Thu, 12 Jun 2008
Ubuntu Hardy unlikely to have working Ralink drivers...
So I've been persisting with using the rt2x00 drivers with 2.6.24 on Ubuntu
Hardy but it wasn't only slow (interface was quite often at 1Mb/s rather than
54Mb/s) but unreliable, dropping out every 15-20 minutes. A quick bounce of the
interface brought it back but it's just un-acceptable to do that
indefinately.
I'd been booting into an older kernel in order to get working drivers, in the
hope the new ones would be fixed and using them would be a quick reboot away,
but after following the bug
in launchpad it seemed quite clear that I was dreaming.
I bit the bullet last night and installed the old drivers. I had to pull them
from CVS rather than using the packaged ones. But a quick 'make && sudo make
install' and everything is working perfectly again.
I left a
little note in the bug:
I'm not sure why this is "Medium". Most computers these days are doorstops if they don't have reliable networking. You have a LTS release due next month and you are persisting with releasing broken drivers for Ralink chipsets. There was a point about a month ago where someone needed to make a call and either revert to the old drivers or commit to getting the new ones working in time for Hardy. I for one am using the old drivers.
[2008/06/12 / tech / linux permanent link]
Wireless interface renaming fun on Hardy...
As I mentioned in in
my last post I was having problems with wireless.
As the drivers for the rt2500 chipset have been a problem in the past, I
assumed it was the same issue rearing it's ugly head again. I was wrong.
My system had a wlan0_rename interface as well as the expected ra0 interface.
$ sudo iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. ra0 no wireless extensions. wlan0_rename IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXXXX"
Hmmmmm... looks like some udev fun! I'd come across the udev replacement for /etc/iftab after we swapped out a network card at $work[0] and the interfaces came up in an odd order. I figured it was something similar here.
$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules :%s/ra0/wlan0/g $ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces :%s/ra0/wlan0/g $ sudo rmmod rt2500pci rt2x00pci rt2x00lib $ sudo modprobe rt2500pci $ iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wmaster0_rename no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXX"
Bingo!
[2008/06/12 / tech / linux permanent link]
Reading something into your bash history...
An interesting idea from jimmac via jdub.
At home:
(marty@merboo)-(03:42:46 Fri Apr 11)-(~)
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
106 screen
96 ssh
48 sudo
43 vim
25 ifconfig
25 cd
17 make
12 ls
12 cat
10 iwconfig
...and at work:
marty@boober:~ $ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
142 ssh
82 screen
45 sudo
42 dig
24 pstree
18 offlineimap
14 vim
12 telnet
8 ooffice
8 mutt
[2008/06/12 / tech / linux permanent link]
Corner cases make me a sad panda
At $work[0] we've had issues with a server that has a Nvidia SATA controller. The errors look a little something like:
ata2.00: cmd 60/08:78:3f:8f:3b/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 15 cdb 0x0 data 4096 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.00: cmd 61/00:80:66:32:77/01:00:00:00:00/40 tag 16 cdb 0x0 data 131072 out
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2: soft resetting port
ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata2: EH complete
ata2: timeout waiting for ADMA LEGACY clear and IDLE, stat=0x400
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 488390625 512-byte hardware sectors (250056 MB)
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
ata2: EH in ADMA mode, notifier 0x0 notifier_error 0x0 gen_ctl 0x1501000 status 0x0 next cpb count 0x10 next cpb idx 0x0
It appears some sata_nv "features" (NCQ) were added to Linux 2.6.22 but some Hitachi
hard drives don't support it. Redhat has errata on this.
Of course we're running that combination. Sigh.
[2008/06/12 / tech / linux permanent link]
Fri, 14 Mar 2008
Trackerd makes Mutt a sad MUA...
I recently upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Hardy. Lots of teething issues
including the rt2500 based wireless card not working with 2.6.24 kernels.
However the one thing that caught me by surprise was Mutt stopped seeing new
mail in folders other than $MBOX.
After checking that I was receiving email fine, my attention turned to the
method Mutt uses to detect "new mail in mbox format folders". By default it
relys on the atime. Which works fine until something else accesses your ~/Mail/
e.g. backups running.
I'm not sure when Ubuntu introduced Trackerd, but the upgrade to Hardy appears
to have either introduced it or started it by default for the first time. It's
basically a search engine for your hard drive. Unfortunately when it reads
files this resets the atime. This makes Mutt sad.
At first I was tempted to turn it off seeing as I've never used it. However,
realising that it's possible to mount partitions 'noatime' I figured the Mutt
guys would have provided another way to do this.
set check_mbox_size = yes
Woot.
