Category Archives: Administrative

My Book

For those wondering, no, I don’t know why a print-on-demand book is showing as unavailable at Amazon. I called them about it yesterday, and they’re supposed to be looking into it, but they haven’t gotten back to me. I suspect it may not be resolved until after Christmas, at this point.

Weird Linux Problem

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.

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.

Continue reading Computer Problems