Search Results: "bruno"

19 September 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: AFS Support for Mondo Rescue

I've finally uploaded mondo-2.09-3 packages which contain the changes to get Mondo Rescue working with AFS to fix #385790. I should have communicated better with Bruno because he has done some work in parallel on this. We have come largely to the same conclusions, though, which is always reassuring.

2.09-3 also has some more changes done in the post-nuke arena. I felt that because it is now an integral part of the Debian package it needed some more love. Changes are:
  • Log the fact that no post-nuke script was found during restore.
  • Perform after nuke steps even if we dropped back to interactive mode because of issue with mount list.
  • Ask user after nuke to wait until s/he is returned to command prompt before rebooting.
  • Use run_program_and_log_output() instead of system() to get output of post-nuke logged.
  • Output screen messages about post-nuke.
With these changes added, post-nuke behaviour is still not perfect but probably good enough for now. Hopefully, Bruno agrees and accepts the changes upstream.

Finally, I've managed to get hold of a VXA-1a tape streamer. It's IDE which sucks because Debian removed ide-scsi from the standard kernels a while back, so the vxaTool doesn't work (yes, I know how to compile kernels, but I like to run a standard environment so that I can pick up on and reproduce issues). Then again, it's just for testing anyway and I can report that I've successfully done test runs with Mondo Rescue using it.

Speaking of testing, mondo-2.09-3 was tested:
  • on sid amd64
  • running kernel 2.6.17-2-amd64 (2.6.17-9)
  • using DVD and tape (!!) as backup media (NFS is still stuffed)
(mindi-2.09-2 which I uploaded a few days ago was basically tested the same.)

4 September 2006

Margarita Manterola: RC bug-squashing second-week

So, last week was a bit bumpy since I was sick for a couple of days, and then had a power outage on Friday and Saturday, thus not being able to keep up with my daily RC bug fixing, but I've been catching up since then. I've uploaded patches done by Arjan Oosting, for packages that wouldn't compile with autoconf2.6: #379812 (kde-style-polyester), #379813 (kxmleditor) and #379815 (klog).

I uploaded a patch by Mart n Ferrari for lilo: #374477 (use MAKEDEV instead of mknod at postinst), and another patch by Mart n for courier-authlib #378571 (fixing the permissions of /var/run/courier/authdaemon).

I uploaded a patch by Andreas Jochens for ntlmaps: #379700 (fixing the build-dependency). A patch by Luca Bruno for predict: #379495 (fixing a change of location of forms.h). And a patch by Mike O'Connor for stardict: #379152 (fixing a misuse of size_t that made it fail in 64bit architectures).
Stardict had a problem with rpath that made me get to know the LIBTOOL_IS_A_FOOL hack, and I had to apply that, so that the binaries were not screwed up.

I also uploaded a fixed version of yacas, that included patches from Arjan Oosting (fixing #379261 and #379895) and Braun Gabor (fixing non-RC #295413). However, it's not like the only thing I've done is upload patches done by others. I've also done some patches myself: The amount of bugs currently affecting the next release is 247. It's not a secret that we are a bit behind the schedule (we should be at less than 200 bugs by now). But it's also totally possible to get back on track if we work together on fixing the current bugs and we stop uploading unneeded new releases that trigger new transitions.

1 September 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au will be held from 15 - 20 January 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Hopefully, Bruno and I will be given the opportunity to share with others our experience with upstream/downstream maintenance of Mondo Rescue. The presentation we have submitted about this is called "Mondo Rescue & Debian - an Example for Upstream/Downstream Collaboration".

It would be positively fabulous to actively participate in the conference and to be surrounded by people that share the same interest in FOSS. And meeting Bruno in person would be cool, too - after all, we've worked quite closely together for a year now without even speaking to each other. Maybe we'd even get some hacking done! ;-)

I am excited!

13 August 2006

Andree Leidenfrost: Of New Hardware, New Packages, Bugs & Kernels

I decided that before my socket 939 ASUS A8V Deluxe motherboard becomes obsolete, I should do an upgrade to dual-core. It so happened that my dealer had an Athlon64 X2 4800+ returned to him the other week, so I went for it. It's the fastest that the board supports and comes with juicy 2x 1MB L2 cache (which apparently got axed by AMD now as part of the price-battle with Intel). My only concern was about power/heat/noise because it's the 110W model, but to my delight it appears to be running cooler and quieter than the (130nm) 3500+ I had before. Cool! ;-) While I was at it I also doubled the RAM to 2GB and bought two SATA hard disks and a swappable tray system for them.

The latter was mainly so I could do some tests in regards to #380703. The outcome is that restore works fine with SATA disks on above motherboard using its Via SATA controller (haven't tried the Promise one yet). So far, so good - or rather bad, because I can't produce the problem.

At least I do have a fix for #379966 which basically entices the introduction of a new function mr_stresc() to properly escape things when using system() or popen(). It's gone through a few revisions both by the submitter and upstream (Thanks Steve & Bruno!) and should be in upstream soon.

For the time being, I have just uploaded mindi-1.09-1 and mondo-2.09-1. They are purely new upstream versions and don't close any of the open bugs - hopefully, this will follow soon. Testing was done on an etch system using a SATA disk and a sid system using PATA. The archiving mode was NFS both times and the kernel used was also the same, i.e. 2.6.16-2-amd64-k8-smp (2.6.16-17).

I am experiencing problems with 2.6.17 kernels and creating ISO images on NFS mounts using mkisofs. mksiofs would just hang sooner or later whilst writing the image file. With 2.6.16 there is no such issue. And neither cp nor dd have this problem with 2.6.17. Weird. I'll have to do some more testing and probably will bring it up on the debian-kernel list before I file a bug report.

18 June 2006

Alexander Schmehl: Damn, why did you splitted the package?

From time to time it's funny to run a scriptlett and play a bit with numbers. For example:
find /pub/debian/pool/main/ -name \*_i386.deb -or -name \*_all.deb -exec ls -s \; sort -nr
157696 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fgfs-base/fgfs-base_0.9.10-1_all.deb
152284 /pub/debian/pool/main/v/vegastrike-data/vegastrike-data_0.4.3-2_all.deb
141144 /pub/debian/pool/main/o/openclipart/openclipart-png_0.18+dfsg-4_all.deb
89808 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fgfs-base/fgfs-base_0.9.6-1_all.deb
86304 /pub/debian/pool/main/k/koffice/koffice-doc_1.5.1-1_all.deb
81892 /pub/debian/pool/main/l/llvm/llvm-doc_1.7-1_all.deb
78860 /pub/debian/pool/main/t/texlive-extra/texlive-latex-extra_2005-2_all.deb
67844 /pub/debian/pool/main/b/beneath-a-steel-sky/beneath-a-steel-sky_0.0372-2_all.deb
67764 /pub/debian/pool/main/b/beneath-a-steel-sky/beneath-a-steel-sky_0.0368-3_all.deb
62252 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fillets-ng-data/fillets-ng-data_0.7.1-1_all.deb
61660 /pub/debian/pool/main/f/fillets-ng-data/fillets-ng-data_0.6.1-1_all.deb
58984 /pub/debian/pool/main/v/vegastrike-music/vegastrike-music_0.4.3-1_all.deb
56260 /pub/debian/pool/main/t/tetex-src/tetex-src_3.0-3_all.deb Interesting, I always thought one of my packages would be on of the biggest, bit according to my find, planetpenguin-racer-extras is just on place 117! But now I sponsored an upload for an other member of the pkg-games group: nexuiz_2.0-1_i386.changes uploaded successfully. Sadly Bruno decided to splitt of the music of the -data package, so we won't take the crown, but will still get the fourth place, as soon as Ganneff let it the packages through new :) PS: Damn, they still didn't fixed the bug, that I allways get killed.

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.

15 May 2006

Christian Perrier: Debconf - day 1

So, day 1 started when I felt asleep in the plane, at some randome place over the ocean near Galicia. We actually had a good sleep as the other place people weren't noisy even though the plane was packed. Woke up at 03:00 (MEX time). After a few listening music, I found myself using the free time to read the huge Report of Findings about Gender in F/LOSS recently mentioned in the Debian-Women mailing list. This is a very deeply interesting document which is a quite complete picture about the "Women in F/LOSS" topic. The people interested in the Debian Women project should definitely have a look at it. We finally landed easily at 06:30 local time. No problem going thru the customs, even though 3 of us were carrying more cheese than needed to be considered a terrorist group trying to invade Mexico. Cab drive to Oaxteprc went fine. The scenery is quite impressive and the pass at 3100m on the highway is....a bit strange for all of us. When arriving the Oaxtepec center we soon met with Enrico who helped us to discover the place, which is good as is is BIG... Found my room, with Damog and Ana sleeping in it (sleeping drunk as I was told later...:-))). So, I gently left my luggage there and we moved to have some breakfast at the market. I ate some really good tasting stuff which names I've no idea of, but thanks to Magic Enrico and his incredible abilities to catch any language in the world, we managed to do it. Back to the Tower for the Introductory talk...it was hard to be there in time with all these people crossing my path and who I need to say "hi" and babble with again. Later in the afternoon, after lunch, I felt more and more tired, so I missed Enrico's talk (Enrico, apologies!) and just isolated self, listening to good old Hot Tuna stuff and working on my business mail (yeah, I know, it's Sunday). More energy retrieved helped to finish the afternoon by hanging around here and there, trying to set up two ad-hoc sessions aimed at gathering all people interested in i18n to have some brainstoriming about what we want for i18n infratructure and all similar topics. Finally, at the end of the day, I attended Meike's training session for speakers. Really interesting moment to share with Aigars Mahinovs, Neil Mc Govern (hope I got it right), Bruno (Barrera), Martin Krafft. OK, we all suck on some aspects of our presentation skills but we less suck now (I'm afraid I will still suck by talk unpreparation as you will all notice for the "State of the art of i18n" I share with Javier on Saturday). And, finally, yes, finally...bed at midnight. Not so bad to recover from jet lag. Now I'm ready for a full Debconf Day, full of energy. Be prepared to a lot of bubulle's babbling, dudes.

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.

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...

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.

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! ;-)

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