Zugschlusbeobachtungen

I recently had to install Openfiler on a HP server with ten 750 GB hard disks on a cciss RAID controller, which proved to be a major nuisance. Since the customer wanted the box in service fast, I finally settled on wasting two of the disks as a 750 GB RAID 1 for the actual system (with like 10 GB actually used) while RAIDing the remaining disks together to a RAID 6 with spare disk for productive data.

During this task, I noticed a severe lack of current knowledge about modern PC architecture and how to boot from a big hard disk and decided to do some research into this direction. This article shows the first "results" that I have achived in the last few days.

Dear Lazyweb, I have just found out that ksynaptics has stopped working against the X in unstable, and that ksynaptics is not even in lenny, let alone in current testing and/or unstable. This currently leaves me with an unconfigured touchpad, which is a major nuisance since I have gotten accustomed to tap-dragging and touchpad border scrolling.

xserver-xorg-input-synaptics' README.Debian dates back to 2004, so I suspect that the information given there in does not any more apply to today's configfile-less X.

So, dear lazyweb, how do I get my touchpad back into the more intelligent mode? Clickable configuration preferred.

This is a rant. A rant which goes to the grub maintainers, and one that could go nearly identically to many people in the KDE environment or many other open source projects.

I really like grub. I really like grub 0.97 despite that it's been unmaintained for years and not booting on two of my important machines. I should like grub 2 because its configuration looks more straightforward and for its better features - direct booting of .iso images, from LVM and RAID. But actually, I have learned to hate grub 2 since it is not finished and badly documented, and that its existence is already being used as an excuse for grub 0's development having stopped years ago (and it being renamed to "grub-legacy" to clearly show that it's the unloved child) - and things looks like this is not going to change any time soon.

Linux policy routing is still incredibly painful if one wants to have more sophisticated routing than just "take source and destination IP address for the routing decision". The mechanisms that have been in use seven years ago still work though, and I didn't find any possibility to do it any easier. In this article, I'll try to explain the "old" mechanisms and hope that somebody from lazyweb will comment and say "it can be done so much easier".

This is a translation of the Usenet article <gu48cs$rul$1@news1.tnib.de> in de.comp.os.unix.networking.misc in the hope that the english-speaking blogosphere can give additional insights.

I haven't been using ATM on Linux for some six years now. I neither have access to an ATM network any more nor do I have ATM hardware any more. Therefore, I plan to remove ATM support from ifupdown-scripts-zg2 in the next release which will be done in the next few weeks.

If anybody does still use ATM on Linux in conjunction with my scripts, you might want to offer help with the package if you want to have continued ATM support in ifdown-scripts-zg2. I cannot test the code any more and therefore cannot maintain it in the future.

I just wanted to make an USB stick bootable and wondered why mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sda 0 32 64 complained about the disk having too many cylinders. After a few moments, it ocurred to me that since libata, the system hard disk has become sda and that the stick was sdb or sdc. One ctrl-C later, fdisk confirmed both counts: That I accidentally started mkdiskimaging my main system hard disk and that the partition table was already gone.

A few hours later, the notebook is back in business without too much data loss. Lucky me.

In the last few weeks, I spent quite some time wondering about how to arrange the hard disk layout of my productive systems in the future. This article outlines my thoughts and would like to ask the lazyweb for comments.

I try to keep my Debian servers as identically as possible, making it possible to talk non-linux persons remotely through the system without having to worry about this particular box' configuration.

A few months, I blogged about the pains I had with my nVidia FX 5200 graphics card, Debian and current kernels.

I have solved the issue in the mean time and would like to document what I did. This has been updated to reflect driver 173.14.20 from July 2009.

Dear lazyweb, how do I pin lenny now and have that pin hold after lenny's release?

• Codename lenny doesn't work, apt cannot do this (#433624, 18 months old, without any reaction yet)
• Version 5.0 doesn't work, lenny's Release file doesn't have a Version field yet
• Suite testing will match lenny now and then track squeeze once squeeze is testing

My home workplace is slowly and steadily mutating into a never ending story. I do not remember blogging every aspect of it, but after three graphics cards, an even older mainboard and two DVB-S-Cards, my home workplace PC currently does what I expect it to do: Run Debian unstable, drive two 20 inch DVI TFT monitors with 1600x1200 pixels each and receiving DVB-S transmissions. I do not think that these are exaggerated expectations, but it took over three months to find a combination of hardware which will actually do what I want.

The hardest part was finding a AGP graphics card which can drive two DVI monitors with 1600x1200 pixels each. After failing with two different Matrox cards (the G550 not being able to do 1600x1200 pixels if the monitors are connected via DVI), I finally settled on a used GeForce FX 5200. In the beginning, the binary nVidia module didn't hurt as much as I expected. Unfortunately, this rapidly changed with the 2.6.27 Linux kernel.