- Roundtable - muug.ca

hard drive failure curve
by Trevor Cordes 04 Sep '14

04 Sep '14

OK, so you know how many (most?) computer components' failure rates follow the "bathtub curve": http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/des_s99/sw_reliability/Image1.gif They either die quickly due to egregious manufacturing faults, or live a long time (near 0% failure rate), and then all start dying as they get really old. The bathtub curve occurs in tons of places, like with a simple light bulb. As per my experience (probably dealing with over 1000 drives personally), and google's studies, as well as anecdotal information, hard drives are different. The failure rate seems to be bathtub-ish. The initial failure rate is fairly bathtub. But the useful-life period is at a much higher level and seems to grow slightly, meaning instead of dropping to near-zero failures during useful life, they drop to around 15% failure rate each year, mostly independent of age. Then, in the old-age phase they seem to ramp up much slower towards death. It's not a hockey-stick right edge, it's more a constant gentle hill slope. We all have seen many drives that are still running after 8, 10, 20 years. In fact, it seems more of a survival of the fittest system (maybe like turtles?), where once they live to a certain age, many go on to live far beyond the average. Anyhow, my question is, what else in the non-computer world has a failure graph like hard drives? Something easy for a neophyte to grasp. Normal bathtubs have lightbulbs. What analogy can be used for hard drives? I haven't been able to think of any! Surely there must be one??

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[Muug] MUUG Meeting, Sept 9, 7:30pm -- Sage
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 02 Sep '14

02 Sep '14

The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, September 9. The meeting topic for this month is as follows: Sage Sage is a free open-source program that allows (in the style of Mathematica or Maple) various types of symbolic manipulation. As described on the web page, Sage is built out of nearly 100 open-source packages and features a unified interface. It can be used to study elementary and advanced, pure and applied mathematics. This includes a huge range of mathematics, including basic algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, exact linear algebra and much more. It combines various software packages and seamlessly integrates their functionality into a common experience. It is well-suited for education and research. The user interface is a notebook in a web browser or the command line. Using the notebook, Sage connects either locally to your own Sage installation or to a Sage server on the network. Inside the Sage notebook you can create embedded graphics, beautifully typeset mathematical expressions, add and delete input, and share your work across the network. Michael Doob will be our presenter. Before the break, as this month's RTFM topic, Rob Keizer will talk about the tmux(1) command. The group holds its general meetings at 7:30pm on the second Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. ***************************************************************** Please note our *NEW* meeting location for this month: Room 1L08, Lockhart Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence St. and Balmoral St. Parking is available on the surrounding streets and in the lots on nearby streets. Look for signage once you're at the building, or ask a security guard. ***************************************************************** For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their Web server: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ Help us promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board or other suitable public message board: http://www.muug.mb.ca/meetings/MUUGmeeting.pdf -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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32->64
by Trevor Cordes 27 Aug '14

27 Aug '14

OK, screw 32-bit PAE, I'm going to switch to 64-bit Linux. (For reasons left as a teaser to read the upcoming newsletter...) I'm going to attempt an in-place upgrade F19 to F20, similar to what is outlined here: http://archive09.linux.com/feature/123800 It sounds do-able. I'm more than used to doing wacky pseudo-supported upgrade procedures; I'm running many boxes that have been upgraded from Fedora 3 all the way through to F19 via yum (headless, via network) only; and those boxes have also been hw upgraded a few times each! Try that with Windows (and the end result is clean and trim, not bloated)! I do have a couple of questions I can't seem to find answers to: 1. Will /usr/local/bin stuff I've compiled myself (not too much), which are obviously 32-bit binaries, run on my new 64 system? 2. If #1 requires 32-bit libraries, can Fedora 64-bit have both 32 and 64 libraries installed? 3. Will I lose flash? 4. How many programs am I running that (as per link above) use binary arch-dependent data files? The article mentions db files (I use only MySQL/Maria), but I don't mind doing a full text dump/restore. But what else might use them? I'm a bit scared that systemd's new journal logs might also cause problems. What else? (Good thing UNIX is so text-based.) Why do I not want to do a wipe/reinstall? a) I'm good at getting the wacky option to work, generally. b) I've configured the !*%@@ out of my box and to resetup everything to the way I have it would take way more than the 1 day I am guessing the upgrade method will take. c) #b includes the bazillion daemons I run (and would require reconfig / data file migration) Thanks guys.

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Networking Workshop Questionnaire.
by Sean Cody 25 Aug '14

25 Aug '14

Hey folks, an idea a ways back that it would be neat to put on a workshop on networking design and techniques. In order to gauge interest, and ideas of what content would be the most valuable I've put together a questionnaire. http://bit.ly/networking_questionaire If you are interested in learning more about networking and network design, you are invited to fill in this questionnaire. As well please feel free to send this questionnaire along to any other groups or folks whom may be interested in participating. -- Sean

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Interesting Linux Kernel Developer Panel discussion video
by Bradford C. Vokey 22 Aug '14

22 Aug '14

The latest on the Linux kernel from Linus Torvalds; Andrew Morton (Google); Shuah Khan (Samsung); Andy Lutomirski (AMA Capital Management); and Greg Kroah-Hartman Interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8myENKt8bD0

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CA Domain Registrars
by Dan Keizer 19 Aug '14

19 Aug '14

Hi there -- well, I'm getting frustrated with my current registrar " domainsatcost.ca" ... whom I've used for many years. They recently implemented an automatic renewal for all domains. Meaning, I get an email in my inbox saying I've been billed x$ for my domains that are 45 days from expiring. I understand the reasoning behind it, (ie: DAU's) but I certainly don't agree with being billed without a pre-notice invoice of some type. (They pointed out that I have the option of logging onto the site and looking at my expiry date to find out when I would get billed -- bah -- not the point). Since they have no opt-out option and have no other option to not be renewed automatically, I am looking at other registrars to send my small needs, referrals, to. What do you guys know of for decent registrars for CA domains that you'd recommend? that don't have draconian policies ... Thanks. Dan.

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Control panels - WHM/cPanel, Plesk, Virtualmin
by Hartmut W Sager 14 Aug '14

14 Aug '14

I know that most of you are "raw Linux" geeks, but, as a control panel user on rented Linux servers (usually VPS), I'll ask anyway. This affects a decision about to be made. I have had extensive experience with WHM/cPanel (crappy!) and Plesk (superb!) over the years and right up to the present. But, partly to save money, we are now looking at Virtualmin, which is part of the Virtualmin/Webmin/Cloudmin family. The question is simple: Is this Virtualmin/Webmin/Cloudmin stuff a viable alternative? We don't need a huge array of features, but we need the stuff to work properly, and to be user-friendly enough for us to use. Reseller and/or customer layers for setting up domains/sites would be desirable. We are IT people to quite a degree, but not knowledgeable enough at the Linux prompt nor of all the details of the Linux OS. Also, does anyone here know whether Virtualmin/Webmin/Cloudmin entangle themselves into the OS the way WHM/cPanel and Plesk both do (requiring a disk format and fresh OS install to get rid of them)? And finally, would anyone here be willing to give some paid help if we get stuck or into trouble with Virtualmin/Webmin/Cloudmin? Hartmut W Sager - Tel +1-204-339-8331

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Pipelight - Flash, Unity, etc. on Linux
by Adam Thompson 13 Aug '14

13 Aug '14

So I'm sure lots of you already know about this, but in case you don't (I didn't!) - there's an *easy* way to run Windows plugins under Linux: pipelight. See all the details at http://pipelight.net/ . YMMV, but it finally lets me run Unity3D plugins on Ubuntu. (One note: it requires NSAPI support, so it won't work in Google Chrome v36+) -- -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net

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Auto-response
by Sugumar C 07 Aug '14

07 Aug '14

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bisecting distro kernels
by Trevor Cordes 07 Aug '14

07 Aug '14

I'm still struggling with that horrible oom-killer kernel bug present in all post-3.11 kernels. (To feel my pain, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1075185 ) I even posted to the LKML and got zippo replies. There's nothing else I can do now but Git bisect. Here's my dilemma, you can't really bisect distro-modified kernels, or in my case Fedora (source) SRPM files. The reason is those don't really exist in Git. The distro takes the Git files, freezes them, adds its own stuff (patches, etc), and makes up its own RPM SPEC file (or similar for DEB, etc) and then slaps its own kernel version number on it (the third and fourth numbers). For Fedora, some guy has a page and scripts to help bisect kernels "the Fedora way" but his scripts fail due to yet another 32-bit bug (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1090186 ) meaning I can't use them. I'm not sure what his things even do to make it all gel, but I haven't found any other references to bisecting "the Fedora way". So the question becomes, should I just forget all the Fedora-specific tweaks and patches and just try to build myself a vanilla kernel and do the bisecting that way? Now, for sure I don't want to answer the config questions on my own so I'll have to find a way to steal or modify the config (and perhaps most of the SPEC file) from Fedora to ease the process. Does this seem reasonable? The last thing, is it seems distro kernel version numbers seem to have nothing to do with kernel version numbers beyond the 2nd dot. For instance, Fedora has a 3.11.10-200, but "Linux" doesn't really have a 3.11.10 version. They only have a 3.11 release and then lots of Git commits, but nothing that officially says "3.11.10". Or at least that's what it seems to me after all my research. Since I know that 3.11.10-200 is working, and 3.12.9-201 (but maybe not 3.12.1-xxx e.g.) is broken, it seems to me that I would have to bisect vanilla 3.11 with vanilla 3.13 (note: NOT 3.12!). That's a lot of extra bisecting! I can reproduce the crash nearly every night just by going to sleep and waiting for 5-6am to roll around, but then all my services are down until I wake up and hit reset, so bisecting/testing/bisecting... will take forever and a lot of hardship to me and others who rely on my services. If anyone can correct any incorrect assumptions above, and so make the path easier for me, please do so! If anyone has a better understanding of bisecting in relation to distros, please explain. Delving into this much deeper than I ever wanted to, it appears to me to be really messed up that no one bridges the divide between Git and distros for the purposes of bisecting. Surely I'm not (once again) the 0.000001% of Linux users that needs to do something like this?

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