Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Technology and Society

Weird Linux Problem

3 Comments

After a reboot, I was trying to save a file to a subdirectory of my $HOME directory, and getting an error that it was a read-only drive. When I look at permissions, I’m seeing something like this:

drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 May 29 2013 Alaska
drwxrwxr-x. 5 simberg simberg 4096 Apr 26 2012 Blog
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 CA_Enterprise_Zones
drwxrwxr-x. 7 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 Conservative_Space
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Aug 9 2012 Depots
drwxr-x—. 6 simberg simberg 4096 Dec 21 14:49 Interglobal
drwxrwxr-x. 3 simberg simberg 4096 Dec 3 2010 LaunchSpace
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Nov 5 2012 LEO_Adventure
drwxrwxr-x. 2 simberg simberg 4096 Jun 19 2012 Liberty

I’ve never seen that dot after the permissions before, and it seems to be an ACL-related thing. Does anyone know how this happened, and how to undo it?

[Update a couple minutes later]

Also, could this be related to an inability to print? It thinks it’s sending something to the printer (which it sees), but it never actually happens.

[Update a while later]

Well, whatever the problem was, a reboot fixed it, as well as the printing problem.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Is There A Fedora Doctor In The House?

2 Comments

I’ve been having hardware issues with my Fedora 20 installation (yes, I know it’s still beta until tomorrow). I had it on a new WD 2T drive, but occasionally I was having boot problems, and having to repair the filesystem. I noticed that it was making strange noises and running hot, and taking a long time to even get to GRUB, indicating that it was hanging up the BIOS itself. I was on the verge of returning it, when I tried moving it from the first to the second SATA interface on the MB (I have six). The problems went away, so apparently it’s a motherboard problem on that interface (at least that’s what I’m inferring). Unfortunately, it refuses to boot now, dropping into emergency mode, and telling me that it can’t switch root, because /sysroot/etc/os-release is missing (which it does seem to be). I tried copying /etc/os-release to /sysroot/etc/os-release, but it wouldn’t let me (and etc doesn’t seem to currently exist on /sysroot).

Any ideas how to fix this?

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently Anaconda can’t be bothered to load logical volumes before looking for linux partitions. But why?

And what do I do about it? When I do a ‘vgchange -ay’ it loads them, but if I then run anaconda, it still doesn’t work, and when I go back to shell, they’re no longer mounted. I can’t believe I’m the only person having this problem, but I’ve done searches and can’t find any useful information about it.

[Late afternoon update]

Someone on twitter asked me to post the contents of grub.cfg, so here it is, after the fold:
Continue reading Is There A Fedora Doctor In The House? →

Administrative, Health, Space

Hundreds Of Books To Sign

23 Comments

…and I’ve come down with tendonitis in my right (as in “write”) wrist. Got a brace on it, taking ibuprofen and hoping it clears up by next week, when books come.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of the book, does anyone know what’s going on with this? Who would be trying to sell used versions of the book for more than retail cost for new? A couple days ago, they were asking a thousand bucks for them. And the descriptions are false, since it doesn’t have a dust cover.

[Update a while later while decorating tree]

For those curious, I’m highly confident that this is my problem. The symptoms match to a tee. Fortunately, there’s no numbness, just pain when I bend the wrist.

Administrative

Off To Vallejo

16 Comments

Heading up north in an hour or so for the weekend. But there will be computers and bandwidth there.

[Thursday-morning update]

Got in late last night. It was a three-hour drive to get thirty miles, from Redondo Beach to Valencia. Smooth sailing after that, though. Don’t think we’ll do that again. And definitely not coming back Sunday night.

It’s a good reminder of what a mess it would be if there were some event that required evacuating the LA metro area. I think we need to keep a boat in the garage.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Computer Problems

4 Comments

I just put a new install of Fedora 20 (yes, I know it’s still beta) on a brand-new Western Digital 2T drive, and it boots into emergency mode. Here’s the final output of journalctl -xb:

[Update in the afternoon]

For anyone who’s interested, here is the output of of ‘journalctl -xb’ and here is dmesg.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Whoa! Now that I look through that enire output of journalctl, I see a lot of file system errors on the /home partition. Guess I’ll run e2fsck and see if that fixes it.

[Update a while later]

Welp, that was the problem. I ended up just doing a reinstall, and let Fedora decide how to partition. I’m not real happy with it, because I’m not sure that fifty gig is ultimately big enough for root and I don’t want to have to resize later, but at least it’s working now.

Continue reading Computer Problems →

Administrative, Technology and Society

New Server

2 Comments

This is the first post I’ve put up in a while, because I’ve basically been unable to post. Our theory is that I was running out of memory (the server for this blog, and all my other sites, only had four gig). So I’ve upgraded to one with sixteen. You won’t see this immediately, until the DNS servers pick up the new IP, but hopefully I’m back on the air.