What fresh hell is this? Why is Win 8.1 on my laptop telling me a five gigabyte file is too large for an empty 16G flash drive?
Category Archives: Administrative
Is There A Fedora Doctor In The House?
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?
Hundreds Of Books To Sign
…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.
Off To Vallejo
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.
Computer Problems
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.
On The Road Again
Heading back down to LA. Traffic in the Bay area is a mess as a result of the BART strike, but we’ll be heading east, and it shouldn’t affect us. We’ll be back there this evening.
Back From Las Cruces
It was a good conference. But in the morning we’re driving up to the Bay Area to visit relatives. Maybe more blogging in the afternoon, but it will probably be light until Monday.
Off To Las Cruces
I’m heading to the airport in about an hour, heading to ISPCS. Probably light blogging until this evening.
New Server
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.
Commenting Problem
A regular commenter writes:
I’ve been blocked from commenting on your site for weeks now. I’ve tried both IE and Chrome, and I get the same error message:
Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.
If you are a regular commenter or you feel that your comment should not have been blocked, please contact the blog owner and ask them to modify this setting.
As far as I know I’m not behind a proxy, whatever that is. I use the same email addy and computer I’ve always used. If I’ve offended you somehow and you’ve blocked me, I would like the opportunity to apologize for the offense. If there’s a technical issue, I haven’t changed anything, but Win7 updates so many times, I wouldn’t know if it messed up my settings somehow.
As I told him, I have no idea why WordPress thinks that he’s behind a proxie, but I’m afraid that if I don’t block proxies I’ll be inundated with comment spam. I’m not sure how to allow his IP, because while I have a blacklist, I don’t think I have a white one. Any suggestions?