MyLVMbackup: Adding keep_mount
So for my work, I needed yet another addition to the whole slew of options that mylvmbackup already has. This time, I added a keep_mount option. The dpatch can be found here. The package with this patch and my previous work on mylvmbackup (which added support for a defaults_file instead of plaintext username/password credentials in the mylvmbackup.conf) can be found in Kumina’s Debian repository.
WARNING: These two patches are my first steps into the wonderous world of Perl. I only checked if they did what I wanted them to do, not if it still worked as required without this extra code. Your mileage may vary, so be sure to test!
Also, if you use this, please let me know! I’d appreciate it.
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Gmail: Time sync?
This made me grin a bit. No idea what happened, maybe an ntp sync just after I hit the send button?
Tags: backup, configuration, debian, etch, lenny, mylvmbackup, mysql, package
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MyLVMbackup: Making it cooperate with Debian
For making a consistent backup of MySQL data, mylvmbackup seems to be a great tool. It’s written in Perl and does what you would expect: Lock the tables, flush them all to disk, make a LVM snapshot and release the tables, recover the InnoDB log,make the backup from the snapshot, remove the snapshot. Minimal downtime and still a consistent backup. Although it’s fairly new, it looks good.
There’s even a Debian package for it, but that doesn’t really contain everything I need. First of all, I need a package that runs on Etch. There’s a dependency in the Debian package (which is for Lenny) on an asciidoc of a version that’s available only in Lenny. I don’t really see why that dependency is there at all, but when removing the version, the package still works as expected.
Also, I made two patches of which one is not needed at all, but I left it in there anyway, because it doesn’t break anything. It simply adds the –innodb-file-per-table option to the invocation of the mysqld_safe daemon, but that’s not needed since it only affects MySQL when you change data. But since mysqld_safe is used to recover from logs, you won’t be changing data. I left it in there anyway. You can find the dpatch file here.
The second one might be more interesting. The mysql-server-5.0 package from Debian creates a file /etc/mysql/debian.cnf with login details for the debian-sys-maint user. This user also has enough permissions to do all the things necessary for manipulating the database when we want to make a backup with mylvmbackup. Normally, mylvmbackup needs you to give it user details for a privileged user in /etc/mylvmbackup.conf, which is a bit double, since the debian.cnf exists. So my patch adds a –defaults_file option which allows you to mention the debian.cnf. No need for more passwords in plaintext on the filesystem! You can either give this option no the commandline or in the mylvmbackup.conf in the [mysql] section. It only supports Debian style debian.cnf, though, since it searched for a [client] section in the file you mention. You can find the patch here.
A working package can be found in Kumina’s Debian repository for both etch and lenny. Please let me know if this works for you! It’s my first Perl, though, so be warned. If stuff breaks… Well… Sorry… So be sure to test it.
Skype on Ubuntu: Feisty package seems to work for Intrepid
No idea why the nice folk at Skype haven’t updated their package yet to Hardy at the very least, but I can inform you all that the Feisty package seems to install en run just fine on Intrepid at least. Haven’t tried it on Hardy, but I have no reason to assume it won’t work there too.
Find the Ubuntu package here.
Kubuntu: Intrepid too advanced for me
I upgraded a Kubuntu Hardy installation to Intrepid. Boy, what an eyecandy! It looks very nice, but it took me a while to get used to it. Since I’m trying to get a desktop that is easy to work with for people who are used to Windows, I can definitely say it’s way too advanced for my taste.
It looks really nice, though. However, I already noticed some strange stuff. The Network Manager applet (or whatever they’re called in KDE) just shut down when I tried connecting to my Wireless network. No message, nothing. No idea how to restart it.
So yeah, it looks nice, but it’s not for me yet.
Tags: 700ae, aironet, cisco, compaq, firmware, install, kubuntu, presario, windows
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Cisco Aironet 350: Upgrading the firmware
So yesterday and the day before I spent a lot of time getting the latest version of Ubuntu Linux installed on my old Compaq Presario 700AE. After a lot of trials and some very long upgrade trajectories, I finally had Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex installed on the old machine. Only to find out that I needed to upgrade my Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA card to the latest version to allow it to connect to WPA protected networks (which is what most people should have these days). And the only way to upgrade the firmware on the card is… from Windows… which I had just deleted to install Ubuntu on there. Happy happy, joy joy. The story continues today.
The machine is old, which resulted in me trying to boot from a (official) Windows XP about 50 times. No exaggeration there. I heard the CD spin and then it just didn’t take. But as we say over here, the one who persists, wins. So eventually, the machine booted. Installing Windows XP takes a long time, longer than the usually Linux installation. I had to search a bit on the Cisco site, but I found the tools and the v5.60 firmware (sorry, no link, I was under Windows and wanted to close that as soon as possible). I updated the firmware and reboot a Kubuntu CD that I got at my dad’s place this afternoon.
For some reason, if I boot with the PCMCIA card in the slot, the CD doesn’t want to boot onwards without problems. After answering the questions, the installer started “Checking the hard disk” (I wish installers would just tell me what they do, makes it so much easier to debug) and stalled at 15%. Rebooting again without the PCMCIA card seemed to solve this.
It’s still installing, but I need to go to bed. So, I will continue this tomorrow.
Tags: 700ae, aironet, cisco, compaq, edgy, feisty, gutsy, hardy, intrepid, linux, network manager, presario, ubuntu, upgrade
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Ubuntu: Upgrade Edgy to Intrepid
I’m in the process of reviving my old Compaq Presario 700AE laptop. Yes, it’s very old, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a modern Linux distribution like Ubuntu Linux. However, I only had an Edgy CD at hand, no empty CD-R’s and a hell of a lot of time. So I decided to upgrade Edgy all the way to Intrepid, passing Feisty, Gutsy and Hardy in between.
First problem I encountered was the fact that neither Edgy nor Feisty are part of the common mirrors. It took me some time, but eventually I found the old-releases.ubuntu.com mirror from Ubuntu, which, as the name kind of suggests, contained all the old releases. So I needed to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all the references to “us.archive.ubuntu.com” to “old-releases.ubuntu.com”. Thank god for vim’s regex replace:
:%s/us\.archive/old-releases/g
Then an apt-get update and a apt-get dist-upgrade. Now I had the most recent Edgy release. Next change in the sources.list:
:%s/edgy/feisty/g
Again, apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. Prepare to wait a while, after downloading about 600M of packages, it took the machine almost 2 hours to install them all. Besides some errors about the Network Manager and a cross in the menu instead of a link to Evolution, everything seemed to have gone correct. I didn’t try to actually use anything else on the laptop, though. I assumed that during the updates, things would get broken and fixed again. We’ll see how everything works at the end of it all.
With Feisty installed, I rebooted and everything seemed to go well. On to Gutsy. Again, editing the sources.list:
:%s/feisty/gutsy/g
But als the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/prerequists-sources.list. Not sure if every Feisty has this one, I tried upgrading from the Ubuntu tools first, but that failed. That process might have created this file. Anyway, if you have it, you need to change feisty into gutsy in there too. Next, the upgrade again: apt-get update followed by and apt-get dist-upgrade. Again it needs to download about 600M, but installation seems to take a lot longer. I have no idea why that’s the case.
There were some issues during the installation. For example, scrollkeeper seemed to be rebuilding the docs for over 20 minutes, after which I ctrl+c’ed it. I have no idea what caused this, though. The app f-spot seemed to have the same trouble. A little later, I got a scary glibc error telling me about how the app scrollkeeper-update seemed to have a corrupted double-linked list. The setting up of sound-juicer and tomboy also took longer than I was willing to wait for.
After this first apt-get dist-upgrade was done, I got a list of 38 apps that weren’t completely installed. When I looked through the list, it looked mainly to be desktop apps. I tried to do an apt-get dist-upgrade again, to see if it would be fixed this time around. I got some parsing errors this time, about parsing /var/lib/scrollkeeper/es/scrollkeeper_extended_cl.xml, but it continued after that like normal. So I guess I was too impatient on the first try. It took about 30 minutes in total, which is okay, I guess.
Another reboot later and I had a working Gutsy. Yay! No strange errors while loading the desktop this time and all links seemed to be working. Again I tried the Ubuntu supplied tool for upgrading to Hardy, but it seemed to stall while downloading the first to components (the ones that are supposed to guide me through the upgrade process). For some reason, once I clicked cancel, it did continue, however. This is a way nicer way of upgrading, though, so I decided to stick with it. It seemed to work for the time being and I got nice progress indicators. Another 600M to download, of course.
A little over two hours later, the laptop reboots into Hardy Heron, which gave me some headaches. First boot didn’t even get very far. There were no obvious messages why it didn’t want to boot, so I pressed a few buttons and it did continue. However, the result was an unusable system with / mounted in ro mode. I thought, “Shit, there goes all my work”, but tried a reboot anyway. This time without the Cisco Aironet 350 card inserted into the PCMCIA slot and that worked. Not sure if that’s because of the PCMCIA card, though.
After I got the desktop, the default Software Update app didn’t show me the latest new version, Intrepid Ibex. I had to enable “Normal releases” in the Software Sources tool. After that, however, everything went back to normal. I noticed a button that told me I could upgrade to the newest version of Ubuntu, 8.10, I pressed it and it continued on, downloading again.
While waiting, I installed Intrepid from and ISO on my Parallels Desktop VM. So that at least I can compare dpkg -l output’s from a fresh install to this upgraded install.
The upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid was another 2 hours, about. But then the trouble started. First of all, the Network Manager didn’t do what I expected. Now, I might be a retard, but I wanted it to simply keep my previous settings. It was not meant to be. I had to reset all the settings, apparantly, because it kept showing me the icon for the network with a warning triangle in it.
Adding a new wired network setting didn’t seem to change much, I was unable to active it and there’s no obvious method of activating it anyway. So I tried the Cisco Aironet 350…
Well, that’s when I learned that this card, which I once bought for it’s outstanding Linux support, needs a firmware upgrade to enable WPA connection encryption. And the firmware upgrade tools only works on Windows. Darn it.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to install Windows XP in the VirtualBox VM and see if I can upgrade the PCMCIA card from there. Hoping for the best…
