David Trebacz Blog

I had the main system drive on my 5 year old Kubuntu machine start having read errors in the syslog reported by logcheck. I had the system up and running straight for those 5 years and it was likely nearing the drives lifetime. I didn't want to have to rebuild the system from scratch, since it had served me well -just wanted to get a little more reliable disk drive in place (with a minimal amount of hassle). The drive I was replacing was a  250GB 7200 rpm SATA drive. I had an extra 500GB 7200 rpm Western Digital Black drive that had been a warranty repair. It had been gently used in a machine that needed more space. It was a perfect donor for the Kubuntu machine. It was currently mounted in a Rosewill USB external hard drive enclosure ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005KGNXTE/ ) . Here's an example of the errors in the syslog: ata5: EH in SWNCQ mode,QC:qc_active 0x1000 sactive 0x1000 ata5: SWNCQ:qc_active 0x1000 defer_bi...

A few months ago in another blog post I had a 1TB drive fail in my Ubuntu 12.10 linux mirror array ( http://blog.trebacz.com/2012/04/replacing-failing-drive-in-linux-raid-1.html ) . I decided to replace it with a 2TB drive to have room for further expansion. Using unequal drive sizes allows me to stagger my drive replacements I just ran out of disk space on the 1 TB partition, so I purchased a new 3TB drive. I really on need 2TB, but the Seagate 3TB drive was just to good of a price to pass up from Amazon. This is the second part of the story about adding a 3TB drive to my existing mirror and the challenges that I ran into. The whole process is just a few (11) steps 1. I checked the array to make sure everything was fine before starting. sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0 /dev/md0:         Version : 0.90   Creation Time : Fri Mar 11 22:53:54 2011      Raid Level : raid1      Array Size : 976759936 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB) ...

When I upgraded the machine from 11.10 Kubuntu 64-bit to 12.04, my machine essentially became unusable until I turned desktop effects off (ALT-SHIFT-F12). The story was well documented on the internet ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4ODQ - Good story on the failings of the 295.40 Nvidia driver that shipped with 12.04 LTS Kubuntu ). I suffered along not wanting to custom a version of Kubuntu expecting Canonical to relatively quickly update the version in the repositories - after all this is an LTS version. After 3 months of running my video on Kubuntu 12.04 by running desktop effects under the compositing type "xrender" for my Quadro NVS 210S/GeForce 6150LE graphics card instead of "OpenGL", I was fed up. Running under xrender was just as good as turning them off. I wasn't up to downgrading my drivers to the previous version or suffering through the continued development on the Nouveau drivers.  I even contemplated getting...

I've been successfully backing up several machines on my network with BackupPC ( Version 3.2.1). After a recent update to Kubuntu from 11.10 to 12.04 (AMD-64-bit), I'm now getting a the error message from three of my Windows boxes (2000, XP, and 7). Googling the error message did not give me any clues to why the error all of a sudden started showing up. I'm pretty sure there was an update to Samba moving from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 (to version 3.6.3). In checking with other resources on the internet it would seem, that the problem stems from an update to samba that has some incompatibilities with BackupPC: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753531 or http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=653207 Hopefully there is a better fix than reverting sanmba versions back to 3.5.11-71, since I'm not sure what other issues that may cause on my ubuntu based system. Here are a couple excerpts from the logs that show how it was working, but has ...

I've had a disk drive complaining about have trouble writing to certain blocks (specific error is I/O error, dev sdc, sector 1446901823 -across a bunch of different sectors). This raid mirror isn't supper critical, it holds backups from the other machines on my home network, but I'm starting to think it's time to replace the failing drive and eventually upgrade the size of my backup mirror (md0) partition from 1TB to 2TB. I'm using about 90% of the space right now, but probably have a good 3-4 months before I need the space. Overall, the process was much simpler than I expected and very straightforward. Other than the synchronization of the new drive the whole process took about 20 minutes. It was nice not having to do this with a system down, but I could do it much quicker having been through this test run. 1. Preparation before starting: I just wanted to gather some background on my drive system before I start unplugging and plugging bac...

I'd like my newsreading activity to remain private and I enjoy using the PAN Newsreader . The newsreader is open and free, but unfortunately doesn't support SSL connections. My news provider astraweb does support SSL at no additional cost. So I decided to take the plunge an utilize stunnel to encrypt connections to news service provider on my 64-bit Kubuntu linux machine. Hope the following procedure helps anyone trying to do the same. Install stunnel4 form the Ubuntu repositories: sudo apt-get install stunnel4 Configure stunnel to start automatically by editing the main configuration file with nano text editir (my favorite) and change the ENABLED=0 line to 1: sudo nano /etc/default/stunnel4 ENABLED=1 Copy the example configuration /usr/share/doc/stunnel4/examples/stunnel.conf-sample to /etc/stunnel/ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/stunnel4/examples/stunnel.conf-sample /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf Edit the newly copied configuration file to make news request secure Uncommen...

I really enjoy using a simple Newsreader on my KDE version of Ubuntu. It's a simple newsreader that feels a lot like Forte's Agent newsreader on windows. After a recent upgrade to 11.10, I started getting double images of inline images. This is the opposite of a problem before where mulipart images wouldn't appear at all. The version of PAN in Ubuntu repositories is quite old, so I needed to install it myself. I adapted the post by Scot Kuma http://www.scottkuma.net/pans-at-it-again-updating-pan-newsreader-on-ubuntu-11-10 for my needs. I got an error about missing hotkeys.h when I tried to compile it using his instructions verbatim. As suggested in this pan mailing list post for KDE I could just install the program from their source. Hopefully this will help you get your version of pan updated. I f you don't have pan installed. Install it. This will created all the icons in the appropriate menus in kubuntu. sudo apt-get install pan Download the source tarball from t...

For a few months I arpwatch has been reporting that "some device" on my home network is sending out packets that aren't properly formed. Unfortunately, the email that I get sent (via logcheck ) only sends me the mac address that's sending the bad packets. I did some checking around the internet and wasn't sure what I should do with that information - do I have a NIC going bad, bad cable, etc? My network is becoming a complicated systems of >40 devices running a variety of operating systems. I like using the linux utility arpwatch on my network, since combined with linux logcheck , it let's me know via email when any new DHCP device is added to my network. Seems like a great way to monitor if that crazy neighbor is snooping around at my wireless network. Even though they are pretty protected -separate network segment (courtesy of Smoothwall ). Anyway the email that I was getting two or three times a day looked like ...