's a "less common problem," why would it be on a cheat sheet? :confused:

# ? Jan 30, 2013 22:29

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Adventures in UEFI-land:

I hate everything. Full stop.

# ? Jan 31, 2013 00:54

syzygy86: Feb 1, 2008

fivre posted:

Adventures in UEFI-land:

I hate everything. Full stop.

Especially when you can brick your laptop.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4ODQ

# ? Jan 31, 2013 04:37

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

UEFI isn't actually the cause of the problem, just a really easy way to quickly identify which laptops are susceptible to being bricked by the samsung-laptop driver.

# ? Jan 31, 2013 06:24

Goon Matchmaker: Oct 23, 2003; I play too much EVE-Online

Regardless of whether its the UEFIs fault or the samsung laptop fault, a driver/firmware shouldn't be able to get hardware into such a state that it becomes bricked.

# ? Jan 31, 2013 18:01

Qtotonibudinibudet: Nov 7, 2011; Omich poluyobok, skazhi ty narkoman? ya prosto tozhe gde to tam zhivu, mogli by vmeste uyobyvat' narkotiki

Goon Matchmaker posted:

Regardless of whether its the UEFIs fault or the samsung laptop fault, a driver/firmware shouldn't be able to get hardware into such a state that it becomes bricked.

That is straight out ossism, firmware are people too!

# ? Jan 31, 2013 19:22

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

fivre posted:

That is straight out ossism, firmware are people too!

Linus Torvalds posted:

I'm _shocked_ to hear that firmware would be fragile.

Anyway, here's the #1 thing to keep in mind about firmware:

- firmware is *always* buggy.

It's that simple. Don't expect anything else. Firmware is written by
people who have lost the will to live (why? Because they do firmware
development for a living), and the only thing keeping them going is
the drugs. And they're not the "fun" kind of drugs. The end result is
predictable. In their drug-induced haze, they make a mess.

So saying "ACPI is buggy" is like saying "water is wet". Deal with it.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/21/75

Fun comments from some current and ex firmware developers in T. Tso's google+ repost of Linus' comment.

https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/drvhoByi7sW

Longinus00 fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jan 31, 2013

# ? Jan 31, 2013 19:44

rockamiclikeavandal: Jul 2, 2010

Update for anyone interested from when I botched an install. It was a broken partition. My buddy had a sata-usb adapter which I used along with a simple partition recovery program. Saved me a bunch of cash. Thanks for the advice goons.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 02:40

Tighclops: Jan 23, 2008; Unable to deal with it; Grimey Drawer

I hope I'm in the right place for this, but I'm having problems getting the 304.64 Nvidia drivers to remember which of my two monitors I want to be the primary display. I'm running Mint 13 MATE with a GeForce G210 so far with few problems I haven't been able to stumble and google my way through, but I can't seem to lick this. Here is my x config file: http://pastebin.com/XMxL3y7X

I can't really make heads or tails of it but I suspect it's something in here I need to change.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 23:21

Hefty: Jun 11, 2008

Do you have a ~/.config/monitors.xml file? I think that's a Gnome thing. If it's there, you can just change the <primary> values (yes/no) for whichever monitors. That'll persist your changes through a reboot.

# ? Feb 1, 2013 23:32

River: Apr 22, 2012; Nothin' but the rain

Hey guys, small problem here.

I made a script to record the output of various commands into txt files, chuck them all in a dated tarball and email it to me. Having some trouble with mail/mailx.

If there's an attachment added it (most of the time) won't send the email at all. When it does send it, it takes a VERY long time to get there. Any email I send with the same command, sans the attachment bit, sends just fine and is received immediately.

I'm using CentOS 6 x64 and mail/mailx version 12.4 7/29/08.

The specific command I'm using is:

code:

mailx -s "MYSUBJECT - $MDT" -a MYFILE_*.tar.gz myemail@mydomain.com<<MSG
This email was automatically generated at $MDT. This email was sent by my@server and will send again 24 hours from now.
MSG

'$MDT' is `date +"%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S"`

Any help would be VERY appreciated. I've been trying to get these loving mails to send for 2 hours now. :smithicide:

# ? Feb 2, 2013 16:48

Xik: Mar 10, 2011; Dinosaur Gum

Tighclops posted:

I hope I'm in the right place for this, but I'm having problems getting the 304.64 Nvidia drivers to remember which of my two monitors I want to be the primary display. I'm running Mint 13 MATE with a GeForce G210 so far with few problems I haven't been able to stumble and google my way through, but I can't seem to lick this. Here is my x config file: http://pastebin.com/XMxL3y7X

I can't really make heads or tails of it but I suspect it's something in here I need to change.

This might be a bit too hackish for you, but my solution was to run a couple of xrandr commands when my window manager starts up.

My NVIDIA card has two DVI and one HDMI outputs, I leave them plugged in and I am constantly switching between the second DVI and the HDMI output. One of the startup entries in my window manager(i3wm) is a two line script to ensure the second DVI output is active and not the HDMI output:

code:

xrandr --output HDMI-0 --off
xrandr --output DVI-I-3 --auto --right-of DVI-I-2

As I said, I'm always switching between them so I have two functions in my .bashrc file:

code:

# turn off output on hdmi screen and turn on dvi                                                        
function xdv(){
    xrandr --output HDMI-0 --off
    xrandr --output DVI-I-3 --auto --right-of DVI-I-2
}

# turn off dvi output and turn on hdmi                                                                  
function xhd(){
    xrandr --output DVI-I-3 --off
    xrandr --output HDMI-0 --auto --right-of DVI-I-2
}

# ? Feb 2, 2013 18:15

Kire: Aug 25, 2006

(crosspost from a much slower moving thread, hope that's ok)

I'm trying to use my beaglebone, but I'm running in to trouble just trying to install emacs. I've been following this tutorial:
http://www.gigamegablog.com/2012/01...angstrom-linux/

and I'm trying to use "wget http://www.angstrom-distribution.or...r1.6" but linux keeps telling me "wget: bad address 'www.angstrom-distribution.org'" and since I can't ping any IP addresses from the command line I assume my beaglebone isn't accessing the internet properly? How can I get it to access the net, presumably through the ethernet connection to my WinXP machine?

# ? Feb 2, 2013 19:00

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# ? May 13, 2024 11:04

River: Apr 22, 2012; Nothin' but the rain

Also one other thing - I am getting literally hundreds, sometimes thousands of failed password for root messages (bruteforcing?) from some Chinese website (http://113.106.24.21/) that I probably should never have went to without noscript and a sandboxed browser, and I wanna ask what the best way to deal with this is. Tell iptables to drop all packets from that IP? If so, are there any special flags or anything past the basic "-j DROP"? Or should I report them to my host/datacenter?

# ? Feb 2, 2013 21:06

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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