A problem not big enough to solve?

In open source, 'scratching your itch' is a source of birth for many a project. It makes the assumption that someone who has a problem a.k.a. "itchy", has the resources (e.g. time, effort) to develop a solution (or scratch that itch). With so many open source solutions already built using this time-honored method, the issue nowadays is more of finding the project that "scratches your itch" than actually building one of your own. In fact, this has lead to a lot of dead projects, some of which were brilliant but lost in the shuffle. 

But it surprised me to discover an itch, a problem, that should have been so prevalent that someone should have done something about it. 

I was setting a new MSWindows10 environment at home and decided I needed to be able to access a Linux box remotely and do so while being able to run X11 applications remotely from the box. My go-to solution has been MobaXterm but since it is Freemium solution, I have always installed it with a caveat. I also didn't like it charging for was basically integration of existing open source solutions (in a way, at least). Okay, re-packaging. I remember seeing an alternative called mRemoteNG which sort of has the same features, is open source and expandable.

I downloaded a portable version and in no time was able to reach servers via SSH tunnels. It does rely on external applications, like Putty, to do the actual connection. But the presentation and configuration management features it provided was very much welcomed. Finally, I decided to use an X11 application on the server. MobaXterm has a built-in X11 server and using it was a no-brainer. But mRemoteNG has no documentaion for it. Even on-line, people did provide suggestions like using the VcXsvr X11 server for windows but no clear indication anybody has successful done so. Which is odd considering running an application from a linux box would be one of the things one would do after connecting to a Linux box. Or have we been disciplined enough to limit ourselves to command-line?

I used XMing back in the day but there are warnings that it doesn't run on Window10. There seemed to be a myriad of things to consider when setting up VcXsvr (e.g. display number, permission settings) before being able to run a single X11 application. Which is strange considering the X11 architecture was intended to allow complex X11 applications to run and consume resources on the server and just provide the UI to the user. 

So I chalk this up to an itch not itchy enough to solve. Nobody has done the work and shared the way to setup mRemoteNG with VcXsrvr. Someone has solved the connection part and the ability to run X11 on Windows. But no one has setup mRemoteNG together with VcXsvr. And that is a shame given that MobaXterm runs X11 apps straight from the ssh window. 

Maybe MobaXterm is the problem solved but nobody it willing to take the extra step and make an open source solution for it. Like I said, not itch enough.

Pandemic and Mageia Madness

Fortunately, the pandemic has little negative impact for me. Working from remote, couped up in the house,endless remote meetings. Tell me something new. It's just more of it. And my exprience with work during the pandemic is opposite of most, I got even busier. New clients looking for a cheaper way of doing the same things. Companies looking at open source solutions mainly as a cost reduction option, suddenly okay with solutions that cost less even though it sticks out in their MsWindows environment. I'm not complaining but some days, I'm am at the edge of it.

 I've recently moved to the most recent version of Mageia. Well, forced to was the more likely. A distro upgrade broke and screwed up the loading of the kernel. I could try to fix it but decided to just start fresh. The data directories were in a different partition (best practice ever) and installing fresh would just mean I may had to deal with the configuration setting differences between the older KDE/Cinnamon with the most recent one (since it was reading my existing home folder). Long story short, it worked like a charm (other than my USB stick coming down with a case of bad blocks).

Then came the whole process of reconsidering the apps I really needed vs the apps I wanted (but almost never use). This is where my thoughts of the needs of the average user return. Does the average user use the apps I use or need? Do they use apps that I don't? This is important to me as a Linux advocate because if Linux doesn't meet the need of the average joe, then the adoption will always fall short. 

This was a slow start.

Thankful for past programmers of mature open source system

I am a big fan  of Bacula. It is an enterprise-class backup system with a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to it's setup and the setup of the backup jobs. It was built to handle and manage tapes and has the most flexible way of selecting and choosing which directories and files to backup.
I've since moved on to Bareos, mainly because they were adding features and functions to the backup system that moving with the times. The decision to build a web-based user interface also mae me gravitate to their orbit.
Recently, I've been setting up Bareos with MySQL version 8. The main takeway when working with MySQL version 8 is that MySQL now made some default choices to be more of a secure variety.
Which leads to problems installing Bareos. Basically, the scripts written to set up the database took advantage of the lower security requirements of the previous versions of MySQL.
So I set about figuring our what to change and where. The scripts that were setting up the database were in /usr/lib/bareos/scripts/ . There were 3 scripts, create_bareos_database, make_bareos_tables and grant_bareos_privileges. All these scripts called another script called bareos-config-lib at the start of the scripts which provided the base functions and parameters. Running the scripts would throw up an error. I needed to see what was the command executing that was producing the errors. In this case, the commands were being provided through the bareos-config-lib script which itself called other files and scripts.
After poking around, I decided to think like an open source programmer, looked at other files in the same directory and started reading the code for clues. I found another script called bareos-config which took in a parameter. The parameter was the functions called in the bareos-config-lib. So the bareos-config-lib file had a function called get_database_grant_privileges. So to see what function provided, I executed bareos-config get_database_grant_privileges which then provided the output of the commands that executed the function. bareos-config get_database_driver will tell me what database Bareos is configured for. bareos-config get _database_password provides me with the database password used by Bareos to access the database. And so on and so forth.
This is a sign of a mature open source project. A tool exists to validate input or commands, created for the use of other future programmers.  Now I know what my problem is exactly and I can fix it. 

Why I think SystemD is acting like a bully

It's seems that I post only to complain about Systemd. I have tons of other articles in draft but only the ones about systemd drives me hard enough to complete them and post them. My other post on SystemD took some time longer but this was written in record time.. So much so that I write as a form of release or therapy in the face of all the roadblocks systemd has put between me and what I want to accomplish.
Systemd is a way their developers of saying to all the guys who have been doing Linux longer than them, "Sorry, what you knew then, is worth nothing now. We are the next generation and we are changing the game." Typical talk from the young who thinks they know it all. It gets worse when you think they are also saying, "We saw something better and we are doing it that way." when what they really saw was Linux through a terminal session in Windows or a Mac. The behavior of pushing people up the stairs, even when you don't really know whats at the top. All they see is light but it could just as well be a cliff.
While the dev seemed to claim they were seeing the light, it's that odd that one of the main things systemd did was blind others to what it was doing by making other people jump hoops through journalctl. It kicked syslog to the curb even though it didn't do everything syslog did. Being opaque was the order of the day.
Systemd is a solution looking for a problem. Rather than building a layer on top of work done before, they decided to start over, which was ok but then said "It's my way or the highway." and "We'll redo the tools you made before but they'll only work with our stuff, our way." It doesn't necessarily improve anything, only just for completeness of control when it's just masking "I can't be bothered interfacing with anyone else's stuff". Systemd has a bully mentality and it probably rubbed off from the people who developed it. It also has a Windows mentality of "(more) complexity is the solution" and "security is what we do later".  Which telling of where the developers get their ideas from.
Basically, RedHat, who is funding this realizing this or not, gains the most. They can't control Linus and his kernel team. So, why not build a wall around the kernel and forcing everybody to go thru systemd to get daily things done. Linus can do what he wants in the kernel, RedHat controls the doors leading to the kernel. And a knock-on effect for them is more people require retraining because all that knowledge accumulated is worth less now with systemd.
Let's get this straight, systemd works when it gets out of the way, like in desktop distros. I run Mageia and it's wonderful. I don't have to deal with it directly. But when it makes previously simple tasks complicated forcefully, then we have a problem. If it changes stuff while I am configuring other things and claims "but I told you so in the logs that you have to enter 4 parameters to make it readable", we have a problem. Look, things aren't perfect and improvements are always welcome. And Linux people love to learn new stuff. But it's hard to compare when the first thing done is say "I'm the only one competing." And being forced to learn is always a turn-off.
But I guess we are living in times when bullying is ok.

Top 5 mistakes new programmers make while developing

Is programming an art or science? While numerous proofs can be made on programming languages on their properties, which puts it in the realm of science, inspiration is the source to a program that can be described as elegant as well as efficient.
Being such so, in the early years, programming is often a singular pursuit that offers great satisfaction. As a programmer matures and Interest become Vocation, the nature of programming changes. What was a lone effort is now collaborative. And while there was none in the past, deadlines constantly looms high over the programmer. This change has led many programmers down the same path of discovery and maturity. Some become disillusioned, others trudge on and often making the same mistakes those ahead of them.
Being a programmer myself, I am also guilty of some of the following mistakes. In no particular order,

1. Trying to fix the problem on their own. A remnant of the lone programmer mindset or the advent of the 'lone programmer against the world' world view. Often followed by the belief that nobody else can help or solve the problem but themselves. This despite knowing well someone else has walked along the path before they did. Solution: a. Always repeat to yourself: This is not a unique problem. Someone else has solved it or solved something similar to it. Look for that solution. b. Talk to someone. Sometime the act of telling someone one provides another perspective.  
2. Dismissing bugs as 'small' in front of others. Those 'small bugs' can get very big. Treat all bugs the same or through the same process.
3. Going down a rabbit hole. That is hyper-focusing on one issue which create more problems or needs changes elsewhere. Which goes recursively until a few hours is lost. Solution: Mandatory breaks where you stop thinking about the problem and have something to eat OR talk to someone about the problem and what you are doing.
4. Not familiar with the production OS platform and not giving a care. Assuming just because it runs on platform, it must on the other. Followed by the attitude that because it doesn't, it's the platform's fault. The big picture: The customer doesn't care. All they want to see is that it's done and running. While the platform developers are at fault, you still have to care for the target's platform. What other services does it offer?  Hoe do I use them. Classic example: while a lot know about ssh, not many have used scp despite both using the same platform and technologies
5. Assuming the most technical/complicated solution is the right one to match the difficulty of the bug. Because only such a solution is 'worthy' of this bug. In reality, the best solution is often the simplest. Wield Occam's Razor wisely and the path to the solution will present itself.

Pressing Save in Blogger doesn't mean it did

You are have been writing the post on and off for the past few hours. You have been diligently pressing save to make sure you didn't lose your magnus opus. Other tabs are opened to access other websites for reference. Before switching between them, you still press save, just in case. Finally, after reading and correcting the post, you are finally satisfied with it. A final press of Save should do it. Then you hit Close.
The dialog box pops up and warns you that unsaved changes will be lost. You press Save again and hit Close. Blogger warns again. "But I just saved! What else do you want me to do?" You press ok and find yourself back in the list of posts. The time and date of the post was just a few seconds ago. You click on the post to add "one more thing".  And half of the post is gone.
Blogger warned you. So far, there is nothing that can be done. Pressing the back button has saved me a few times in the past but not recently. Especially with browsers driving the Back and Forward button into extinction. (Think about it,  Firefox on PCs don't have the Forward button, Chrome on Android don't have the back button). 
So what should you have done? The moment the dreaded "unsaved changes will be lost" dialog come up, press Cancel. Select all the text in your post, copy and paste them to a text edit (like notepad). There is no other way. That post is Titanic. Pressing save doesn't save it. Pressing ok at the dialog will lose the edits but is the only way to move on. Re-open the post and past back the text. And edit the format. And add the pictures again.  If your are wondering why Blogger didn't take over the world, this is one reason.

Lesson:Don't ignore that "Unsaved changes will be lost" in Blogger.
If Blogger overwrote your post, there is a way to get it back.

Systemd is not the end of the world but someone needs to save us from it

This post has been months in the making. I believed I've reduced the rant-iness to a minimum level. It add nothing to the discussion elsewhere on the Internet. It is however, a burden off my chest.
I became aware of systemd as an init system in recent months as it gained traction in Fedora and it's competition with upstart. I didn't give it much of an interest as it primarily dealt with services that are more associated with the desktop: Plug and Play, power management etc. Imagined my surprise when I installed CentOS7 and it was the default init option. And going back wasn't an option.
The discussion around it's adoption has been intensive. This is a website that documents the fallacies in the arguments against for it and the follow-on discussion for a now-dead website advocating for boycotting it.
 My main beef with systemd is philosophical. Systemd's complexity and how it goes against the concept of "many simple programs doing basic jobs well working together" is not where Linux should be going. While many deride this backward-looking, that concept has served us well and has brought us this far. Yes, I do know that not everything that has brought us this far can carry us into the future but that point is evident only in hindsight. We should try new things but not at the cost of what works.  They should also be subject to discussion and mutual agreement. And finally there should be a transition between what is to what will become.

The opposite of this concept is "one big program doing many things complicated things", the best example being Windows. While some point out that systemd is a collection of applications, they are being developed together as a whole and made inter-dependent.
Another beef is the sense of (or lack thereof) of community around the development. The fan-boy-ism around it and the attitude of the developers (e.g the attitude towards corruption in binary logs) is alienating. Although it runs both ways, it is more healthy on the sysvinit side of things. I understand why there is a strong push-back from parts of the Linux community. This is the age-old difference between Linux users that are excited by solving problems and those that like to go home at the end of the day. Systemd is this complicated box / tool that can be used to solve complex problems in a complex way.  

End of another hiatus

I've been quiet for some time because I've had quite a few interesting gigs. Basically, I was thrown deep into the corporate end of the enterprise IT pool. And enough time has passed that I can share something about it.
I won't do that right now. Not the details. It's enough to say that it has reinforced some of the things I already know to be true. Like the difference between open source software and commercial enterprise software is just polish and the benefits that come with a large user base. Like finding obscure bugs. Really,  the average feature set and functions are the same. It's just that commercial software can be easier to configure (sometimes at the cost of flexibility) and someone is selling it. The user may say that what they're looking for is support but really they're just waiting for someone to sell them something.
There were a few surprises, though. Like however great a system can potentially be, it's the way it's used that can make an ocean of a difference.
Look out for this space for more.

Dual booting Windows 8 and Mageia 4: Part 1 - The Prep

I wanted to install Mageia on the Lenovo laptop as soon as my work allowed me to mess around with it since it was now my main system.

My main worry was UEFI, Microsoft's effort to make it harder to install anything else along Windows in the name of security. After going through so many detailed explanations, I'm still not convinced that it was a good move. Protecting anything is a good idea so long as the bad guys don't crack the key. But with a target as valuable as Windows, the cost spent to crack the key may be justified. I figured it would be best to see how other people were doing it. I found this great guide and how other Mageia users are dealing with it. In this day and age, there was already someone who shared how they did it on YouTube.
After reading some more, I found out that Mageia 4 does already some of the work needed already (https://wiki.mageia.org/en/UEFI_how-to). This convinced me that the risk I would mess up everything was not that high (Famous last words).
I tried to shrink the 400GB windows partition down into 100GB but could only go to 200GB
cause is unmovable files. Now I'm thinking: Do I "screw it and use gparted" or do I "do the safe way". Since I don't have a backup copy of Windows 8  and I need A USB stick with 16GB to create a bootable recovery backup, I chose the safe way. Basically I disabled the windows system settings that were preventing me from shrinking the volume. These posts were helpful in getting me to that point.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2087466
http://www.download3k.com/articles/How-to-shrink-a-disk-volume-beyond-the-point-where-any-unmovable-files-are-located-00432
I was able to shrink the partition to about 70GB and re-enabled the settings back, doing all the reboots that were required along the way

Login failures and the joy of Linux

Linux login screen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have only Linux running at home, most of them Mageia. Which means that I am also Technical Support. A few days ago, the kids complained that they couldn't log in on the shared computer near the kitchen..I tried logging in and after I entered my password, a dialog box appeared and said "The name org.gnome.DisplayManager was not provided by any .service files". Clicking on OK would land me back in the login page. Fortunately, I solved it pretty quickly.
I found out that there was a power outage and the machine restarted with a filesystem error. It fixed itself but then the error message came out. I reckon one of the config files got mangled and needed to be re-installed. If you are new to Linux, this is not as bad as it sounds. This isn't the only Linux box in the house, so I had options. My first guess was that the Mate / Gnome config file in my directory was messed up. So I logged in as root. It logged me in without any error.
A quick Google search did said that it was likely my GDM custom.conf file was mangled. I compared it with my laptop's version and it was the same. Then I remembered that Mageia didn't use GDM but LightDM instead. And then I realized that all I had to do was switch Display Managers. Mageia came with about 4, so I was spoilt for choice. I opened up the Mageia Control Center and then chose Boot and then Display Manager. I chose GDM, saved and logged out. Problem solved.
Sorta. I will have to get around to fixing LightDM but there is no rush. GDM is almost similar and Mageia developers went to great pains to ensure all the graphics were consistent. So the difference my kids saw was that instead of a drop-down list with their names to choose from, their names were now in a dialog box list. It was something they saw for about 3 seconds and knew immediately what to do.
This is one of the reasons I love using and working with Linux. It not only gives you choices, those choices are modular to the point where one breaks down, chose another that does the same thing and move on. This would have been a major catastrophe on MSWindows. I'd be looking at a re-installation at least. If I knew, what file was corrupted, I could replace it but I wouldn't know whether it would be of the same version of the other MSWindows components.

Beware: Blogger deletes everything in HTML editing if you don't save

Some words of warning when editing in HTML in Blogger and what you should do every single time to avoid disappointment.
I am livid. I was working on a post for hours when I decided to edit something in HTML view of the editor. I saved the post before switching to HTML view. After some tweaking, I decided to drop the changes and revert. I clicked the Close (post) button and it warned me that all changes will be lost. I was fine with that and said Ok. When I opened the post it was gone. Blogger decided that since I didn't want to save, it should save nothing. Literally nothing. Blogger saved an empty page.
Lost all the work for the past hours. Pressing the back key sometimes switches to the past state but not this time. Blogger was serious. Even though I had saved and closed and opened my post several times, it didn't changed the state of the page. I was working within one page as opposed moving from page to page. I wonder how many people done this and moved to wordpress or tumblr in disgust. Perhaps this is one small way Blogger is killing blogging.
The way to avoid this and have backups before editing a post in HTML is use the preview function. Preview will generate the preview of the page in another tab. Then switch back and edit in HTML. If things go south, you at least have the text in the preview tab.
Thanks Blogger, for nothing. 

I touched my laptop screen and I liked it

I finally decided that I needed a new laptop. My 2008 HP Mini was really showing it's age and I wanted to do some work with VMs that would tax my desktop. I did my homework and was content to buying low end laptop, hoping that Linux would be able to detect the 'standard' configuration without much fuss. Through a surprising turn of events, I ended up with a Lenovo IdeapadS410p Touch, a laptop with a touchscreen. It was an Intel i5 machine with 4GB of RAM (which I bumped up to 8GB), both VGA and HDMI outputs and a DVD drive to boot.

Kids love a touchscreen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So how did it came about that way? I had done my homework and gone to buy the Lenovo laptop that didn't have an OS bundled or the 'DOS version' they called it. How many people buying new computers remember what the heck is DOS, is another question. But that range only came with AMD CPUs and having done that in the past (and got nothing other than a warm lap and mediocre performance), I decided to go for the Intel version, the i5 specifically. But to keep my options open, I decided to also keep an open mind on the the AMD A10 CPU which was by most reviewers as good as the i5 although meant to compete with the i7s.
Next was to find someone who knew what they were talking about. Too many times, I have been besieged by salespeople who knew little about what they were selling. It was time to give the right guy their due. I finally found a chap who gave me several options and let me try the laptops. Finally, I decided to ditch the A10 and went firm with the i5. He found me two models that fit the bill, a Windows 8 machine with a touchscreen and the OS-free version without a touchscreen.
For some reason, the non-touchscreen Lenovo laptop was slightly pricier and was a different model range. I did get the notion that the guy wanted to get rid of it because it was an older model. A quick check showed it was still listed as current on the Lenovo website, so I figured that it wasn't all that old. I figured I might as well see what the fuss was about Windows 8 and the touchscreen interface.

Going Minty 3 - Solving why Gimp is opening PDFs on Chromium

Something I did not encounter on Mageia but cropped up in Linux Mint is something quite strange. It's strange because it also seems counter intuitive. Especially for a distribution that does so well in keeping things user-friendly. The odd thing that happened to me in Linux Mint was that Chromium opens PDF with Gimp.

GIMP 2.2.8  graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now this is not too bad if you have a good PC. And it's not wrong either because Gimp can open PDFs and better still, edit them. But you want to open a multi-page PDF, Gimp will render each page up-front. Meaning that if the PDFs has a lot of pages, it's gonna take some time. If your rig has less than 1 GB of RAM, the wait becomes worse.
The solution is obvious: change the default setting or program for opening PDFs. Unfortunately, that didn't work for me. Set what ever it is, the default is set to Gimp. I do get a choice to switch to another program each time, but it tends to get annoying. So how does one change the default application. Apparently there is common program called xdg  that helps with opening of files. Applications under freedesktop.org call on xdg to help them open document files. So for Chromimun, after it downloads a PDF file, it calls on xdg to open it. xdg determines the actual viewer and passes the name of the PDF to the viewer for it to open. The definition for the 'actual viewer' is either set by the underlying environment (KDE, GNOME, etc) or by xdg itself. The command is as follows:

Away and back

There is no way else to say it. I haven't posted much in the past few months. Simply put, work overtook free time. In fact, work overtook everything else. So much so, I had to come to a decision, choose work or everything else.
Don't get me wrong. I loved working with the people I've been working with the last few months. They were, and still are, some of the smartest, most positive people I've worked with. Whatever came our way, we took on the problems and dealt with them the best way we could, with whatever we had. We played with the hand we were dealt with, no excuses. Inclusion was a big theme. Information was shared freely and bullshit was called out without shaming and without shame. Getting things done was the song of the day and it drowned everything else.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But it came with heavy costs. Free Time fell first. Health came next. I'm sure Sanity would have been the next casualty. It's a big problem for me because I've seen how lives and families were lost when work took over everything. I could learn from lessons past or forge ahead.
So I made the decision. I value my life and my family more than work. Work is money but having gained hindsight the others, I've saved some just for a rainy day like this. Money can always be earned elsewhere. But love is life. And I love my life.
I have a ton of posts in draft so expect to see more in the next weeks. Thanks for sticking around.

What Facebook saw in WhatsApp and Liked it enough to buy them

Sizing up WhatsApp and Twitter (Photo credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi)

A lot of people are scratching their heads about the Facebook deal with WhatsApp. Most of those heads are in the US. They just can't see why Facebook would pay so much money to a company that charges a dollar a year to use it, with the first year for free. In fact, it seems that WhatsApp seems to be looking for ways to give itself away for free. In the early days, all you had to do to get another year for free was to uninstall and reinstall the app. In some countries, using WhatsApp doesn't count against the data cap.

So what is Facebook really buying? It's very simple: Facebook is buying users. The popularity of WhatsApp in the rest of the world is so huge that it dwarfs so-called popular messaging platform. But what makes it most interesting is how loyal users are to it. Rather than bore you with numbers, here are the 5 reasons it is so popular and why Facebook splurged serious cash for it.
It's cross-platform where it matters.
To a lot of people, especially on IOS,  WhatsApp was the way they communicated with their non-iPhone friends. It was also the app Blackberry users told their friends to install if they wanted to send messages to them ala BBM. Using WhatsApp allowed you to join your friends on BB and iPhones.
While messaging platforms in the past were also cross-platform, the platforms they covered were traditionally computer-centric. WhatsApp is all about mobile platforms, from IOS and Android to all the way to the common Symbian phones. Which makes it accessible to more people than PCs. For the younger generation, especially in the rest of the world, a smartphone is their first computer. Which is partly why there are so many active WhatsApp users.
It ties in with your phone number. This is the secret sauce. WhatsApp identifies you by your phone number. At first glance this may not be a big thing. But by making your phone number your unique ID, it ties you, the WhatsApp user, with a verified ID. Your phone company verified you as a paying customer, their definition of a "person". Different phone companies have different regulations for who can have a phone number. Each country has their laws regarding phone number ownership. WhatsApp rides on these laws and regulations to ensure that the phone number being registered to WhatsApp actually belongs to a person. This, plus the fact that users can only message to people in their phone book or to groups that they can leave any time, raises the bar of entry to bots and spammers. 

Plus having a globally unique ID like the phone number is a programmer's dream. They now have a way to follow you from phone to phone and keep you connected to your friends. Switch your handphone, even switch to another platform. all you have to do is insert the sim card, install WhatsApp and you start getting your messages and continue discussions in your WhatsApp groups. For those of us who can't figure out how to transfer contacts, this is really useful because your friends' names appear next to their phone numbers in the discussions. You can then add them back into your contacts in the new phone.

Recover from a bad superblock

When things go really bad, you may not be able to recover a disk. In those times, think of salvaging the data, reformat and live to fight another day. Consider how valuable the data is versus the time spent on repairing something that is damaged and may not be salvagable. testdisk photorec ddrescue are the tools to think of when you come that decision
But I do enjoy a challenge and when a USB disk was brought to me with mounting problems, I just couldn't pass it up. It was an uncommon setup. The USB stick had two partitions, one with an ext3 filesystem and the other with FAT32. I decided to focus on the ext3 filesystem first.

FSCK (Photo credit: SFview)

To cut a long story short, my efforts to mount the disk met with screens full of error messages and cryptic clues as to what went wrong. Running fsck seemed to clean it first but it still would not mount the partition. Running fsck again would yield more and a different set of errors. My previous boss love to used the expression "time to decide: Fish or cut bait". It was one of those times.
This is probably the last ditch effect before you make that fateful decision. This is the line in the sand and the one you have to cross before deciding to put your effort in getting the data out and start all over again.
The recovery process involves rewriting the information about the partition. Specifically, reinitializing the superblock and group descriptors. However, reinitializing does not touch the data part of the partition. It does not touch things like the inodes and the blocks themselves. So by starting out with a 'fresh' set of information that is used to mount the disk, there is a possibility that the data may still be readable. After that, the data part gets checked and hopefully what you end up with is a filesystem that can be mounted properly.
The process can only be done when the partition is not mounted. If you have tried other ways, it most probably isn't. Mine wasn't, obviously.
So here's the process.
1. First, figure out the block size of the USB drive (in this case /dev/sdf1). I need that information to re-build the partition information. Run the command
dumpe2fs /dev/sdaf1 | grep 'block size' -i
Block size:               4096

2. Then format the superblocks. The command below won't format the whole partition, only the superblocks. It is critical that you use the correct block size gathered from the previous step
mke2fs -S -b 4096 -v /dev/sdf1

3. Now that the partition information is 'fresh', I checked the inodes to figure out what else could be wrong with the filesystem. Remember ext3 = ext2+journalling. So, ext2 tools still work
e2fsck -y -f -v -C 0 /dev/sdf1

4. Now that I've done with one element of the ext3 equation, it time to fix the journalling system or more specifically the journal data .
tune2fs -j /dev/sdf1

5. Re-attempt to mount the partition. If everything went well, you should be able to mount the partition and read the data.

After that, for hard disks, you have to determine whether the disk has reached it's threshold limits. Things like SMART properties will help you get that information.

Interested to know more: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1681972&page=5&p=10434656#post10434656

Is Ubuntu is licencing Linux? Canonical looking for value in the wrong places

Linux Mint 11 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Full disclosure: I am no fan of Ubuntu. I applaud their efforts to put Linux in as many hands as possible with the free CD distribution effort but I'm of the opinion that Ubuntu puts itself above Linux while riding on the contribution of open source developers to Linux in general. I applaud their focus on making Linux user-friendly but I'm of the opinion that their effort is no more better than of other distro developers like Mandrake/Mandriva in the past. To top it off, I've predicted the path Ubuntu will take eventually once it has decides it does not need the community any more.
So it comes to no surprise the latest move by Ubuntu to protect 'it's intellectual property' is to licence Ubuntu. Sounds harsh? Some people will think I am being unfair using language normally used to describe Caldera. How else should I react when Canonical is asking derivative distros to sign a license to use 'Ubuntu binaries'? Ubuntu apologists have already made their stand known. They have made light of the gravity of the act of demand to licence and trying to convince us that the issue is about protecting the Ubuntu brand when it comes to derivative distros, Linux Mint, specifically.
I have ask: Why Linux Mint specifically? Does Canonical ask the same from Kubuntu and lubuntu? Is it because Linux Mint is becoming increasingly popular at the cost to Ubuntu? I've been thinking about writing of the possible danger of other distros basing their work on Ubuntu and how dangerous it is to base their work on a source that is actively consolidating their hold on it. I guess I don't have to now.
Really, I don't. At the end of this post are links to articles that go into this deeper.

In the shadow of DOS: DESQView and DESQView/X

There is a wonderful article in ArsTechnica that summarizes the story of OS/2, the competitor to Windows at it's infancy. I'll have something to say about the article later.
The article made me pull out a draft I had kicking around on old-school tech. I had written on old-school tech like PCGEOS and TFS before but this article reminded me of on another legacy technology that is no longer around: memory managers and the unintended competitor one memory manager spawned.
When PCs still ran DOS (or command line to you younger guys), it had a big weakness: DOS programs can't use more than 640kb of memory. As programs got bigger, there was a need to use memory above that limit. Then programs got weird, they wanted to stay running in memory while you ran another program. These were called TSR (terminate and stay resident). There were programs that displayed alarms or provided a function that could be called on at any time. These programs caused more memory to be used.
The memory manager was born. They allowed more memory to be used by swapping blocks of memory from under the 640kb limit with blocks of memory above the limit, fooling DOS into thinking it's still using 640kb of memory. The gory details of DOS memory management can be found here. The best memory manager was QEMM. It allowed more programs to run at once simply be making more memory available. But it soon took that to another level with a companion product called DESQView.

DESQView running DOS programs
in windows

Before DESQView, a program had to be programmed to be able to become a TSR. But with DESQView, any program can become a TSR. This allowed for the ability to switch to another application and then switch back, without stopping the first application. There were other programs that could provide that function. But DESQView also allowed DOS applications to run within something called "windows".  This meant that applications that were programmed to run full-screen could now run in a smaller virtual screen or better known as a window. Some graphical applications could run inside a window, too. The picture shows 2 full-screen applications, WordStar and Lotus123, running at the same time. The top blue window shows other programs that are ready to run.

If it run xeyes, it's XWindows.

Quarterdeck, the company behind both programs, upped the ante with DESQView/X. This was a program simply too far ahead of it's time. It integrated an X Windows server with
DESQView. Not many people could fully wrap their heads around what that meant. It was mainly marketed as a GUI interface for DOS and a Windows alternative. It also provided a tiled interface to launch DOS applications. With some applications that used smaller fonts, it allowed them to run on-screen at the same time with programs using normal-sized fonts. It even allowed graphical applications, like AutoCAD, to run in a window alongside normal text-based DOS programs. Some pictures in magazines even showed MSWindows running within DESQView/X. Although it wasn't virtualization, that feature did seem like it was, mainly because MSWindows was essentially a graphical DOS program.

That's right, Tiled GUI and Windows-within-a-window
circa early 1990s

What blew people's mind was that because it was an X Windows server running on DOS, a PC running DESQView/X could serve DOS programs to X Windows workstations (XWindows terminals still needed a start-up system for booting, IP management etc). If you are not familiar with X, the concept allows for Unix workstations to run DOS programs because they were running on the PC's CPU. Unfortunately, it didn't blew that many people's minds. The fact that the configuration meant bypassing some licensing restrictions also meant that if it was ever popular, it would have been shut down anyway.
If you are interested in old technology and want to experience how it was done in the old days, there are now sites that give guides and clues as to how to rock it old school. Apparently, you can get QEMM and DESQView from here. Quarterdesk was bought by Symantec but I'm not sure what they did with the technology they bought. My guess is that they bought it for patents.

Fix CMOS Battery Issue with NTP: the NetworkManager Edition

While in the previous article, I described a solution to trigger a script when the network goes up. This works on most server Linux setups but it does not work if you are using NetworkManager. NetworkManager has a different way of doing this. If you are not sure whether you are using NetworkManager, consider this: if you are using a wireless network and configuring it using an applet in the task bar or through a GUI program, it's likely that you are using NetworkManager. That and the fact that the script in my previous article didn't work.

NetworkManager applet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

NetworkManager can still do it. It can run scripts after a network interface is connected or disconnected. It's just not apparently forthright about it. But first a little clarification. In Linux parlance, when a network is connected, it is known as "a network being brought up". This is because the network interface state is changed from DOWN to UP.  And vice versa. When talking about network connections, both set of terms are used interchangeably.
NetworkManager offers this feature through a mechanism called a dispatcher. Basically, the dispatcher looks into the /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d directory and run scripts saved in there. Scripts start with a two digit number that determines the order they are run. The scripts are passed two parameters from the main NetworkManager system. They are the network interface that was connected or disconnected and whether it was connected or disconnected.
In my case, I didn't care which network interface it was but it had to be just connected. So the script looked something like this.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Run ntpdate when network interface goes up using NetworkManager
#
export LC_ALL=C
if [ "$2" = "up" ]; then
        /usr/sbin/ntpdate -u pool.ntp.org
        logger Updated time due to network interface going up
fi

Save the file as 10-ntpdate.sh and change it's attributes to be executable. Drop that into the /etc/NetworkManater/dispatcher.d directory. That's it.

Solve CMOS Battery Issues with NTP

Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 netbook Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I guess it was time. My HP Mini 1000 netbook was giving me the wrong time and date every time it booted up. It made going to websites with HTTPS impossible because I was apparently accessing them from the past. Resetting the time didn't work because it would forget the current time and reset back to 2002. I would then manually reset the time using ntpdate.
After a few times, I got tired of this and decided that there is a better way. Since the netbook is connected to the Internet most of the time, I knew that a script could be triggered to run every time the network card started up. All I needed to do was to add the ntpdate command and options to it. Problem was I didn't know what script it was. I wasn't also big on making a custom change that would affect future updates.
I knew the scripts that set the network configuration was in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. My network interface family was eth so the script that set it up was /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-cfg. At the of end of the file was the command

exec /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-post ${CONFIG} ${2}

Reading the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-post file, I found the following command at the end.

if [ -x /sbin/ifup-local ]; then
    /sbin/ifup-local ${DEVICE}
fi

However, the file /sbin/ifup-local does not exist. So I created one with the ntpdate -u pool.ntp.org command in it.  So now, every time the network is configured, the time is correct.
I know it doesn't address the problem of the battery being dead or needing replacement but it'll do for now.

This didn't work for you? Maybe you're using NetworkManager. Run NTPDate automatically with NetworkManager too.