July 2021 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

war story: power failure makes CentOS system unbootable
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 30 Sep '22

30 Sep '22

tl;dr / spoiler: change fstab so that /boot/efi is not automatically mounted. See the recommendation at the end of this message. My gateway computer is a little PC running CentOS. It does not come back after a power failure. The reason (as best I can tell) is interesting and I think that I have a fix. My system is UEFI. It boots from a UEFI system partition, known as /boot/efi to Linux. If this gets corrupted, it won't boot. It is a VFAT partition. On my gateway (a Zotac Zbox RI321, a cute little box with two ethernet ports), the UEFI firmware apparently won't boot if the dirty bit is set in the system partition. CentOS normally runs with /boot/efi mounted. So when the system isn't shut down cleanly, the dirty bit will be on. Consequence: the system is not going to boot after a power failure. Odd observation 1: if I put a live Fedora 25 USB stick in the system and try to boot in this otherwise-unbootable state, CentOS boots from the main disk. So this really looks like a firmware bug/quirk. Odd observation 2: fsck doesn't seem to automatically fix the system partition. Once CentOS 7 booted, I dismounted /boot/efi and did an fsck on it. $ sudo fsck /dev/sda1 fsck from util-linux 2.23.2 fsck.fat 3.0.20 (12 Jun 2013) 0x25: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt. 1) Remove dirty bit 2) No action ? 1 Leaving filesystem unchanged. /dev/sda1: 16 files, 2420/51145 clusters Googling got me to <https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50917> In particular, this advice seemed quite good: ==== recommendation ==== Two other changes I recommend for UEFI systems, to each OS's /etc/fstab. - For the /boot/efi mountpoint, add the mount options x-systemd.automount,noauto - Change fs_passno (last column) to a 1 or 2; the canonical fstab instructions suggest 2, but systemd treats 1 and 2 as the same. The first change means the EFI System partition will not be automatically read-write mounted at boot time; it's a bad idea this is the default because it puts the ESP at risk especially if ther are crashes, FAT has no journal and will therefore always be marked dirty in such a case; no other UEFI OS mounts the ESP by default. Second, if anything tries to access /boot/efi (read or write), systemd will automatically mount it, and because of the fs_passno 1 or 2, it will fsck it first and that fixes and clears the dirty bit in case it's set. Right now without these changes, it's just a matter of having the right number and bad timing of crashes to render the EFI System partition corrupt.

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USB TV Card Free
by Ansar Mohammed 26 Jul '21

26 Jul '21

Hello All, Apologies if this is too much off topic, but I have some extra hardware lying around that is free to a new home. NIB never used still in box.DVDXpress tv card I have a ton of other hardware including SIP phones and SAS hard drives. If it’s too much off topic I won’t post the list

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long war story: growing the ESP (/boot/efi)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 Jul '21

15 Jul '21

== why you might wish to grow the ESP == In a UEFI system, booting starts with the ESP (EFI System Partition). Apparently Windows creates a 100M ESP during a fresh install. 100M isn't enough sometimes. On my notebook, Linux's firmware update mechanism, when updating the UEFI firmware ("BIOS" is a misnomer), stages gobs of stuff in /boot/efi. My ESP filled up and updates stopped. (The ESP was mostly filled up with Dell / Windows stuff, but the firmware update pushed it over the edge.) == growing ESP partition with gparted == This should be done from a bootable live Linux system. It isn't wise to move partitions while they are in use. gparted can grow a partition by shuffling all the other partitions. It needs free space, either from unallocated disk space or from shrinking other partitions. After it had made my ESP larger, it refused to resize the (FAT) filesystem inside the partition. == growing the ESP FAT filesystem == gparted? no luck (see above). === fatresize == no luck: it claims that the ESP's partition isn't FAT. It is wrong. What was it thinking? I hacked on it to cough up more information in the diagnostic. For some reason, fatresize thinks that the FS is NTFS. See my fork of fatresize, if you care: https://github.com/HughR/fatresize === brute force === [this can actually be done while running off the disk. You do need to unmount the ESP after step 2] 1) copy all of /boot/efi to a different filesystem 1a) see later, but do this now. 2) use gparted to make a new FAT32 filesystem in the partition (it will naturally use the whole space) 3) copy the backup back into /boot/efi OOPS: fedora won't boot properly because the filesystem's UUID has changed. It is used (at least) in /etc/fstab for /boot/efi. A partition has a UUID and a filesystem within a partition has a UUID. It is the filesystem's UUID that matters. FAT filesystems don't have a UUID but they have something that is a bit like one: the "serial number". That's what Linux considers to be the filesystem's UUID. Each FAT filesystem has a likely-unique serial number. It is 8 hex digits, sometimes shown with a "-" between the fourth and fifth characters. It is generated randomly by the file-system formatter. We need to get the new VFAT FS's serial number to be the same as the old ones. 1a) note the old FS's UUID. You can glean it from the UUID field of the /etc/fstab entry for the ESP. Or you can figure it out from the gnome "disks" program (before you blow away the old FS). 4) fix up the serial number using mtools mlabel command. Note the serial must not have "-" in it. From <https://superuser.com/questions/1247972/how-to-change-vfat-partition-uuid> sudo mlabel -i /dev/sda???? -N 12345678 where ???? gets you the correct ESP partition and 12345678 is the desired UUID / serial number. If you use mtools to create the FAT filesystem, you can probably specify the serial number and not have to go back to fix it up.

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My slides: Pages → Searchable PDF (→ archive.org)
by Stewart Russell 14 Jul '21

14 Jul '21

Are here: https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Pages_to_Searchable… (LibreOffice) or PDF: https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Pages_to_Searchable… cheers, Stewart

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[ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)
by Karen Lewellen 08 Jul '21

08 Jul '21

Speaking personally as someone who has used the program for field production, I am rather disappointed. Audacity open source audio editor has become spyware https://www.slashgear.com/audacity-open-source-audio-editor-has-become-spyw… Ewdison Then - Jul 5, 2021, 12:47am CDT One of open source software’s biggest strengths is, naturally, its openness, which brings other benefits like freedom of use, security through scrutiny, flexibility, and more. That is mostly thanks to the open source-friendly licenses these programs use, but, from time to time, someone comes along and tries to make changes that infuriate the community of users and developers. Sometimes, those changes can even be illegal. Such seems to be the fate that has befallen Audacity, one of the open source world’s most popular pieces of software that now comes under a very invasive privacy policy. The brouhaha started just a few months ago when Audacity was bought by the Muse Group, the company behind equally popular music software like MuseScore, which is also open source, and Ultimate Guitar. So far, Audacity remains open source (and can’t really be changed into proprietary software in its current form), but that doesn’t mean that Muse Group can’t do some pretty damaging changes. Those changes come in the form of the new privacy policy that was just updated a few days ago, a policy that now allows it to collect user data. As a desktop application with no core online functionality, Audacity never had any need to “phone home” in the first place. Now the privacy policy says that the new company does collect data and does so in a way that’s both over-arching and vague, most likely by design. For example, it says that it collects data necessary for law enforcement but doesn’t specify what kind of data is collected. There are also questions regarding the storage of data, which is located in servers in the USA, Russia, and the European Economic Area. IP addresses, for example, are stored in an identifiable way for a day before being hashed and then stored in servers for a year. The new policy also disallows people under the age of 13 from using the software, which, as FOSS Post points out, is a violation of the GPL license that Audacity uses. The open source community was understandably irked by these changes. Fortunately, Audacity is open source software, and it will most likely be taken by the community and forked in a different direction, perhaps with a different name. That will leave Muse Group to develop Audacity on its own instead of being able to leverage (and exploit) the open source community’s hard work.

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searching FireFox tabs
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

I just learned this (I'm a little slow). I think it will make a big difference to me since I have so very many tabs. <https://www.howtogeek.com/722570/how-to-quickly-search-open-tabs-in-firefox/> Quick partial summary: In address bar type % and space. The rest should be clear. PS: whenever you are typing in the search bar, the sort of drop-down menu of suggestions has a bottom row with "this time, search with"" and a bunch of icons. There are icons for bookmarks, tabs, history and more.

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Re: [GTALUG] ThinkPad P15 -- crap?
by Scott Sullivan 02 Jul '21

02 Jul '21

On 2021-06-26 2:42 a.m., ac via talk wrote: > On Sat, 26 Jun 2021 01:06:23 -0400 > William Park via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: >> Hi guys, >> I'm using ThinkPad P15 Gen 1 at work. The keyboard, touchpad, and >> trackpoint are not what I expected. They feel cheap. My old T450 is >> better. >> Is it just me? Or, has anyone notice this also? >> > not just you, I also am of the opinion that it is cheap crap :( > personally I have now started using HP, the quality is just better Over the last three years my employer has issued me both an HP Elitebook G3 (Intel) and a G6 (AMD). Both have run linux well, both have had trackpoints. The build quality was decent on both, plastic on the G3, aluminum on the G6. The G3 machines had a common screen defect were one corner would develop a backlight hotspot, but it was readily ignorable. HP's dedicate dock for them also worked well, and the USB-C dock option has also been working well on the G6. Getting into the cases has always been easy with just a few screws on the back panel and no-nonesense access to RAM and M.2 slots. The BIOSes include a handy option to swap the fn and ctrl keys, which are reversed compare to thinkpad layouts. Handy for me as I'm used to the thinkpad layout. I do miss the dedicated middle click button that the HPs lack, but middle button emulation (holding buttons 1 & 3) works. -- Scott Sullivan

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Kurzweil Reading Edge
by Mike Kallies 01 Jul '21

01 Jul '21

Hey Everyone, These came up recently on the list and coincidentally there's a great Youtuber (Techmoan) who just did a piece on the devices, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0jECuwrn_U It's approached as a gadget guy, so no deep dives, but he demos it and gets into a bit of the history and the warts of the aging machines. Interestingly he adds that he's planning future videos on "more recent takes on the same concept" Cool stuff. Mike

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