February 2022 - 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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Positions at Toronto Public Library
by Giles Orr 24 Feb '22

24 Feb '22

Two positions are being advertised in my immediate department, should anyone be interested. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2926612537/ - ITS Lead, Digital Products https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2926616569/ - Dev/Ops Analyst Feel free to contact me if you have questions. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Firmware Test Suite
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 Feb '22

21 Feb '22

UEFI firmware is quite complex and abstruse. It is easy for a vendor to get it wrong. As long as Windows seems to run, ship it. I just discovered the Firmware Test Suite <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirmwareTestSuite/> It acts as a lint for firmware. It detects some violations of standards (such as ACPI). Although it is a Ubuntu / Canonical project it can run on other Linux systems or even from a stand-alone bootable image. To install it on Fedora: sudo dnf install fwts Probably the only thing you can do with the result is fling it at your vendor. It might also give a consumer insight into the quality of the firmware engineering.

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I'm discarding an old notebook!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 17 Feb '22

17 Feb '22

I have an Acer Aspire 9300 that I bought in 2007. I cannot get it to be useful. The problem is (mostly) with drivers for the NVidia Go 6100 video. - nVidia stopped supporting this in the proprietary Linux driver. - nouveau is unreliable https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46557 - using the generic video driver just doesn't cut it. Darn NVidia! If they released specs, I think nouveau would work. There seems to be some bug related to more than 2G of RAM (a lot in 2007). But that's not the whole story. Other than that, the machine is functional. Oh: Windows 10 goes into a slow failure loop if you try to install it. (The computer came with Vista. Not safe to use these days.) The machine would not be fast but it would be useable for many tasks if it worked! It has a 64-bit AMD Turion processor. This was before AMD bought ATI; the "chipset" was made by NVidia.

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Can anyone recommend a source for Laptop batteries..
by Michael Galea 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

I'm looking for recommendations on replacing my T420's battery pack. Either a store, source, particular manufacturer or any experiences would be welcome. -- Thanks Michael Galea

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OT Raspberry Pi 4 Powered Rubik's Cube Solver
by Ivan Avery Frey 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-bot-solves-rubiks-cube Cheers, Ivan

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Tomorrow: Join 18 Readers at "[ONLINE] #34 Jenny Ren on Linux Performance Revolution" (fwd)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

Papers We Love is a great idea for a meetup group. It hasn't been very active during the pandemic. This might be of interest to GTALUGers. <https://www.meetup.com/Papers-We-Love-Toronto/events/283482352/> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Papers We Love - Toronto <info(a)meetup.com> Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2022 18:10:32 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Tomorrow: Join 18 Readers at "[ONLINE] #34 Jenny Ren on Linux Performance Revolution" A quick reminder that this event is coming up tomorrow. Are you going? Ding Yuan added this event for Papers We Love - Toronto What: [ONLINE] #34 Jenny Ren on Linux Performance Revolution When: Wednesday, February 9, 2022, 6:30 PM ET Where: Online event Let's revive Papers We Love :-) Jenny Ren will discuss "An Analysis of Performance Evolution of Linux's Core Operations" (http://meet.meetup.com/ls/click?upn=yBf4llw5PeaY7leriFwBBpcdDwF5GMjZuOVJGeF… And Jenny is the author of the paper! (You shouldn't need to read the paper ahe...

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[GTALUG-Announce] Tonight's Meeting
by Alan Heighway 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

When: Feb 8, 2022 7:30PM Speaker: D. Hugh Redelmeier Topic: Gitlab fundamentals followed by Q&A and Discussion Date/time: 2022-01-11 T19:30:00 Location: Virtual - Big Blue Button (https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl) TOPIC: The GTALUG executive uses several tools. I hope to introduce those tools centred around git: git, gitlab (a public host for git trees), and markup (a simple text markup language for text). *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing] --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Can anyone recommend a "health" smartwatch?
by David Collier-Brown 04 Feb '22

04 Feb '22

My fitbit with a heart-rate sensor died, so I bought a Spade and Co "Health Smartwatch 2", which was absolutely /beautiful/, just what I wanted... and didn't work. All three apps they use all demand I own a phone with a larrrrge screen, so you can fill in the forms. I have a small screen, and the app knows I wouldn't want to scroll down, so it prohibits my doing so. (They should terminate their UX person with extreme prejudice (:-)) Any recommendations about good "health" watches? If folks have had good experiences with some, I'll try their apps, and if they work, order one. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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[GTALUG-Announce] February Meeting Reminder
by Alan Heighway 03 Feb '22

03 Feb '22

*When: *Feb 8, 2022 7:30PM *Speaker:* D. Hugh Redelmeier *Topic:* Gitlab fundamentals followed by Q&A and Discussion *Date/time:* 2022-01-11 T19:30:00 *Location:* Virtual - Big Blue Button (link above) --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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