Treg's blog

Sometimes, copying big files/volumes with DD takes much time. With this simple script, you ‘ll see the progress of the copying process (in MB). (source)

dd if=/boot.img.gz of=/dev/sda -pg bs=1M 2>&1 | perl -e 'print $i++." MBn" while(read(STDIN,$c,3));'

Finally there’s a bugfix for the Linux kernel SATA bug I mentioned in this post. This is how I fixed it on my Ubuntu 7.04 machine:

– Make a file called stopsata in the folder /etc/init.d
The file should contain the following two rules:
#!/bin/sh
echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_disk/0\:0\:0\:0/stop_on_shutdown
– Make a file called S89stopsata in the folder /etc/rc0.d
The file is a symlink to the previously made script. You can link it with:
ln -s /etc/init.d/stopsata S89stopsata

Attention, Ubuntu 7.04 is using kernel 2.6.20.x. This fix is already included in the kernel but not standard activated yet.

Info/patch about the bug on kernel.org: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7838
Info about the bug on Ubuntu’s launchpad: Bug #63937

Since the latest network-manager-openvpn doens’t support pkcs12 certs, I needed to convert the pkcs12 key into other keys. This is how I managed to do it.

Extract CA cert, client cert and private key to a single PEM file
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.pem

Extract client cert to client.cer (no private key or CA cert)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.crt -clcerts -nokeys

Extract client private key to client.key (no certs)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.key -nocerts

Lately I installed an Ubuntu Dapper LTS 6.06 server with a 3ware 8006-2 sata raid controller. I wanted to use the CLI and the 3DMD raidcontroller software. So I downloaded the software on the website, installed it, but it just refused to work, complaining about wrong drivers. I suppose the drivers into kernel 2.6.15.x are good enough, in fact they are _to_ good/new. So I started to find a solution. I found one by downloading the newest CLI version 9.4.1.

The 3DMD tool wouldn’t work either, so I tried to install the 3DM2 tool. It failed because the installer didn’t generate a .pem file. So I searched some repositories with 3DM2 binaries and found a debian based package.

wget http://ftp.debian-unofficial.org/debian/pool/restricted/3/3ware-3dm2-binary-i386/3ware-3dm2-binary_9.3.0.4-1duo1_i386.deb

I just had do install it with dpkg and it works perfectly now.

The latest stable CentOS release (4.4) isn’t compatible with some “older” software (compiled against other depencies). So today an application I wanted to install broke up. “Unable to find libstdc++.so.5 …” cause version libstdc++.so.6 is the standard installed version.

You can easily solve this by installing the CentOS C++ compatibility library:
yum -y install compat-libstdc++-296 compat-libstdc++-33

If you are a Gnome user, just press Alt-F2 and enter “gegls from outer space”. I didn’t know this one. 🙂

N3rd.tv ‘s a fantastic initiative from Jochem Kossen and Sander van de Graaf. On a weekly base, they bring you all the latest OpenSource related news in a sort of (dutch) TV news. N3rd.tv got it’s name because the show deals with “nerd like” topics or at least a bit geeky. Are you tyred of reading and reading and reading all the newssites and weblogs with tech info, than this is the show you must watch. (and it’s funny too)

Fortunately people decided to develop a new version of the Linux Flash player. On this moment version 7 ‘s the latest stable version. BUT, a few days ago version 9 beta has been released. Finally Linux users will be able to see all those Flash based sites and movies (which are nearly all made for flash 8 ).
You can find the player in the Sevaes Repo for Ubuntu Edgy Linux. The package ‘s also hard masked in Gentoo Portage (here).

These days I’m testing the new upcoming Ubuntu Linux release called Edgy Eft. I find some weird shutdown SATA bug. When I’m shutting down the computer, I can hear that the SATA disk doesn’t spin down like it should be. After posting this on the forum and reporting the bug on launchpad (bug #63937), it seems to be an upstream kernel 2.6.17 bug. Let’s hope this is solved soon, cause the sound that the harddisk makes when it shuts down isn’t that nice.