Reinstalling PC-BSD

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I complted my backups during dinner so when I booted my laptop tonight, compared the MD5 checksums on the PC-BSD v1.5 CD#1 ISO file and burned the disk. I had K3B installed from PBI when I installed PC-BSD from a 2-Disk set awhile ago but I’ve never actually used K3B to do things lol. So I put a blank CD-R in my laptops acd0 and looked around on how to burn the ISO.

cdrecord -scanbus               # find out my 'dev'ice
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01 (i386-unknown-freebsd6.2) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
scsibus2:
        2,0,0   200) 'PHILIPS ' 'DVD+-RW SDVD8441' 'PA48' Removable CD-ROM
        2,1,0   201) *
        2,2,0   202) *
        2,3,0   203) *
        2,4,0   204) *
        2,5,0   205) *
        2,6,0   206) *
        2,7,0   207) *

cdrecord -v -pad speed=1 dev=2,0,0 PCBSD1.5-x86-CD1.iso
        # with very nice verbose output ;-)

I’ve never used my laptops DVD+-RW drive for burning disks before, normally I use the install of Nero that came with my Desktop but good ol’Dixie ain’t let me down, the CD-ROM came out great. I did an install with the decision to use the entire disk and a custom disk label. The dang gum installer still doesn’t have an option to set the time zone to UTC so I set it to Europe/London GMT 0000 which is close enough (my .zshrc sets TZ)

I noticed three problems with the custom disk label part of the installer. The first is, although PC-BSD finally fixed their default of 1024MB SWAP to instead use a more dynamic algorithim… For which it alloted 512MB of SWAP when my laptop has 512MB of PC2700 RAM. My previous install had that much RAM and when under the ‘worst loads of its life’ top some times reported ~300-400MB swap usage.

The installer woulnd’t let me create a second swap partition, so I upped the size to 1024MB. Normally I double check my values with a calculator since the installer seems to lack fdisks ability to handle K, M, and G suffixes but I found BC was gone. I didn’t have one handy so I started an XTerm only to find out that ‘bc’ was not on the install disk 🙁 so I did it manually.

The other two problems are that I created /usr, /home, /var, and /tmp partitions. It converted the /home mount point to /usr/home and made /home a symlink, the only problem is I created /home before /usr in the installer. So when I rebooted I found a nice surprise that /usr/home was not mounting because /usr was not mounted yet :-(. Also although I made a /tmp partition the PC-BSD installer failed to disable tmpmfs in rc.conf, I had to do that manually. I know rc.conf.local is supposed to be a bit out dated on FreeBSD and the proper way on OpenBSD… But I always use /etc/rc.conf.local for changing rc.conf on PC-BSD, less trouble ;-).

Started PC-BSD, noted the boot menu now shows FreeBSD instead of PC-BSD like in the last release and the splash screen was gone which is fine by me. I usually would clear it when booting but was always too lazy to disable it 8=)

Setup the display for 1280×800 24-bit with ‘ati-3d-enable’ and switched to a vtty with control+alt+F2 and logged in as root. I had to change roots password, because my is to strong to ‘pass’ the PC-BSD installers concept of an acceptible multinational password lol. And to add my personal user, during install I only added ‘rstaff’ because I wanted to create my user ‘Terry’ with the same UID and GID settings as on my OpenBSD machine, tired of remapping stuff… 

passwd                                  # fix roots pw
adduser                                 # add my user

Then I realized that there was one fatal flaw in my plan, all the backups were on Vectra including the copy of my wpa_supplicant.conf file used for an internetconnection via wireless.

There is more ways then one to solve a problem 😉

Since I don’t have a USB Flash Drive I booted my desktop into Windows and stuck in my spare SD Memory card in the hopes of copying the backup of /etc to it but Windows couldn’t access the bloody file shares, *Grrr* so I used PuTTY to SSH into Vectra and used cat, copy, and paste to create a new wpa_supplicant file.

Since my laptops card reader is not supported on FreeBSD 6.3 I swapped memory cards in my camera and attached the USB cable, I keep it set to ‘Mass Storage’ mode rather then PTP so I can transfer pictures to my laptop.

I plugged in the cable, turned on the camera, and in the time it took for me to type ls /dev | grep da the entire computer locked up, frozen solid on ‘ls /d’ so I had to shutdown with the magic on/off button 🙁

So this time I turned off the camera and started my laptop again, turning on the camera during the kernel probe so it would stay in umass mode. Booted into single user mode and did a fsck -y then mounted the camera so I could get the file.

mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt
cp /mnt/wpa_* /etc/
umount /mnt
                                        # exit single user mode

Logged into KDE with my main user, ‘Terry’ and I decided to give PC-BSDs networking tool a try, set up my wireless card. It failed to detect my wireless access point so I specified the SSID manually and cat, copy, and pasted my passphrase from wpa_supplicant into the GUI. I then proceded with my master plan, mount my stored backups off Vectra via NFS and start restoring files. So I booted into single user mode again and set to work, I knew I’d need single user mode because with X running things would get fucked soon if I didn’t get my xorg.conf back!

Since I rarely write out a mission plan in that much detail when I am ‘playing’ with one of my computers. I’ve kept a log of my actions using vi to write /root/fixit.log and have ordered and commented the entries in a more logical order, I just did them in the order I thunk of them hehe.

fsck -y
mount -u -o rw /
mount -a
/etc/rc.d/netif start                   # start the network connection
# and mount my backup files on /mnt
mount_nfs -r 8192 -w 8192 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/srv/nfs/Backups/today /mnt
bash                                    # /bin/sh lacks a bit on  tab-completion

cd /tmp
tar -xf /mnt/etc.tar
cd etc
cp ssh/ssh*_config /etc/ssh/
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.pcbsd15.install
cp X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/
cp rc.conf.local /etc/ && vi /etc/rc.conf.local # trim my rc.conf
cp pf.conf /etc/pf.conf.my-old
vi /etc/fstab   # create fstab entries for the NFS shares
cd /
tar -xf /mnt/local-share-ri.tar         # install ruby docs pc-bsd lacks
tar -xf /mnt/local-etc /usr/local/etc/sudoers   # restore my sudo config
cd /usr/home/Terry

# add nfs-users and smb groups
pw groupadd -g 7778 -n nfs-users -M rstaff,Terry
pw groupadd -g 19132 -n smb -M rstaff,Terry
pw groupmod -n operator -m Terry        # add myself to the operator group
su - Terry
mv Images Pictures                      # I prefer that name ;-)
mkdir code
# adjust the ownsership of my dirs
chown Terry:nfs-users {Documents,Music,Pictures,code,Videos}
tar -xf /mnt/my-home-backups.tar        # various files, extracts as 'backups/'
# restore the stuff I want saved
mv backups/GNUstep ~/
mv backups/sh ~/
mv backups/misc ~/
mv backups/konversation ~/.kde/share/apps/
mv backups/knode ~/.kde/share/apps/
mv backups/.* ~/                        # restore selected 'dot' files

# connect to my file server and create a new dir for nfs
ssh -p 22222 -i .ssh/mykey Terry@vectra
        su - root
        mkdir -m 1770 /srv/nfs/code     # I'll extract files later
        groupadd -g 7778 nfs-users
        vi /etc/group                   # added my user to nfs-users
        ^D                              # exit vectra root shell
        ^D                              # exit vectra Terry's shell
        cd /srv/nfs
        chown -R Terry:nfs-users ./*
^D# back to working as root on dixie in single user mode
cd /tmp
tar -xf /mnt/root-home.tar
cd root                                 # restore a few files I want there
cp *.ogg ~/
cp .login ~/
cp *-supfile ~/
reboot

on reboot I set out to work with molding KDE into shape and installing PC-BSD updates. With no lockups within the first half hour of operation.

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Well, downloading a PC-BSD v1.5 install disk via KGet… Looks like a reinstall / repair is probably going to be the only way to fix Linux GTK+ apps without spending more time and effort then it pays to on the issue. I even tried booting off my FreeBSD 7 partition and setting up linux-flock there. Much more successful then PC-BSD, it died due to a missing gnome library which is probably what I get for installing gnome2, gtk2, linux-gtk2, and mutual friends from packages >_>

I actually like KGet as far as download utilities go. I’m used to using FreeBSDs fetch command which just wraps around a few library routines. What I like most about kget is it just stays out of my way, sits in the system tray, and doesn’t take a Ph.D to figure it out 😉

It’s been awhile since I’ve tried the konqueror integration but it probably would be nice. I do rather like keeping downloads separated from my browser when it’s a _big_ file though. That way at least if my browser crashes the download won’t get FUBAR’d on me.

So here I sit, downloading the remaining ~500MB of the ISO image and watching The Negotiator which is one of my favorite thrillers. I remember I once caught it on cable one night and had to get the VHS when the chance came up. Now I enjoy the movie twice as much while I watch crooked SWAT team members break almost every damn rule their is to hostage rescue. To quote Kevin Spacey’s charactor, “You want to kill him on national television now!?”. The whole point of SWAT is to *_save_* lives, even the suspects if you can… but never, ever do you jeprodize the lives of hostages like that.

I need to get my system files backed up, shouldn’t take long it’s mostly the /etc folder, the parts of my home dir that are still local, and a few things in /usr/local/{share,etc} that I might want to keep. Guess it’s time to update my partitioning scheme while I’m at it….

Writer’s Block: I Left My Heart in…

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What do you love about where you live?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

It might rain cats and dogs, thunder and lighting to beat the bands, blow the car cover off the car, and even occasionally hail up but the buildings still stand !

Up until last year there was one road that we used to have a lot of clients in that area. That place is like Twisters Vill, if there is a storm, it’ll get whacked. Several years ago I remember we were at the Churches mid-week service and the sound of the wind and thunder was some of the worst I’ve ever heard in my life. And that is a place where you can probably hear the music and singing down to the highway lol.

When service was over the Pastor told everyone they could stay there if they didn’t feel up to leaving. It had to be at least 30-45min before we filtered out. I think the people that left probably wanted to see if they still had a house to go back to lol. On the way home we took that one road, it was seriously blown away man. Dark, any few lights there probably were out of power, there was trees down and debris every where and it was still storming. We finally had to turn around and take the highway after bumping into a crew trying to handle a downed power line in the middle of the road.

Where we live, usually doesn’t get hit that bad… You might have water halfway into your shoes some days, or feel like a tumbleweed in the ol’west but it’s generally safer then most other places in this city. Although to be honest, given the number of tornadoes per year in Georgia, I think I’d take my chances with the Hurricanes back in Florida if we ever moved closer to that on road lol.

I don’t mind rain, I suppose it is strange but I generally like rainy whether; more adventure to travel. It’s the tornadoes that worry me. Thunder and lighting I don’t care very much for but I’ve never concerned myself a lot with it. I figure, if the LORD wants me dead, I’m as good as dead whether or nott I get hit by lighting. And if it ain’t time to go yet, probably not a lot to worry about.

I don’t really have a problem with death I suppose, I know we should always be ready to go but there are a few things I’d like to do/see in life first… The only thing of it, is if I gotta go, I’d rather not take any one with me and a twister is usually not that picky about it’s targets. It’s always been my expectation that I’ll be as good as alone when the end comes, dunno why but that is my suspicion on the matter.

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I’ve had a lot of rolling about on [SAS] related business today, generally productive as far as the NCO and RSM matters go. I also posted a file with my ‘musings’ on a few tactical matters in an appropriate place. Not sure if it was a good idea to share my thoughts in this case but I’ve never really cared much about what others think of me, no point starting now 8=).

I’ve had some time to play with my little music management toy hehe. Basically the idea is to track filename changes in my music collection and then update my playlist files. It’s not meant to be pretty or optimal, just effective. If I ever get it finished I’ll probably leave it running on the file server so it can look after my music files. Every now and then I do like to rearrange files in ~/Music and it always breaks my playlists, and even when using Amarok for the excellent playlist editing… It kind of sucks to have to redo them manually through Amaroks collection browser, it’s a great system but my playlists can some times get quite large.

I’ve also managed to get my server and laptop set up to use NFS instead of SSHFS. Since it seems I can’t count on SSHFS, it has already incured a ‘price tag’. Samba’s mount_smbfs is to much bother on FreeBSD atm, the program that comes with the fusefs-smbnetfs port seems to be as good as KiA if you want to know any thing more about it beyond the sample config file and source code… That leaves NFS and AFS, not familiar very greatly with AFS but NFS a bit more so. The BSDs seem to do things a bit differently with the exports file then what I’ve encountered before, the fbsd handbook / obsd faq also leaves a little to be desired compared to some nice BNF notation ^_^. I might be able to do some thing with a SSH tunnel later, right now some thing that works is all that is important…

My allergies have been tremendous lately but it’s that time of year again. One thing I really did like about living in Fl. It was to damn hot for most of the stuff that makes me sneeze! It was kind of one of those places you are soaked to the bone just crossing the parking lot to get to the car lol.

Time to get some rest, tomorrows another day… Primary objectives for the near future are getting more work done on the SOP Rewrites and trying to fix my laptops problem with Linux GTK+ apps..grrr.

Tactical Wonderland

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An old friend appeared before me with a question before my new orders come, in each hand he held a pill. One Red, one Blue, each representing a course of action. Towards service or my own ends, my reply?

Loyal to the end

days rumble

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Well I’ve put a few thoughts through LaTeX and even discovered that at least the version in my MiKTeX install on WinXP, some times pdflatex.exe/latex.exe will have an endless loop rather then die with the normal error message if you accidentally delete the end{document} at the end of a doc ^_^

I think I’ll probably post the file tomorrow in the members forum, I zipped it with a simple password chosen at random. The question is will I remember what it is later rofl.

I like using tex/latex quite a lot so far, works much better then XHTML+CSS at giving decent output without *eventually* getting annoying to edit and maintain. I’ve been slowing building up a .sty file for things I use a lot so I don’t have to worry about finding the last document I did some thing to when I can’t remember a specific.

Probably will pass out in a few hours next to learning perl, glad I’m off work tomorrow… need some rest: Maybe I can even catch up with the 30++ messages in my in box haha!

I’ve done enough for the night, in the future Ineed to play around with the Linux ABI on my laptop and NFS. I have a FreeBSD 7 partition, I think I will see if I can use that to help fix the PC-BSD one… Either way it would probably take less then 2 hours to reinstall my laptop and restore files once I’ve got a set of PC-BSD v1.5 disks handy…Most of the time of course spent transferring and extracting files on low end hardware lool. NFS, I’ve always avoided and OpenBSD seems to use a different syntax for /etc/exports then I learned on Linux but as long as it works… SSHFS and SMB/CIFS seem to have failed me, the only remaining options I know available to me are NFS and AFS, nether of which I’ve had time to test fully yet. I guess that can wait for later.

*passes out*

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It is kind of amazing, I posted a review of PC-BSD 1.2 and people occasionally still post comments on it lol. I think I’ll do some thing similiar when PC-BSD v2.0 is released, will be a good chance to take a look deeper into KDE4.

Hit over the Library today and checked out the Lama book (Learning Perl), I figure I’ve been using Perl for a lot of odds and ends lately. And I may as well inhale the book a bit since I’m usually finding myself skimming manual pages, perldoc’ing, and STFW’ing for any thing I don’t remember. Hmm, I think Perl was my second programming language but I never went to deep into it back then.

Also pulled a few on PHP, dunno if I’ll have time to read them and I *hate* PHP even through it is a language I’ve had to employ on more then one occasion. I was also lucky enough to find a copy of the Art Of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4. That will make for a bit of an interesting read. If I had the cash, I think I’d love to get all of the volumes that have been published. Considering that Donald Knuth is like 70 years old and the first volume was published ~1968, I don’t see how he can possibly live long enough to finish TAOCP when there are at least 2 or 3 more volumes left… but I’d love to read’em some day!

Never really been a big one for computer related books, I’m more of a Science Fiction kind of guy. But hey, I could live at the library xD.

Writer’s Block: Lost & Found

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What have you lost that you wish you still had?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

I could go on for paragraphs about what comes to mind … wouldn’t do me much good.

Since I recently ‘lost’ it, I’d settle for my web browser back !

As to the other matter, well maybe it was for the best.

exhaustion mounting

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Oy..

I’ve spent most of the week with an almost constent headache, barely been on the computer the past few days and even then mostly AFK. Managed to get some training in today and some work on the SOP rewrites as well but it’s still a very tiring week.

I’m looking forward to the time off coming up so I can catch up with stuff, about all I have gotten done this week so far is talking to Noer and Rasa lol.

A crashing BSD

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Ok, now I dunno what is worse that my very stable laptop has gone nuts or that I’m not surprised by it at all.

mentally back tracing events:

using urxvt with zsh
vim running in background during perl file editing session
linux-flock playing my favorite radio station via linux-mplayerplug-in and native mplayer
mv ./myfile.mp3 /tmp/ -> trying to move a file off a sshfs mount to /tmp
system locked up with sound stuck replaying a single note
tried to switch to vtty1
system auto-rebooted, never saw the vtty

On reboot I restarted flock and tried to move the file again, system locked up and rebooted when I tried to switch to vtty0…

Now linux-flock segfaults when I run it and the only other linux app I know that is handy, realplayer also segflauts. I ain’t seen any thing informative in /var/ yet either.

Now, my Windows XP machine Blue Screen of Deaths and occasionally Black Screens of Deaths! On me all the time when listing to music while using the server browser in Raven Shield, if I use any thing other then WMP: trying WinAmp == instanto death and often same with MPlayer using the usual DirectX related sound/video opts.

So why do I find it sad that for me it is not so much of a shocker that with a third party kernel module installed from pre-compiled binary (fuse) that was ported from another OS, moving data from a mounted network file system (sshfs) to the local hard drive through SSH and said driver, while running binary programs designed for an entirely different system (linux flock+mplayerplug-in), could possibly cause a system to crash?

At least it’s got a better damn reason then Windows XP has got looooool

I’ve tried fsck’ing the drive but the Linux ABI still seems FUBAR.. All things considered with SSHFS and SMB/CIFS, I am seriously considering putting both NFS and AFS into testing here to see if either will fill the gap.