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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Crack: Apr 10, 2009

karl fungus posted:

Why not just install the kubuntu-desktop package?

How will this solve the problem?

# ? Apr 21, 2015 17:32

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# ? May 19, 2024 15:19

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

Crack posted:

E:also at the end it said "tar: /: file changed as we read it" does this mean everything backed up successfully apart from the changes or did it stop when it ran into something changing?

tar almost never stops on errors. Instead, it finishes what it was told to do, then exits with an error if there were errors on the way.

e: I think if you set the exact same password and then just move the homedir over, and set homedir to be encrypted on the new thing, it should just work.

Check ecryptfs-utils or somesuch on debian.

vvvv: This guy is right though.

Truga fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 21, 2015

# ? Apr 21, 2015 18:41

karl fungus: May 6, 2011; Baeume sind auch Freunde

Crack posted:

How will this solve the problem?

You'd be able to use KDE just by logging out of your current session and choosing it as your desktop environment on the login screen, which would be less work than formatting and installing Debian KDE, unless there's something you specifically want from it.

# ? Apr 21, 2015 20:53

Crack: Apr 10, 2009

I guess my main goal is "learning Linux" and I want a distro on a level between Ubuntu and Arch, certainly no unity. I thought Debian KDE would be a good one. I've got to grips with ubuntu 14.10 and "basic linux" including bash and stuff and I want a distro which will slightly challenge me a bit and learn new commands, be more barebones so I can learn about what I'm installing as basic system utilities and how they operate, with the added bonus of increased customizability. On the other hand, I'm not quite ready for Arch yet and I'm already familiar with a debian based distro. If there is something more suitable for my goals, let me know!

# ? Apr 21, 2015 22:13

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

I'm trying to setup SFTP chroot access and I'm not sure how to handle the directory permissions.

I have a directory /backup/some_folder that is owned by some_user. I want to add another user account that has read only access to that folder.

/backup/some_folder has to be owned by root to be able to use it as the chroot, but I still want some_user to have permission to it.

# ? Apr 21, 2015 22:16

hifi: Jul 25, 2012

Crack posted:

I guess my main goal is "learning Linux" and I want a distro on a level between Ubuntu and Arch, certainly no unity. I thought Debian KDE would be a good one. I've got to grips with ubuntu 14.10 and "basic linux" including bash and stuff and I want a distro which will slightly challenge me a bit and learn new commands, be more barebones so I can learn about what I'm installing as basic system utilities and how they operate, with the added bonus of increased customizability. On the other hand, I'm not quite ready for Arch yet and I'm already familiar with a debian based distro. If there is something more suitable for my goals, let me know!

If your end goal is to use arch/gentoo then you might as well hop in now because you are just reading and typing in commands from their 300 page install guide. If you want to manage a server or something other than dealing strictly with gnu/linux and distribution-specific details then I'd stick with your ubuntu install or if you want something else, install fedora and then pick a project and do that (e.g, get nginx + php working, or set up samba to share files)

# ? Apr 21, 2015 22:48

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Crack posted:

I guess my main goal is "learning Linux" and I want a distro on a level between Ubuntu and Arch, certainly no unity. I thought Debian KDE would be a good one. I've got to grips with ubuntu 14.10 and "basic linux" including bash and stuff and I want a distro which will slightly challenge me a bit and learn new commands, be more barebones so I can learn about what I'm installing as basic system utilities and how they operate, with the added bonus of increased customizability. On the other hand, I'm not quite ready for Arch yet and I'm already familiar with a debian based distro. If there is something more suitable for my goals, let me know!

Debian is not very different from Ubuntu in terms of "commands and stuff", because Ubuntu is a Debian-derived distro.

Also, Arch is not nearly as "hard" or "elite" as people present it. It's trivially easy, because there's three zillion "elite" arch users flailing at the system and begging people for instructional guides on the wiki and forums.

It's telling that hardly any developers use "hard" distros. In general, we all want distros that stay out of our way and let us focus on "real" problems with software. Meaning that Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, and Debian are very popular. Arch, Slack, and Gentoo are not.

fletcher posted:

I'm trying to setup SFTP chroot access and I'm not sure how to handle the directory permissions.

I have a directory /backup/some_folder that is owned by some_user. I want to add another user account that has read only access to that folder.

/backup/some_folder has to be owned by root to be able to use it as the chroot, but I still want some_user to have permission to it.

"what are group permissions"

# ? Apr 21, 2015 22:59

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

waffle iron posted:

Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora all have major releases in the next 3 weeks.

Isn't this the Ubuntu release that moves to systemd? I guess I'll stay away from Linux based poo poo until the grognards stop wailing once again.

# ? Apr 21, 2015 23:01

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

evol262 posted:

"what are group permissions"

First thing I tried was group permissions

code:

chown root:some_user /backup/some_folder
chmod 0775 /backup/some_folder

Still got the "fatal: bad ownership or modes for chroot directory component"

According to the arch wiki "sshd's strict ownership/permissions requirements dictate that every directory in the chroot path must be owned by root and only writable by the owner"

What am I missing?

# ? Apr 21, 2015 23:04

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

evol262 posted:

Also, Arch is not nearly as "hard" or "elite" as people present it. It's trivially easy, because there's three zillion "elite" arch users flailing at the system and begging people for instructional guides on the wiki and forums.

I find Arch much easier to diagnose problems (usually of my own creation) simply because current is the only version supported. Using Ubuntu/Mint I had problems because my release was separate from the tickets creator's release. Not to mention there was no unified information dump like the Arch Wiki, just random assorted "halp no computer turn on" poo poo I had to sort through tediously via perfectly phrasing my google searches.

Ubuntu also has a lot of people who give wrong information to correct problems as well which honestly is worse than some terse rear end in a top hat in Arch IRC. Being helpful and wanting to contribute is nice but really adds to the chuff I had to sort through to diagnose the mess I created. I'm at the point where I'm competent enough to catastrophically break my Linux install but not competent enough to solve it without googling incessently.

# ? Apr 21, 2015 23:15

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

YouTuber posted:

I find Arch much easier to diagnose problems (usually of my own creation)

This is kind of the salient point.

You shouldn't need to diagnose problems. You shouldn't need to tinker. It should work. And I don't want to diagnose system problems when I'm writing software that touches the system.

YouTuber posted:

Ubuntu also has a lot of people who give wrong information to correct problems as well which honestly is worse than some terse rear end in a top hat in Arch IRC. Being helpful and wanting to contribute is nice but really adds to the chuff I had to sort through to diagnose the mess I created. I'm at the point where I'm competent enough to catastrophically break my Linux install but not competent enough to solve it without googling incessently.

I don't think Arch IRC is brilliant, either. It's shotgun debugging and cargo-cult answers, just like Ubuntu. The question, again, though, is why is your Linux install even getting catastrophically broken? You should be able to install the software you want, have it come configured out of the box, and use it, right? And if it doesn't work, file bugs.

Diagnosing problems that should never happen in the first place (and wouldn't happen in production) doesn't teach many useful things.

fletcher posted:

First thing I tried was group permissions
code:
chown root:some_user /backup/some_folder
chmod 0775 /backup/some_folder
Still got the "fatal: bad ownership or modes for chroot directory component"

According to the arch wiki "sshd's strict ownership/permissions requirements dictate that every directory in the chroot path must be owned by root and only writable by the owner"

What am I missing?

code:

Match group somegroup
    ChrootDirectory /backup/somegroup
    ForceCommand internal-sftp
    AllowTcpForwarding no

code:

mkdir /backup/somegroup/somepath
chown -R :somegroup /backup/somegroup/*

/backup/somepath needs to be owned by root, but not the files under it.

If you want to make this look really clean (so they don't see the path), you can always bind mount it with the sticky bit set for the group.

# ? Apr 21, 2015 23:39

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

I don't recall having to troubleshoot something broken on Ubuntu in a couple of years at least. At least nothing major that took more than 10 minutes of Googling.

# ? Apr 21, 2015 23:45

Prince John: Jun 20, 2006; Oh, poppycock! Female bandits?

Does anyone have any tips to diagnose performance issues please? I have a Fedora Server 21 install running from a USB3 pendrive, in a USB3 port. The machine has 8GB of RAM and a Xeon E3-1225 quad core processor. It's a base barebones server install at the moment; no GUI.

My load average when doing a yum update is around 5 and it's taking a pretty long time to complete - maybe 10-20 seconds to install each package, depending on size. Much longer, if it's something like a kernel package. However, Cockpit is telling me that read/writes to disk are ~100kB/s, cpu utilisation is 1%, I'm only using 2GB of RAM and there's no network traffic.

I'd be very interested in any suggestions...maybe it's just an unavoidable consequence of using the USB stick, but it doesn't seem like it's being stressed according to the Cockpit figures.

Edit: I haven't got the time to benchmark my particular pendrive right now (I got good speeds burning the image), but a reviewer on Amazon posted the following stats for theirs following a benchmark:

Average read speed 147.01MB/s,
Average write speed: 44.85MB/s.

Prince John fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Apr 22, 2015

# ? Apr 22, 2015 00:10

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

Thermopyle posted:

I don't recall having to troubleshoot something broken on Ubuntu in a couple of years at least. At least nothing major that took more than 10 minutes of Googling.

I broke my gui a few weeks ago by putting an if/then statement in the .profile that I had to troubleshoot.

Commenting that out, once I realized it was my .profile, was all that it took tho.

Prince John posted:

Does anyone have any tips to diagnose performance issues please? I have a Fedora Server 21 install running from a USB3 pendrive, in a USB3 port. The machine has 8GB of RAM and a Xeon E3-1225 quad core processor. It's a base barebones server install at the moment; no GUI.

My load average when doing a yum update is around 5 and it's taking a pretty long time to complete - maybe 10-20 seconds to install each package, depending on size. Much longer, if it's something like a kernel package. However, Cockpit is telling me that read/writes to disk are ~100kB/s, cpu utilisation is 1%, I'm only using 2GB of RAM and there's no network traffic.

I'd be very interested in any suggestions...maybe it's just an unavoidable consequence of using the USB stick, but it doesn't seem like it's being stressed according to the Cockpit figures.

Edit: I haven't got the time to benchmark my particular pendrive right now (I got good speeds burning the image), but a reviewer on Amazon posted the following stats for theirs following a benchmark:

Average read speed 147.01MB/s,
Average write speed: 44.85MB/s.

Check out iostat, I usually do(iirc) iostat -czn 10 100 > /tmp/perfcheck to figure out whats going on with those.

Edit: while the system is lagging, that is.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 01:49

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Robo Reagan posted:

I guess I'll give Ubuntu a shot then? That seems like the most newbie friendly. Should I keep a partition of Win7 since I'm a gigantic nerd and like video games?

Why not run ubuntu in a VM to start with before you go whole hog? Hell, if you're just compiling stuff and writing simple code you can rent a VPS like linode or digital ocean for 5 bucks to tinker with if you're okay with using a text editor in a terminal.

Prince John posted:

Does anyone have any tips to diagnose performance issues please? I have a Fedora Server 21 install running from a USB3 pendrive, in a USB3 port. The machine has 8GB of RAM and a Xeon E3-1225 quad core processor. It's a base barebones server install at the moment; no GUI.

My load average when doing a yum update is around 5 and it's taking a pretty long time to complete - maybe 10-20 seconds to install each package, depending on size. Much longer, if it's something like a kernel package. However, Cockpit is telling me that read/writes to disk are ~100kB/s, cpu utilisation is 1%, I'm only using 2GB of RAM and there's no network traffic.

I'd be very interested in any suggestions...maybe it's just an unavoidable consequence of using the USB stick, but it doesn't seem like it's being stressed according to the Cockpit figures.

Edit: I haven't got the time to benchmark my particular pendrive right now (I got good speeds burning the image), but a reviewer on Amazon posted the following stats for theirs following a benchmark:

Average read speed 147.01MB/s,
Average write speed: 44.85MB/s.

Most USB pen drives have extremely slow writes and somewhat slow reads once you exhaust the little internal cache they have and random writes are even worse.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/I-O-Performance-Workstation,2299.html
Look at the IO/s in that graph, notice that many of them are below 10!

To compare, here's a list of hard drives from the 2008 era (ie mostly smaller than 0.5TB in size). Now think how slow those USB drives have to be to benchmark two orders of magnitude slower than these hard drives that everyone thinks are slow compared to SSDs.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/Workstation-I-O-Benchmark-Pattern,674.html

Longinus00 fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 22, 2015

# ? Apr 22, 2015 02:49

Crack: Apr 10, 2009

evol262 posted:

Debian is not very different from Ubuntu in terms of "commands and stuff", because Ubuntu is a Debian-derived distro.

Also, Arch is not nearly as "hard" or "elite" as people present it. It's trivially easy, because there's three zillion "elite" arch users flailing at the system and begging people for instructional guides on the wiki and forums.

It's telling that hardly any developers use "hard" distros. In general, we all want distros that stay out of our way and let us focus on "real" problems with software. Meaning that Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, and Debian are very popular. Arch, Slack, and Gentoo are not.

"what are group permissions"

Ultimately I want to do server management and web development. It's probably true that Arch, Slack, or a "hard" distro wouldn't be used on a server. I was more thinking that if I could build a functioning Arch build I would know of all the system tools / utilities and what they do and why they are required. For the web I think Debian is used more than Ubuntu, and Red Hat (+ Cent OS) and SUSE have some market share. Maybe I should move to OpenSUSE or the new Fedora instead of Debian, which I thought was going to be similar but more customisable than Ubuntu without the godawful Unity. Another thing is I recently bought a Raspberry Pi, so knowing more about Debian would come in handy there too. But perhaps learning 2 distros at once is more efficient. The new fedora in a KDE flavour is tempting as I've never used a red hat OS before. A gnome/kde selection at login would be nice, I just know that Unity is not for me.

Saying all that, I think the "hard" distros aren't used on servers because they tend to be more cutting edge and maybe have more security holes, even if because the user misconfigured it.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 02:57

karl fungus: May 6, 2011; Baeume sind auch Freunde

If you want Ubuntu without Unity, then use Xubuntu or one of the other Ubuntu flavors. Xubuntu is something I've used as my main OS for years, it's pretty solid. I've never even seen what Unity looked like.

The essentials of running a server should not differ much between distributions.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 03:09

Longinus00: Dec 29, 2005; Ur-Quan

Crack posted:

Ultimately I want to do server management and web development. It's probably true that Arch, Slack, or a "hard" distro wouldn't be used on a server. I was more thinking that if I could build a functioning Arch build I would know of all the system tools / utilities and what they do and why they are required. For the web I think Debian is used more than Ubuntu, and Red Hat (+ Cent OS) and SUSE have some market share. Maybe I should move to OpenSUSE or the new Fedora instead of Debian, which I thought was going to be similar but more customisable than Ubuntu without the godawful Unity. Another thing is I recently bought a Raspberry Pi, so knowing more about Debian would come in handy there too. But perhaps learning 2 distros at once is more efficient. The new fedora in a KDE flavour is tempting as I've never used a red hat OS before. A gnome/kde selection at login would be nice, I just know that Unity is not for me.

Saying all that, I think the "hard" distros aren't used on servers because they tend to be more cutting edge and maybe have more security holes, even if because the user misconfigured it.

You're looking for linux from scratch I think. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/ It will teach you ~~how to type in commands from a guide~~ the general building blocks that are needed to bootstrap a linux system. While you're going through the install you should probably familiarize yourself with the shell programing language if you have any programming experience already.

Also server management and web development are kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum. I would recommend focusing on one of the two first and only broadening out after you're comfortable with your first choice.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 03:21

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

Crack posted:

Ultimately I want to do server management and web development. It's probably true that Arch, Slack, or a "hard" distro wouldn't be used on a server. I was more thinking that if I could build a functioning Arch build I would know of all the system tools / utilities and what they do and why they are required. For the web I think Debian is used more than Ubuntu, and Red Hat (+ Cent OS) and SUSE have some market share. Maybe I should move to OpenSUSE or the new Fedora instead of Debian, which I thought was going to be similar but more customisable than Ubuntu without the godawful Unity. Another thing is I recently bought a Raspberry Pi, so knowing more about Debian would come in handy there too. But perhaps learning 2 distros at once is more efficient. The new fedora in a KDE flavour is tempting as I've never used a red hat OS before. A gnome/kde selection at login would be nice, I just know that Unity is not for me.

Saying all that, I think the "hard" distros aren't used on servers because they tend to be more cutting edge and maybe have more security holes, even if because the user misconfigured it.

Pick one, and do that. A sysadmin is not a webdev, and a webdev is not a sysadmin.

The 'hard' distros as you call them are not used because of security holes(tho those can be there) but because its the depth of stupid to build a business on something that takes that much work just to keep running when you can have something reliable. Those are fine for a hobbyist who likes to tinker with his home system, but they won't teach you anything actually useful that you wouldn't learn, better, from a mainstream distro.

The most common servers in the wild seem to be, in order, RHEL, CentOS, and SLES, since RHEL and SLES have companies backing them for support, and CentOS gets all the goodies RHEL does without paying a subscription.

Ubuntu is rare for servers from what I can tell, and I assume(without having been in on one of those meetings) that its because Canonical is bass ackwards.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:06

Bhodi: Dec 9, 2007; Oh, it's just a cat.; Pillbug

Ubuntu server is pretty popular for the companies that want a "minimal" image that they then stick stuff on and spawn a million copies, especially if they're rolling their own bleeding-edged version of apache or doing a lot of computer janitor OS stuff. It's got a really good .pkg format and a small install footprint with less "bloat" which makes it ideal for virtualiztion/cloud stuff where even small size increases to the baseline image is undesirable.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:15

spankmeister: Jun 15, 2008

RFC2324 posted:

Pick one, and do that. A sysadmin is not a webdev, and a webdev is not a sysadmin.

My friend let me tell you about DevOps. :haw:

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:24

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

^ Devops is the worst

:negative:

Bhodi posted:

Ubuntu server is pretty popular for the companies that want a "minimal" image that they then stick stuff on and spawn a million copies, especially if they're rolling their own bleeding-edged version of apache or doing a lot of computer janitor OS stuff. It's got a really good .pkg format and a small install footprint with less "bloat" which makes it ideal for virtualiztion/cloud stuff where even small size increases to the baseline image is undesirable.

This is me, but I use Debian because it works.

I have ubuntu on my own VPS and my laptop and it's really good for that, but I don't feel like it'd do well in a production environment (yet?), because sometimes things still break on apt-get upgrade, requiring minor tweaking.

Not something I can afford in a production environment with yearly 99.99 SLA, and I haven't had any issues with debian in >6 years now, as opposed to maybe a year with ubuntu.

And yeah, having a 200 meg snapshot ready to be spun up, updated, and running on digital ocean in <60 seconds is awesome.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:27

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

Crack posted:

Ultimately I want to do server management and web development. It's probably true that Arch, Slack, or a "hard" distro wouldn't be used on a server. I was more thinking that if I could build a functioning Arch build I would know of all the system tools / utilities and what they do and why they are required. For the web I think Debian is used more than Ubuntu, and Red Hat (+ Cent OS) and SUSE have some market share. Maybe I should move to OpenSUSE or the new Fedora instead of Debian, which I thought was going to be similar but more customisable than Ubuntu without the godawful Unity. Another thing is I recently bought a Raspberry Pi, so knowing more about Debian would come in handy there too. But perhaps learning 2 distros at once is more efficient. The new fedora in a KDE flavour is tempting as I've never used a red hat OS before. A gnome/kde selection at login would be nice, I just know that Unity is not for me.

Saying all that, I think the "hard" distros aren't used on servers because they tend to be more cutting edge and maybe have more security holes, even if because the user misconfigured it.

Re: Raspberry Pi

For what it's worth, the new Raspberry Pi 2 has an ARMv7 processor, so you have a better chance of being able to run things like OpenSUSE on it and not just Raspian (Debian).

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:33

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

spankmeister posted:

My friend let me tell you about DevOps.

I have heard this, but

Truga posted:

^ Devops is the worst

This almost always follows it. And given my experience as a sysadmin in both the *NIX and Windows worlds, I can't see how devops would really work well in anything but a small environment, since I clash with devs on a weekly, if not daily, basis because devs have terrible practices because 'I write the thing so I know all!!!! :byodood:

'

As an example, right this minute I have a dev insisting on using rcp instead of scp, because somehow rcp is faster and more secure, despite actual benchmarks and security saying otherwise, and us having a corporate directive to use scp.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:35

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

Devops is how sysadmins are going to get any cash unless you work for a large service provider like microsoft/amazon/google, because everyone else will just use google apps/o365/whatever amazon is coming up with in the future.

Dunno when, but it'll happen :v:

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:38

Hollow Talk: Feb 2, 2014

RFC2324 posted:

I have heard this, but

This almost always follows it. And given my experience as a sysadmin in both the *NIX and Windows worlds, I can't see how devops would really work well in anything but a small environment, since I clash with devs on a weekly, if not daily, basis because devs have terrible practices because 'I write the thing so I know all!!!! '

As an example, right this minute I have a dev insisting on using rcp instead of scp, because somehow rcp is faster and more secure, despite actual benchmarks and security saying otherwise, and us having a corporate directive to use scp.

Just because it is currently #1 on HackerNews and seems kind of topical: http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201503/2015031201-the-sad-state-of-sysadmin-in-the-age-of-containers.html

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:42

Bhodi: Dec 9, 2007; Oh, it's just a cat.; Pillbug

it sounds like what they really hate is java

# ? Apr 22, 2015 16:48

jre: Sep 2, 2011; To the cloud ?

Hollow Talk posted:

Just because it is currently #1 on HackerNews and seems kind of topical: http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201503/2015031201-the-sad-state-of-sysadmin-in-the-age-of-containers.html

That article is the epitome of
" :corsair:

get off my lawn."

# ? Apr 22, 2015 17:02

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Crack posted:

Ultimately I want to do server management and web development. It's probably true that Arch, Slack, or a "hard" distro wouldn't be used on a server. I was more thinking that if I could build a functioning Arch build I would know of all the system tools / utilities and what they do and why they are required. For the web I think Debian is used more than Ubuntu, and Red Hat (+ Cent OS) and SUSE have some market share. Maybe I should move to OpenSUSE or the new Fedora instead of Debian, which I thought was going to be similar but more customisable than Ubuntu without the godawful Unity. Another thing is I recently bought a Raspberry Pi, so knowing more about Debian would come in handy there too. But perhaps learning 2 distros at once is more efficient. The new fedora in a KDE flavour is tempting as I've never used a red hat OS before. A gnome/kde selection at login would be nice, I just know that Unity is not for me.

Saying all that, I think the "hard" distros aren't used on servers because they tend to be more cutting edge and maybe have more security holes, even if because the user misconfigured it.

Again, though, you should know that you shouldn't need to build a "functioning" whatever build to know all the tools/utilities. It should be functioning out of the box, and you can learn tooling as you need to do things that require them.

It's not obvious if you've never done it, but even the "hard" distros that make you "learn" things don't really do that. Sourcemage (which is dead, I think), LFS, Arch, and Gentoo will all have you blindly typing commands in to get a working system, at which point you'll start installing software with pacman/emerge/apt-pkg/whatever in exactly the same way as Debian or Fedora or anything else. At best (LFS) you'll learn in what order things need to be bootstrapped to get a working system. This is such a useless piece of knowledge that actually doing it is something that almost nobody knows and we publish blogs about when we have to re-do it.

Ubuntu is just as customizable as Debian or Fedora or SuSE or Arch or anything else. You can change your desktop environment whenever you want, and the underlying system is basically Debian.

If you want to use a new desktop environment/window manager, install one on a system you already have configured. If you want to learn how RPM-based systems are put together, you can install it or use one for real tasks in a VM. But until you start doing real things with a system, installing Fedora won't teach you a lot about how RPM-based systems and deb-based systems differ (or how either one differs from plain upstream distros like Arch and Slack, or how any of these differ from the way Gentoo does it, or...)

It's an operating system. It's a tool. Use it for something.

Hollow Talk posted:

Re: Raspberry Pi

For what it's worth, the new Raspberry Pi 2 has an ARMv7 processor, so you have a better chance of being able to run things like OpenSUSE on it and not just Raspian (Debian).

armhfp is supported basically everywhere, which is good for the pi 2

Bhodi posted:

Ubuntu server is pretty popular for the companies that want a "minimal" image that they then stick stuff on and spawn a million copies, especially if they're rolling their own bleeding-edged version of apache or doing a lot of computer janitor OS stuff. It's got a really good .pkg format and a small install footprint with less "bloat" which makes it ideal for virtualiztion/cloud stuff where even small size increases to the baseline image is undesirable.

To be fair, the Fedora/CentOS/RHEL cloud images are also very small (~300mb). But ubuntu server is just as viable as anything else. "minimal" distros as never as minimal as something a competent admin can build from a distro they're comfortable with.

Truga posted:

Devops is how sysadmins are going to get any cash unless you work for a large service provider like microsoft/amazon/google, because everyone else will just use google apps/o365/whatever amazon is coming up with in the future.

Dunno when, but it'll happen

Linux sysadmins have always been expected to know how to code and do development a bit. The "add DNS record, add vhost, monitor email" janitor work moved to operations a long time ago. The revolution was 3-4 years ago. Sysadmins still get paid well.

RFC2324 posted:

This almost always follows it. And given my experience as a sysadmin in both the *NIX and Windows worlds, I can't see how devops would really work well in anything but a small environment, since I clash with devs on a weekly, if not daily, basis because devs have terrible practices because 'I write the thing so I know all!!!! '

As an example, right this minute I have a dev insisting on using rcp instead of scp, because somehow rcp is faster and more secure, despite actual benchmarks and security saying otherwise, and us having a corporate directive to use scp.

You're already doing devops! I mean, not in the continuous integration/cloud way, but working side-by-side with development and trying to teach them practices, helping them debug their code, and all of that is exactly what devops is about. It's lowering the friction between teams and not being armed camps yelling at each other like a New Guinean war.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 17:06

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

evol262 posted:

Linux sysadmins have always been expected to know how to code and do development a bit. The "add DNS record, add vhost, monitor email" janitor work moved to operations a long time ago. The revolution was 3-4 years ago. Sysadmins still get paid well.

Sorry, I was mostly joking with that post. I thought the :v:

would give it away. Sysadmins aren't going away for a couple very good reasons.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 17:39

Robo Reagan: Feb 12, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

I think Fedora hosed up my video driver. It went to screensaver a few times and on the last one the display stayed black

Tried restarting and now I can tell from the sound that I'm back in Win7. Uhh, what now? :v:

Is this a Linux thing or does my pc have great comedic timing?

# ? Apr 22, 2015 17:55

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

evol262 posted:

You're already doing devops! I mean, not in the continuous integration/cloud way, but working side-by-side with development and trying to teach them practices, helping them debug their code, and all of that is exactly what devops is about. It's lowering the friction between teams and not being armed camps yelling at each other like a New Guinean war.

My understanding of devops was that it was where you combine the 2 roles(dev and sysadmin) into one job, so your sysadmins are in tune with what the devs need and your devs understand why sysadmins do the things we do that make their lives harder. Its a wonderful idea, it just seems that its fairly incompatible to shoehorn the 2 roles into one person, since the goals of both are never going to be entirely harmonious.

That said, most of my sysadmin experience has had a strong 'customer service' drive to it, whether it is traditional customers(when I worked in webhosting) or internal customers(my current role) so we do our best to provide alternatives when we have to reject a request, or work with the customers to tweak the request so that it will become acceptable.

Now just to get our India team to work with us too.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 18:25

Ellie Crabcakes: Feb 1, 2008; Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

Robo Reagan posted:

I think Fedora hosed up my video driver. It went to screensaver a few times and on the last one the display stayed black

Tried restarting and now I can tell from the sound that I'm back in Win7. Uhh, what now? Is this a Linux thing or does my pc have great comedic timing?

Check your power management settings.

I imagine your dual-booting, so depending on how grub settings, if you don't select your fedora install it will fall back to the primary.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 18:31

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Robo Reagan posted:

I think Fedora hosed up my video driver. It went to screensaver a few times and on the last one the display stayed black

Tried restarting and now I can tell from the sound that I'm back in Win7. Uhh, what now? Is this a Linux thing or does my pc have great comedic timing?

I'm gonna guess comedic timing. Unless you were manually mucking with xorg.conf values like it was 1999, it's virtually impossible to damage your hardware.

But is SSH enabled? If it is, try sshing in and checking whether your video card even shows up with lspci

What's your GPU?

RFC2324 posted:

My understanding of devops was that it was where you combine the 2 roles(dev and sysadmin) into one job, so your sysadmins are in tune with what the devs need and your devs understand why sysadmins do the things we do that make their lives harder. Its a wonderful idea, it just seems that its fairly incompatible to shoehorn the 2 roles into one person, since the goals of both are never going to be entirely harmonious.

That said, most of my sysadmin experience has had a strong 'customer service' drive to it, whether it is traditional customers(when I worked in webhosting) or internal customers(my current role) so we do our best to provide alternatives when we have to reject a request, or work with the customers to tweak the request so that it will become acceptable.

Now just to get our India team to work with us too.

Paging Misogynist (or Vulture Culture now, I guess). But devops is facilitating and easing. It's letting one team be aware of what the other team is doing from the inside in a cooperative sense, and not just "we need you to deploy this on X server".

It's probably almost impossible to do with external customers, but at least the basic tenets of it are a rebranding of what many admins were already doing with internal teams.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 18:38

Robo Reagan: Feb 12, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

evol262 posted:

I'm gonna guess comedic timing. Unless you were manually mucking with xorg.conf values like it was 1999, it's virtually impossible to damage your hardware.

But is SSH enabled? If it is, try sshing in and checking whether your video card even shows up with lspci

What's your GPU?

Paging Misogynist (or Vulture Culture now, I guess). But devops is facilitating and easing. It's letting one team be aware of what the other team is doing from the inside in a cooperative sense, and not just "we need you to deploy this on X server".

It's probably almost impossible to do with external customers, but at least the basic tenets of it are a rebranding of what many admins were already doing with internal teams.

I was seriously booting up Fedora so I could see about enabling something like SSH. :saddowns:

My GPU is a Nvidia GTX 550ti and it was a fresh install of Fedora. Hadn't worked up the courage to mess with anything yet because when I try to gently caress with computers this is usually the result.

I've got it on a boot disc if that helps at all.

Robo Reagan fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Apr 22, 2015

# ? Apr 22, 2015 18:50

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Robo Reagan posted:

I was seriously booting up Fedora so I could see about enabling something like SSH. My GPU is a Nvidia GTX 550ti and it was a fresh install of Fedora. Hadn't worked up the courage to mess with anything yet because when I try to gently caress with computers this is usually the result.

I've got it on a boot disc if that helps at all.

I only suggested ssh because you can easily lspci without windows. RDP enablement on windows would work as well.

Sounds like your video card is dead, or one of the rails on your PSU has a problem. But without putting the GPU in another system and testing it...

Does your CPU have onboard? Can you pll the 550ti and use that, then check lspci with the 550 in?

# ? Apr 22, 2015 19:00

Robo Reagan: Feb 12, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

evol262 posted:

I only suggested ssh because you can easily lspci without windows. RDP enablement on windows would work as well.

Sounds like your video card is dead, or one of the rails on your PSU has a problem. But without putting the GPU in another system and testing it...

Does your CPU have onboard? Can you pll the 550ti and use that, then check lspci with the 550 in?

No onboard, but I'll try grabbing the card from the other computer and doing it that way.

e: Whoops, all the other one has is onboard. Could I connect my laptop to the desktop pc and do anything with that to check? If not I'll need to head to my old place and rip the gpu out of another old pc.

Robo Reagan fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Apr 22, 2015

# ? Apr 22, 2015 19:03

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Robo Reagan posted:

No onboard, but I'll try grabbing the card from the other computer and doing it that way.

e: Whoops, all the other one has is onboard. Could I connect my laptop to the desktop pc and do anything with that to check? If not I'll need to head to my old place and rip the gpu out of another old pc.

If you have a serial cable and a serial port and a serial getty, yes. Otherwise, without ssh, there's no real way you can connect it.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 19:16

Robo Reagan: Feb 12, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

Thanks, guess I'll grab that graphics card next chance I get and go from there.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 19:18

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# ? May 19, 2024 15:19

Prince John: Jun 20, 2006; Oh, poppycock! Female bandits?

RFC2324 posted:

Check out iostat, I usually do(iirc) iostat -czn 10 100 > /tmp/perfcheck to figure out whats going on with those.

Edit: while the system is lagging, that is.

Thanks, if you're interested, I've included a paste of the results here: http://pastebin.com/ChjYHwzF

It's hard to format, but I've delineated the two discrete sets of results with ###.

The first set of data was a yum upgrade using your suggested command. You can see the cpu idle percentage decrease and the cpu % iowait increase in the middle, before settling back when the upgrade finishes. CPU iowait creeps up to 50% at one point.

Then I ran

code:

iostat -czNx 10 100 sde >> /tmp/perfcheck

to get a bit more detail on disk activity specifically and installed about 40 packages.

If I'm reading this correctly, it looks like disk i/o is being maxed, as the %util touches 100% at points?

code:

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           9.84    0.00    0.65   26.20    0.00   63.30
 
Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sde               0.00    79.10    3.70   35.60    20.40   573.60    30.23    73.58 1528.63   37.38 1683.62  17.07  67.09
 
avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0.00    0.00    0.03   52.80    0.00   47.17
 
Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sde               0.00    79.00    0.00   20.20     0.00   487.20    48.24   187.39 5486.27    0.00 5486.27  49.50 100.00
 
avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0.00    0.00    0.03   58.06    0.00   41.92
 
Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sde               0.00     9.90    0.00    8.60     0.00   564.80   131.35   171.26 9544.74    0.00 9544.74 116.28 100.00

Longinus00 posted:

Interesting benchmarks.

Thanks, I hadn't realised they were so terrible! It'll do fine for me, as OS disk I/O should be minimal for normal running (media server and document storage on 'real' hard drives), but it's interesting to learn more about what's going on.

# ? Apr 22, 2015 19:31

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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