Linux | Shlrm.org Blag

There was a lot of buzz on the interblags about a 200-line kernel patch that enables per-tty cgroups automatically. Apparently, one can add them trivially to their home directory without having to patch any kernels.

This blog post talks about how to do it, but it didn’t cooperate with Fedora 14 very well. A bit of googleing later and I found this mailing list post that did it for me. Now I have userspace cgroups for each terminal I open. Handy, I suppose. Might be more useful on an SSH server to guarantee that each person logging in can’t overwhelm the system for the others.

To be fair, it’s not Fedora 14 that’s at fault. The 2.6.35 kernel has a regression in the e1000e driver for some Ethernet adaptors.

It was quite tricky to figure out, especially right after 14 came out, as I didn’t have an ethernet connection, and when I was able to get the connection up, and I asked on the IRC channel, no one had any insight. I let 14 stew a while, and the rest of the internet came up with similar problems. Turns out that the kernel driver included in 2.6.35 has issues. There’s some patches in the works, but I don’t know if they’ll get pulled down into 2.6.35. The fix is in 2.6.36.

Until then, you can get the latest driver directly from the e1000e’s SourceForge website here. Make, then make install it as root and you’ll be good to go. This driver version worked for me on a Intel Corporation 82566DC Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02).

Hooray for Logwatch.

It appears that someone['s botnet] was trying to hack my little server yesterday. I have a good portion of attempted logins as root from a slew of hosts. 194 separate hosts with multiple attempts from more than a few. This might explain the horrible internet connectivity problems I was having the other day.

Not really sure what I did to piss off some script kiddie. Perhaps I got someone’s attention? I haven’t blagged about anything controversial recently. Not even in politics. I did submit my resume to Monster.com, perhaps someone is determining if they can hire me as a Systems Administrator?

Logwatch entries follow after the break.

There was a lightning storm recently and the silly Arc Fault Circuit Interrupters in my house tripped off the power in most all the bedrooms, except the room my desktop was in. And so the UPS tanked, because the batteries are old and lose their charge very quickly. The graphs are logged using Cacti, and using a template/polling logic that I built using the mysql-cacti-templates project.

I really should replace the batteries in this guy (freaking sweet UPS by the way, highly recommended) so he’ll last more than a few minutes.

A friend of mine did a bit more controlled test of his UPS and here’s his blog post with graphs also.

I have zoomed the graph a bit more to get more detail on the last 20 minutes of my servers uptime.

I find it interesting that the UPS temperature actually dropped when the thing was on batteries. I remember reading somewhere that the fan only runs when the inverter is actually active, so I guess that would make sense. I also find it interesting that the input frequency never changed, perhaps the UPS only records that value once every now and then, and doesn’t update it. I would think that with 0 input voltage I wouldn’t have any measurable frequency either.

I wonder if I could/should get those AFCI breakers replaced. They tend to not keep my computers on when there’s a lightning storm, and the only way to turn them back on is to go into the garage and flip it by hand.

I used to think that Upstart was the wave of the future regarding new init systems.

Boy, was I wrong. Not that upstart is “bad.” Just that there’s something much better.

This actually makes things better instead of just providing the ability to make things better. It involves less shell, and more configuration. Dependencies are automatic, instead of manually specified. The author of the previously linked post goes into great detail regarding the reasoning behind the decisions made. It’s quite a good, albeit long, post.

I think I will have to get this working on my linux box that I intend to build. Possibly even on my laptop, as the features for enabling and disabling bluetooth would be quite advantageous. Also for the wifi and such. It’d be great if when I fired up the bluetooth, it were to start various things, like trying to connect to my mouse, or enabling the obex ftp thing.

As for a server, it’d be really nice to have if I can ever get my fibre channel setup to work. The Xen VMs won’t start until the Fibre Channel drives are available, and then they’ll all start up. Events could be fired depending on when the UPS was online or on battery.

I’m very impressed with it in concept, I’ll have to see how it goes in practice. Oh, and it’s going to be in Fedora 14. Woot.

Shlrm.org Blag

Userspace cgroups in Fedora 14

Fedora 14 and Intel Gigabit Adaptors

Attempted haxx0ring by a botnet

UPS failure graphs

A refreshing new perspective on init systems

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