Bit Decay - linux

Uptime Passes 1 Year

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:00:30 -0400

I just noticed last night that my main server at home has surpassed 1 year of uptime.

fogey:~\$ uptime
6:00pm up 385 days, 22:25, 1 user, load average: 0.26, 0.10, 0.10

This is a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 160M of RAM. It is my main web, mail and print server. It is running SuSE Linux 7.2.

It came close twice before. Once it was foiled by a power failure. Another time my daughter accidentally kicked the power switch. Both times it was within two months of a year's uptime.

Gentoo Upgrade on Slow Processor

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:07:33 -0500

I have been dreading the prospect of sitting through an Gentoo upgrade on my old 333MHz Celeron system. It's mostly used as an X terminal to log into one of the other faster machines so it wasn't bothering me too much. But the longer I put it off, the worse it was going to be when I finally got around to it.

I had been thinking of NFS mounting the root partition from one of my other machines and chrooting into it to do the upgrade. I finally bit the bullet and decided to try it after finding someone else that did it successfully. I started emerge this morning and it's half done using my new AMD X2 4200 as the build engine.

Distcc doesn't quite cut it in this situation. Only the compilation step is offloaded with distcc. This machine is too slow to feed multiple compilation hosts with preprocessed source. It can't keep my other machines busy while it consumes 100% of its own processor just doing precompilation.

Distcc can also be turned off by certain ebuilds but that may not stop make from honoring the '-j5' you stuck in make.conf. That means this lowly 333MHz Celeron with 320MB of RAM is now executing 5 simultaneous builds on its own.

It would be nice if some additional steps could be offloaded. I did a test yesterday between my 700MHz P3 and the new machine. I compressed a large text file on the P3 and timed it. I then used ssh to fire up the compressor on the X2 and return the compressed file to the P3. The X2 was 3x as fast even though the data made two trips across the network through an encrypted channel.

Anyway, this has been a significant improvement for upgrading this machine. I have already set up a run-level to turn off unnecessary services on the Celeron. I'll set up some scripts to do the mounts required from the X2 and maybe this machine will stay somewhat updated from now on.

MythTV

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:30:55 -0500

A while ago, I bought a Happauge PVR-150MCE television tuner card for my PC. I have been manually scheduling recordings which means writing a script to run the capture program, invoking cron to schedule the script to run at the right time, programming the satellite receiver box to tune to the program at the right time, and praying that everything was done right so I'd get the show I wanted.

Over the last few days, I started playing with MythTV. I had installed it previously but didn't devote enough time to figuring out how it works. Last night I finished the setup and now have a fully functional PVR system. I have scheduled the recording of several programs by picking them out of a programming guide.

Continue reading "MythTV"

Nothing to see here...

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 23:13:55 -0500

A ham sandwich is better than complete happiness. You see, nothing could be better than complete happiness and a ham sandwich is certainly better than nothing.

I think I detect a division by zero somewhere in this train of logic.

Hang during linux shutdown when stopping postgresql

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:06:35 -0500

For quite some time now, my laptop has been having problems when shutting down. It would get to the point where it was attempting to shutdown postgresql and it would hang for a few minutes before stopping the database and continuing the shutdown. When it continued, the message "Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info (Ignored)" would be displayed. This all started happening after an 'emerge -u system; emerge -u world'. I played around with various ldap/slapd and pam settings but could not get this to go away.

Today, a google search turned up the answer. Someone else had a similar problem and figured it out. The passwd file entry for postgres contains an 'x' in the password field. This means that the password is in the shadow file. There was no shadow file entry for postgres.

I added an entry in the shadow file for postgres and the error went away.

I think gentoo changed their passwd format for some reason. I don't remember those 'x's being there before.