As what as you like

• Jan 14, 2008

  Migrating Ubuntu to RAID1

  I have a fair stack of data that I quite like, some of which is vitally important, stored in multiple places and generally not at concern for loss without some very bad things happening already. The rest I’d just like to keep. For example, I wouldn’t cry if I lost all my uni work, but it would be a shame. Same for the working emulation of my trusty Amiga that I used for so long, but now barely remember how to use. So, not wanting to trust it all to a single hard disk, I bought a second so I can could clone the data onto two disks with RAID1. Not a problem in Linux thanks to software RAID. I knock up a RAID1 with a single partition on the new disk (which the tools like doing as much as they make sandwiches, grr). rsync across the existing / to the raid volume, modify fstab, grub and maybe something else and reboot expecting tenshu to finally live up to its name… Except that’s not its name. Not when it’s booting. It turns out that having created the RAID volume while fully booted, it had been tagged as being for a machine with a hostname of “tenshu”. The initramfs does not know your hostname because your hostname is stored on your root partition, which is a RAID partition that hasn’t been mounted yet. It is possible for the initramfs to have a hostname, and I expect it might even have a kernel commandline option to specify it, but either way it’s not there by default. As any string comparison function will tell you, “tenshu” is not an acceptable match for “(none)”. So to fix this, boot the system and it should sit for ages waiting for the RAID arrays to assem ble (this timeout is *far* too long. what the hell takes this long to be detected by the system?!). After a while it will get bored and give you an initramfs shell. Busybox to the rescue! I suspect you can run mdadm -A /dev/md0 --auto-update-homehost, although I ran mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdb3 --update=homehost to be specific and because I found those options first. Reboot and bam, the orange bar of progress skips up merrily. Assured that my data is safe on the new partition, I can now proceed to trash the original disk and grow the RAID1 to include it.

• Jan 4, 2008

  More Nokia n95

  The awesomeness of this phone continues… as well as a rash of cool apps I’ve installed, I also just tried out the “Home Network” features. What this actually refers to is uPnP, specifically DLNA. What does all that mean? It means I can view/copy the photos/movies/music from the phone with my PS3, which also means I can not only use the TV out to display arbitrary things, I can also view the media digitally, via wifi through a easily available/usable interface. This feels like the future!

• Dec 28, 2007

  Nokia n95

  I recently got a Nokia n95 from Orange and have been playing with it for a week or two. Overall I am most happy with the thing. It’s a little bit slow and stranger than SonyEricsson’s firmware in some ways, but it has some wicked features: * GPS * TV Out * Symbian GPS is obviously useful, you can bring up a map of where you are and look around. The TV Out was a total surprise though, and is incredibly cool. I figured it would just be used for things like image galleries, and while they are specifically tailored for TV output, it works everywhere! You can nagivate all the menus, run apps and so on. Symbian is just really handy because there are plenty of apps for it and a pretty open development environment. Short review, but all in all, I’m happy so far :)

• Dec 27, 2007

  Jorge rocks

  Thanks very much to Jorge Castro for pimping Terminator on his blog. I hope I get the flurry of patches he mentions!

• Dec 26, 2007

  Terminator 0.6 released

  Terminator 0.6 is out. As usual you can get all of the goodness from here or my PPA, which has the 0.6 package already.