atp

Atp's external memory

Back on Track. Surveys, return of blue skies

(Storm and comms problems mean these are being posted in batches)

This morning saw the return of Blue Sky and sunshine, albeit in brief periods after some bad squalls and thunderstorms overnight. I failed to wake up during the most severe one at 2:30 am which proves you can become accustomed to anything. The Typhoon wind has dropped, but we're keeping the hatches battened down just in case. The swell also dropped during the day, making a fun dive in the afternoon on the North Wall possible.

Written by atp

Monday 10 August 2015 at 09:29 am

Posted in Conservation

Surveys Starting

Today was a bit of an extreme in both directions. I managed to slip and fall down some concrete steps. Even following the rule of “one hand for the ship” on the hand rail I still had a nasty knock. Still - things improved from there. The kids did a nature walk

Written by atp

Monday 10 August 2015 at 09:10 am

Posted in Conservation

A Down Day - High winds, High Seas, High Spirits.

The storm really blew through last night. Horizontal rain and high winds. It's not called Typhoon Beach for nothing. This morning was a different side of Danjugan Island. Yoga class was moved from the front cabana to the old kitchen cabana due to flooding. Unfortunately halfway through the rain started again, and those of us at the back started getting 'a little' damp. None the less with stiff upper lips (as well as necks and lower backs) we battled through to the end.

 

Written by atp

Saturday 08 August 2015 at 08:49 am

Posted in Conservation

Stormy Conditions

Today was rather different. We woke for Yoga and high winds at 06:00. We rapidly established that I’m not a flexible as I used to be and that my chakras are all out of whack. I could only look on with envy as on the next mat Pete ‘another beer?’ Raines smoothly transitioned from flying locust to downward dog ending in the crying baby position. Looking forward to more tomorrow.

 

Written by atp

Saturday 08 August 2015 at 08:35 am

Posted in Conservation

Adventure Begins!

(Due to problems with comms and the storm, these are somewhat delayed in being posted).

Here we are, all on Danjugan Island – the adventure has begun. As I write this, there’s a gentle breeze coming off the sea, and we’re helping ourselves to a buffet of Filipino spaghetti, and fish and calamansi and rice

Written by atp

Saturday 08 August 2015 at 08:23 am

Posted in Conservation

btrfs recovery again

An update to the previous article on btrfs recovery.

Written by atp

Monday 13 April 2015 at 1:38 pm

Posted in Default

btrfs recovery

This article has been superseded by http://blog.tinola.com/?e=43

 I had high hopes for BTRFS. The brochure was very enticing. Checksums, snapshots, disk management... all good things for someone who fondly remembers the digital advanced file system. Unfortunately the brochure describes something that right now is a construction site.

Lately I've been getting really disenchanted by it. There are several reasons for that, but the general bugginess and instability is the main reason my enthusiasm is waning.

At home I have several filesystems on several hosts that all run BTRFS and filesystem problems are a common occurrence under both light and heavy loads. Even with latest Fedora (21) or latest kernels (3.17.6 at time of writing) on centos the situation has not improved much. It still feels like we're beta testing something which has been rushed to market.

For example running a mac timemachine share via netatalk (for the missus' computer) is a rapid way to kill a BTRFS filesystem. I think its something to do with sparse files. However even bog standard rsync of normal files  has been able to make a small 3 disk raid 1 setup go read only on me fairly rapidly.

Aha - you'll be thinking that this is some dodgy hardware problem and I'm pointing the finger unfairly at BTRFS. Well, that's not the case as I've seen this happen on multiple machines, some running centos+epel kernels and some running Fedora 20/21. Plus it's acted up at work recently too.

Btrfs clearly has "the momentum" and "the mindshare" in linux land. So, I'm now in the awkward position of not trusting my data to the officially sanctioned future. The alternatives are very unappealing.

EXT4 is solid, but based on old technology.

ZFS brings too much baggage. It'll be probably what I use next out of sheer desperation. 

XFS is looking tired. Its a first generation journal based file system lacking some of the modern conveniences. Percona say it's faster for databases. There's freeze and some other good stuff, but none of the killer features. Its basically just a better ext4.

Personally I think the decision to make XFS the default FS for redhat is very telling. BTRFS is not there yet, they also don't like the baggage of ZFS - plus it also conflicts with their NIH mindset. XFS offers improvements over EXT4 but they're marginal.

Even Jolla only use btrfs for /home, and ext4 for the important partitions (as of u10 vaarainjärvi)

It seems that everyone is waiting for BTRFS to grow up.

In the mean time, here's my recovery steps for a corrupted BTRFS filesystem.

I wonder how hard it would be to add checksums to advfs...

Written by atp

Saturday 03 January 2015 at 3:50 pm

Posted in Default

yum problems

Not an obvious solution

So, going back and fixing up auth on our few remaining older systems (centos 5, not internet facing) came across the error below. Solution was beautifully non obvious, so it goes here in the external memory pack.

yum --enablerepo=my-repo-x86_64  list updates
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: a.centos.mirror
 * epel: another.centos.mirror
 * extras: and.a.further.centos.mirror
 * updates: centos-updates.co.uk
my-repo-x86_64                                                                                                                                                       | 2.9 kB     00:00     
my-repo-x86_64/primary_db                                                                                                                                            | 7.1 kB     00:00     
http://myreposerver.internal.domain/my-repo/repodata/7d1016c9fcac64ee6c0fe9b5b\
58ed1e791dae601b1b0be13ea8af523761fbabd-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno -3] \
Error performing checksum
Trying other mirror.
my-repo-x86_64/primary_db                                                                                                                                            | 7.1 kB     00:00     
Error: failure: repodata/7d1016c9fcac64ee6c0fe9b5b58ed1e791dae601b1b0be13ea8af5\
23761fbabd-primary.sqlite.bz2 from my-repo-x86_64: [Errno 256] \
No more mirrors to try.

Do not pass go. Do not collect your new sssd binaries.

Written by atp

Monday 29 September 2014 at 5:37 pm

Posted in Annoyances, Linux