Search Results: "andree"

8 July 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: New mondo package: Fixes for some (longstanding) bugs & Ubuntu

mondo-2.08-2-2 fixes three bugs, namely #369321, #222052 and #292782.

I am particularly happy with the two latter ones even though they were only minor and wishlist, respectively. But they were fairly longstanding, and it makes me feel good that I finally got around to fixing them.

I've also gone through all the remaining bugs again, nagged the submitters where appropriate and closed some (with submitter agreement), especially the ones about LVM and RAID because I feel they have been fully addressed now. The result is that mindi has currently no open bugs and mondo is down to nine. Certainly not as cool as what Steinar H. Gunderson is doing to the RC bug count, but still not bad. ;-) Hopefully, I'll be able to get the bug count down even further.

I've also worked on Ubuntu support with the result that things should function out of the box on Dapper now, i.e. the package should build and run fine.

mondo-2.08-2-2 was tested on:
Enjoy. ;-)

29 June 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Meeting Melbournian Debian Developers

I only sent a [VAC] message on Sunday asking people whether they'd be interested to meet in Melbourne this week. To my great surprise and delight, this resulted in a nice Japanese dinner at Ginza with Russell Coker, Hamish Moffat, Anibal Monsalve Salazar and Jason (sorry, no full name) followed by a drink in a pub in the city. (The drink was actually free as in beer due to Russell organising some vouchers - very good! ;-) )
We had interesting conversations about various topics including Debconf6 which Anibal had attended and it was really good to meet some other Debian developers. Hamish stayed a bit longer and we had a good conversation about packaging, Ubuntu and the general direction of Debian.
In summary a very nice evening - thanks guys! ;-)

27 June 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Sometimes Things Just Work

I'm in Melbourne for the week, so I thought I take a laptop with Ubuntu Dapper from work with me to see how Mondo Rescue works on it.
I had prepared myself well by making sure that all build dependencies where installed - or so I thought. It turned out that I couldn't install the freshly built packages because some binary dependencies where not installed - very clever. Not.
I didn't have Internet access in the hotel, the winmodem in the laptop doesn't work with free software and there were no (free) WLAN access points. I did, however, have my Treo 650 with an SD memory card. Also, I noticed for the first time that the laptop actually has an SD card slot. I tried the card from the Treo in the laptop and amazingly enough it just worked. (There you go, another glorious Ubuntu success story...) So, I downloaded the necessary packages using the Treo's Blazer webbrowser (which didn't go all that smoothly, downloading stalled all the time basically, but removing and reinserting the SD card helped here), and then installed from the SD card onto the laptop.
Looks like Mondo Rescue is running quite well on Ubuntu Dapper at least in the standard install, i.e. no RAID and no LVM. Cool. Writing to DVDs directly literally takes hours, though. No idea why that is, so I haven't run out of things to keep me entertained yet. ;-)

18 June 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: New x.0.8 Mondo Rescue Debian Packages

mindi-1.08-2-1, mindi-busybox-1.00-7 and mondo-2.08-2-1 are now in incoming. The main changes apart from being new upstream versions are:
  • LVM support,
  • includes Debian-specific post-nuke script to update initrd images after restore,
  • fixed DHCP support, i.e. using something like 'nuke ipconf=dhcp:eth0' should work now (feature done by Bruno, I just ironed out some scripting buglets).
I have switched over to upload amd64 packages partially because I wanted to and partially as a workaround for the still unamended Packages-arch-specific file. If anyone can tell me how to get this changed, I'd be very grateful. Other than that, I have double-checked that i386 builds in pbuilder, so fingers crossed that i386 packages are going to get built automatically.

The packages were tested doing a full archive and restore run on sid i386 (NFS) using kernel 2.6.16-2-k7 (2.6.16-14) and on sid amd64 (ISO/DVD) using kernel 2.6.16-2-amd64-generic (2.6.16-14) (I've had intermittent problems with the OOM killer in -k8 kernels during restore.). The amd64 setup uses a combination of two RAID volumes and two physical LVM volumes one of them on top of RAID with multiple logical volumes. (/boot is a normal partition because I like grub.)

Hopefully, I can now focus somewhat more on the remaining bugs, some of which look like they might entice substantial upstream work. We'll see. Oh, and upgrading mindi-busybox to 1.1.3 would also be nice, there is a problem with mount/mtab support that I have to get to the bottom of first.

All in all, with both RAID and LVM support pretty much there (knock on wood), Mondo Rescue in etch should be much improved over the version in sarge.

14 June 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Long time, no blog

I just noticed that I haven't written anything for more than three weeks, so I thought it's time to give a little bit of an update:

Packaging mindi 1.0.8 and mondo 2.0.8 is coming along nicely, albeit with more work involved than I was actually hoping for. I've put together a bit of a list of issues and their workarounds. Interestingly enough, nothing of this stuff is actually related directly to Mondo Rescue.

I have put some effort into LVM2 support and am now able to restore an amd64 Sid system with RAID and LVM2 (on top of RAID; /boot is still a normal partition because I like grub). Also, I have added a post-nuke script that rebuilds initrd images to adjust them to things like different IDE controllers on the restore system. It still has some shortcomings which I hope to address in future versions.

Hopefully, I'll be able to release new packages within the next few days.

25 May 2006

Andree Leidenfrost

Andree Leidenfrost: Supermarket of Components

Whilst my contributions are totally dwarfed by those of Joey Hess, I wholeheartedly agree with what he says - Debian should be more than just a large collection of readily available packages. Ubuntu is great, but Debian should be able to innovate in different ways because of its different structure and longer release cycles (which can be both a burden and a blessing). I really would like to see Debian staying relevant to end-users, otherwise many people may eventually just stop contributing. That would be a big blow for all the derivatives as well, not just Debian itself.

[Update: Fixed 'what he says' URL.]

Andree Leidenfrost: Debian Installer rocks!

I spent some time the past week looking into virtualisation to make installing and restoring installations with Mondo Rescue a bit less disruptive and more efficient. So, I ended up doing a fair few Debian installations. I figured that with all these virtual machines all of a sudden, it would make sense to upgrade my caching-only name server to handle the local network to save me the effort of having to maintain lots of hosts files.

To my pleasant surprise, I found that this also resulted in the hostname and domain being automatically filled in by the Debian Installer (even without DHCP)! Good stuff! Also, the graphical installer in the i386 daily builds is just awesome!

Conclusion: The d-i people do positively rock big time!

14 May 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Mondo Rescue RAID Support at Last

CeBIT Australia ate substantial amounts of my time for the last two weeks (and almost killed both my feet and my voice but was still interesting and fun), so things took a little longer in Mondo Rescue land. But at last, here it is: mindi-1.07-3 and mondo-2.07-2 are in incoming and add the much overdue RAID support for Debian!

What it does (from the shiny new NEWS.Debian file):
This is the first release supporting RAID via mdadm. It is supposed to work with all RAID levels/varieties supported by mdadm and the kernel.

The following limitations and oddities apply:
  • All information about existing RAID arrays is drawn from /proc/mdstat, the contents of an mdadm.conf file is ignored.
  • Using RAID for the boot device is currently untested. The system will likely be unbootable after a restore.
  • Using LVM in conjunction with RAID is currently untested. Restore will likely fail.
  • Building a RAID5 array may appear to hang the system because of extended screen inactivity. However, disk activity should be high and eventually the restore will continue.
  • The synchronisation progress bar and the formatting progress bar may overwrite each other leaving the screen somewhat garbled. Not nice but harmless.
I have intensely tested this with various RAID levels, chunk sizes, parity algorithms, with and without spare disks and so forth. In particular, I've done successful full archive and restore runs using NFS as storage media for the following:
  • amd64, RAID1, kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 (2.6.16-12)
  • amd64, RAID5, kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 (2.6.16-12)
  • amd64, RAID10, kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 (2.6.16-12)
  • i386, no RAID, kernel 2.6.16-1-k7-smp (2.6.16-10)
I'll post the patch to #325877 for reference purposes and will also commit to upstream SVN shortly. Bruno was kind enough to review that patch and likes it, so there shouldn't be a problem (other than some fiddling because I have worked off the Debian 2.07-1 package and not tracked upstream).

Apart from fixing issues with the above, I plan the next steps to be:
  • support for RAID boot partitions
  • getting LVM to work
However, I think I'll do a fresh install of Sid AMD64 before that, to ensure that d-i created systems work with Mondo Rescue.
.

Also, I am experiencing a strange behaviour with busybox on AMD64 in that I get the following message on virtual terminals (and no prompt):

./sh: Cannot set tty process group (Operation not permitted)

when I run:

./openvt 8 ./sh

(where ./openvt and ./sh are both links to ./busybox)

This happens with 1.00 as well but in either case only on amd64, i386 is fine. Also, it only happens if NFS support is enabled for busybox mount.

2 May 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Parsing Text Output in C

I'm currently working on a better routine to parse the output of /proc/mdstat in Mondo Rescue to get RAID to work on Debian.

Fiddling around with pointers and doing nasty things in general finally got me to think that there must be a better way.

I'm sure everyone else is in the know, but I was quite happy to find the fine GNU C Library Manual where in turn I found strtok() which allows for much cleaner and safer code. Cool.

Also found www.snippets.org. Cool, too.

30 April 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Emergency fix: mindi-1.07-2

Two days after mindi-1.07 hit testing, we have a new user - yeeha.

But guess what - mindi crashes and burns. :-(

>Morale:<br><br/>Morale:

I must test purging and reinstalling before uploading.
I must test purging and reinstalling before uploading.
I must test purging and reinstalling before uploading.
>...<br><br/>...

Oh, well. Fixed in mindi-1.07-2 which is currently in incoming.

29 April 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Mondo Rescue Debian RAID Progress

Sadly, RAID support in Mondo Rescue on Debian has been broken since the raidtools2 package was removed just before the sarge release.

I have finally started on getting things to work with mdadm (whilst retaining raidtools2 support to get this accepted upstream) and sent an initial patch to bug #325877.
.

Looks like it generally works, i.e. I have successfully restored a sid amd64 system with a RAID1 and a RAID0 array without manual intervention. However, there are some limitations that I'd like to overcome:
  • hard-coded chunk size
  • RAID5 parity algorithm is ignored
  • spare devices are ignored
The main thing is inclusion in upstream, so I am now waiting for Bruno's verdict on the general approach...

28 April 2006

Andree Leidenfrost

Amaya -- I am very sorry to hear about your loss of Emacs.
.

Even more so, as Emacs and my cat shared the strong liking for bathtubs. I dread the day when my cat follows on the same path - at least she's already about 15 and so has lived her life. I think it's going to be a gourmet can of her favourite this weekend. Oh well...

17 April 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: mindi 1.07 & mondo-2.07 Packages

are available from the Debian unstable repository. It's i386 only atm, but amd64 is hopefully going to follow soon. In fact, I'm writing this from a restored amd64 installation.

The upstream ChangeLog can be seen here: http://www.mondorescue.org/.
.

The main Debian changes are:
  • package reorganisation to adjust for upstream changes
  • fix for #357785
  • fix for #331060
  • fix for broken '-I' and '-E' parameter handling (from SVN r468)
  • fix for verify via NFS not working
  • fixed compiler warnings on i386
There is still a handful of 64 bit related compiler warnings because the code wrongly assumes that pointers are 32 bit and can thus be cast to int that I am not sure about how to best fix:

newt-specific.c: In function 'popup_changelist_from_file': newt-specific.c:1651: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size mondo-rstr-newt.c: In function 'redraw_filelist': mondo-rstr-newt.c:1007: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size mondo-rstr-newt.c: In function 'edit_mountlist_entry': mondo-rstr-newt.c:1374: warning: cast from pointer to integer of different size mondo-rstr-newt.c: In function 'redraw_disklist': mondo-rstr-newt.c:2506: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size mondo-rstr-newt.c: In function 'redraw_mountlist': mondo-rstr-newt.c:2538: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size mondo-rstr-newt.c: In function 'redraw_unallocpartnslist': mondo-rstr-newt.c:2575: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size mondo-rstr-newt.c: In function 'redraw_varslist': mondo-rstr-newt.c:2610: warning: cast to pointer from integer of different size

Other than that things have been tested successfully on amd64 with kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 using NFS as backup media and on i386 with kernel 2.6.16-1-k7-smp using both NFS and DVD as backup media.

With the etch freeze still some time away, I'll try to focus on the following issues in the given order:
  1. get RAID and LVM to work - this is by far the most important task and there are numerous bugs in BTS
  2. improve FHS and other compliance, in particular default the location of the scratch and tmp directories to something sane (cf. #312546) and move the location of floppy and ISO images away from /root and make it configurable (cf. #222065)
  3. fix things so that NTFS restore leaves Windows in a bootable state rather than requiring the workaround using gparted - this may require switching things from fdisk to parted which Bruno doesn't like much...
  4. IA64 support for mondo - depends largely on what happens upstream and probably also on whether I can get my hands on an Itanium box that I can actually reboot and restore...
  5. general clean-up and wishlist stuff
I think I'll be quite happy if 1. and 2. are done before etch freezes (and all new bugs are addressed as well). We'll see.

9 April 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: I am a Debian Developer!

Amazing stuff, after almost two years, I've become a Debian Developer! I've certainly learned a lot, met numerous nice people (mostly remotely unfortunately). My password is changed, my gpg key updated - so not long now, until I type the commands to make my first upload, undoubtedly with trembling fingers!

I'd like to thank all the people that were involved in making me a Debian Developer. Specifically, I'd like to thank H ctor for making me co-maintainer of mindi and mondo before I even knew what hit me, Ben for sponsoring me, Matthew for being my AM (We should play pool again one of these days!), and of course Amaya, who has helped in so many ways that I don't even know where to start, so I won't.

Thank you all!

4 April 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: I'm on Planet Debian!

Thanks to the indefatigable and ever helpful Amaya, I'm now on Planet Debian! Thank you also for your nice introduction, Amaya! :-)

Just to drop a few words about myself and what I do:

I am an expatriate German and have lived in lovely Sydney for almost seven years now. I work as an IT professional mainly programming and maintaining SAP systems.

I have been a Debian user for about a decade now and finally decided to become a maintainer almost two years ago when I started to get involved with the mindi and mondo packages that form the quite neat, flexible and versatile disaster recovery suite Mondo Rescue.

It turns out that I got sucked into Mondo Rescue upstream development reasonably heavily mainly because it is quite a low-level tool and thus needs reasonably extensive tweaking to get it to work properly on Debian (or any other distribution for that matter). Upstream (at the time) wasn't all too fond of Debian, but I was given CVS commit access pretty early on which suited my fine as I could commit my fixes directly upstream.

Since about half a year ago, upstream has become much more active, mainly thanks to Bruno Cornec (sorry no link), the new lead developer. So, hopefully for Etch, we will have a much cleaned-up codebase and fully operational RAID and LVM2 support! In the meantime, give Mondo Rescue a go - it is quite cool as it is right now! ;-)

Hopefully, there will be some time soon to look after a few more (maybe less demanding) packages and to get more involved in Debian in general. Oh, and hopefully I'll be a real Debian developer soon - DAM approval on 27 Mar looks promising - thanks, Joerg! ;-)

3 April 2006

Amaya Rodrigo: New head in the headcount!

I just added Andree Leidenfrost to the Planet Debian feed. H ctor and I have been sponsoring his packages for mondo and mindi for a long time now, his New Maintainer proccess is currently in DAMnation and I think he will be a great maintainer one day (hopefully very soon). Andree is from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, has a cat, and is a pleasure to work with.

Everybody say hi!

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