Josh Olson’s Blog

Update: The current (173.14.09) stable NVIDIA driver works with Fedora 9. The following information is outdated and kept for archival purposes.

The latest stable NVIDIA drivers will not install when using the version of X.org that is distributed with Fedora 9. I was able to use NVIDIA’s beta 172.08 display drivers after a few manipulations.

Version 172.08 does not support ABI, so I placed the following in /usr/bin/startx

defaultserverargs="-ignoreABI"

I also commented the following from /etc/X11/xorg.conf

# Load "glx"

Fedora 9 and NVIDIA Drivers x86_64 Instructions

Download the appropriate beta driver

$ wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/
Linux-x86_64/173.08/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run

Run the installer

$ sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run

Edit /usr/bin/startx (for runlevel 3 users) and add the following:

defaultserverargs="-ignoreABI"

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment the following:

# Load "glx"

I upgraded my primary workstation to Fedora 9 this week. Although the upgrade was mostly uneventful, I did struggle with a few annoyances.

The latest revision of openbox lacks a specific functionality that’s vital to my coherent work flow. It lacks the ability to hold down the left mouse button on the title bar, and use the scroll wheel to migrate the currently held window to the next or previous desktop. It was easy to roll back to a previous version from the Fedora Core 6 Extras repository.

Another annoyance is that konsole removed the –noxft switch in their latest revision, this allowed me to prevent my terminals from having anti-aliased fonts. I use the font Terminus (highly recommended, by the way) within my terminals, and having that anti-aliased is just unacceptable. I could just disable anti-aliasing across all applications, but then my browser and mail client would look terrible. I was able to solve this issue with ~/.fonts.conf.

The last issue I had was with pulseaudio. Sound was very soft, even with the speakers and alsamixer set to 100%. I removed alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, and things started functioning normally.

I tried KDE again this week, and was dissapointed (as usual.) It was quite sluggish, and seemed very kludged together. Maybe someone will develop a feature-full window manager that doesn’t require big iron to run before I’m a gray-beard. They would then have to convince me that it is indeed better to have all that eye candy, yeah right.

A software raid group disk failed in one of my servers yesterday.

The kernel was spewing SCSI errors:

kernel: ata2: status=0xd0 { Busy }
kernel: SCSI error : return code = 0×8000002

# mdadm --display /dev/md0
# mdadm --display /dev/md1

both reported a failed disk sdb*

The procedure to rebuild the md groups is as follows:

Replace bad disk (sdb in this scenario.) Note that if you do not bring down the server to replace the disk, be sure to “remove” the disk from the raid groups using mdadm.

# mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/sdb0
# mdadm --remove /dev/md1 /dev/sdb1

Read the good disk’s partition table (sda in this scenario.)

# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda2 14 19457 156183930 fd Linux raid autodetect

Install identical partition table on newly replaced disk. Create partitions that start and end on the same listed cylinders and are of type “fd.” Be sure to set the boot flag, and don’t forget to write the changes.

# fdisk /dev/sdb

Add partitions back to the appropriate raid groups.

# mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdb0
# mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb1

Ensure the raid groups are rebuilding properly.

# mdadm --display /dev/md0
# mdadm --display /dev/md1

This afternoon I was faced with searching a directory tree for large files that have rotated within the last 24 hours - a symptom of a problem we were experiencing with a service.

Here’s what I put together quickly:

# find -iname name-\*.log -mtime 0 -exec du -sh {} \;

Explanation of the switches (from the find man page):

-iname pattern
Base of file name (the path with the leading directories removed) matches case insensitive shell pattern pattern

-mtime n
data was last modified n*24 hours ago.

-exec command {} \;
run the specified command on the matched files


It’s not complex (and probably not post-worthy,) but someone may find it helpful.

Craving more mutt functionality I was enticed by the mutt sidebar patch[1]. Instructions appeared simple enough, but it required a rebuild of mutt so I took the opportunity to build[2] an rpm. Having only made a few rpms in the past and wanting to do it in a manner that conforms with best practices, I used one of Josh’s spec files as an example. Red Hat’s How To documentation[3] was also helpful, although probably quite dated.

After building & installing mutt I appended the following to my .muttrc.

# Sidebar settings
set sidebar_width=20
set sidebar_visible=yes
set sidebar_delim=' '
color sidebar_new yellow default
macro index b 'toggle sidebar_visible'
macro pager b 'toggle sidebar_visible'
bind index K sidebar-prev
bind pager K sidebar-prev
bind index J sidebar-next
bind pager J sidebar-next
bind index O sidebar-open
bind pager O sidebar-open
bind index B bounce-message


I like the sidebar a lot, we’ll see how long it lasts.

[1]http://www.lunar-linux.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44
[2]mutt-1.5.15-mtu.1.spec
[3]http://www.rpm.org/RPM-HOWTO/build.html

Josh & I spent some time this week upgrading our workstations to RHEL5 x86_64, other than a few oddities I believe we’re both happy about it. Exciting news - yum allows us to use public repos[1] with ease , this has really improved my x86_64 experience.

The rest of my week included [but was not limited to] the following:

• Updating all of our Solaris & Linux krb5.conf files so that they no longer rely on dns for realm / kdc lookups
• Auditing / updating our php.ini configuration files
• Messing with samba shares
• Setting up vncservers
• Messing with the abyss (account exceptions, secondary logins, etc)
• cron scripting

[1] Fedora 6 Extras

Stacked, racked, and kicked our first 2950 today, it’s going to be an IDL cruncher for one of our departments. They’ve got a fancy new swing arm in back that keeps the cable management arm from swinging out too far. I spent some time customizing a kickstart file for flexruns, there were a few quirks, but everything appears functional now.

Flexruns is currently using RHEL4U4 as our campus RHN proxy is still not RHEL5 compatible.

Josh Myles has an RPM for IDL, it works great as long as you remember to install the i386 version of xorg-x11-deprecated-libs.

# up2date xorg-x11-deprecated-libs –arch=i386

Modified eecn-vpn1 /samba/ configuration files, as well as the rest for future
samba daemons.

Joined eecn-vpn1 to the domain, it’s now authenticating against kerberos.

Moved /samba/common configuration directory to cfengine, wow my first cfengine
powered production service.

Created a few account exceptions, checked some things out on the abyss.

Had lunch with Josh, Nancy, & James. Learned about praising cheese.

Still practicing Limoncelli’s To Do & time management techniques, still
haven’t read his book.

Created a new nagios service group for our routers (called “network”), nagios
should now page me when it loses the ability to talk to either subnet.

Started organizing the kitchen in the new house, it’s finally starting to
resemble a kitchen. The refrigerator is old & loud, I hope the landlord
replaces it after a few rent payments / complaints.

Installed wordpress last night - this will be my weblog.

Overall a good day, finally feel like I’m accomplishing something.