Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

A happy migration day in my life of a Linux user.

I easily managed to upgrade my entire system from GCC 3.4.3 to GCC 4.0.2, using the wonderful ArchLinux distribution.

Steps:

1. list self-compiled packages using a script
   

   #! /bin/bash
   installed=`pacman -Q | sed -e “s|\(.*[^ ]*\) .*|\1|g” `
   repos=`pacman -Sl | sed -e “s|[^ ]* \(.*[^ ]*\) .*|\1|g”`

   for pkg in $installed
   do
   found=`echo $repos | grep $pkg`
   if [ "$found" == "" ]; then
   echo $pkg
   fi
   done

2. disable/uninstall all the packages listed above, in order for the system to remain stable after a bootup with new GCC & libraries
3. upgraded everything with “pacman -Syu” - followed close all the changes being done in the system, mainly backuped files
4. rerun “lilo” - new kernels got installed
5. rebooted
6. I could feel fresh GCC 4 air
7. reinstalled “nvidia” - the installer has a setup which must be run after a kernel upgrade
8. recompiled own packages previously disabled/uninstalled
9. started X
10. enjoyed KDE 3.4.2… an updated version compared to my previous one

Now, I’m getting ready for KDE 3.5

P.S. Yep, I do enjoy being an ArchLinux user.

While working at the computer, I got the following amaroK information popup:

amaroK has had to delete some of the images that you downloaded from Amazon. Amazon’s licensing policy require us to remove content within 90 days of its download. You can read more about Amazon’s policies here. Please note that this only affects covers downloaded using the Cover Manager’s fetch covers feature and the covers downloaded using the context menu in the Context browser, not manually added covers.

That is what I call a good interaction between the licenses world and the open source world.
Congratulations! Everybody wins.

… again.

It is very difficult for me to say but… the most appreciated by me application in the Windows world was defeated. It was tough. I tried to save it but it failed… for the 2nd time in (my) history.

Last night has been a busy night trying to send 2 e-mails of ~3MB each with Microsoft Outlook 2003. I know, they’re pretty big, but in my father’s business people often exchange big files (documentation) using e-mail. Unfortunately, some servers block big e-mails or some busy people have e-mail boxes with few free space. That’s when.. (no) surprise.. the e-mails bounce back, filling YOUR e-mail box with the same e-mails you’ve sent (lots of MB included).

As I’ve said here, my ISP behaves a bit weird. I have uploaded very fast the e-mails, but they weren’t gone from Outbox. Downloading bounced e-mails took really long time. Unfortunately, Outlook sent over and over those e-mails and they bounced back, filling my father’s Inbox with ~14MB. Guess what… everything was blocked. My father couldn’t read future e-mails because those e-mails were waiting in the queue to be downloaded. Moreover, if Outlook did manage to download an e-mail, it would not delete it from the server unless all the transfer has been completed. A broken connection would have meant re-downloading everything (which did happen a few times). Great “joy”…

My father has a pretty small e-mail box, considering the tons of e-mails he gets - only 50MB maximum mailbox size. The hosting provider in Romania (actually a resaller from US) is not very competitive - I’ll make sure this changes in the future. I have to use POP3 for his e-mail in order to free his mailbox. The problem of the 14MB of bounced e-mails could only be solved by IMAP.

Enter the Outlook IMAP experience. My previous expericences with IMAP in Outlook were also not very bright. I’ve had problems before. I’ve selected the e-mails, pressed delete, but Outlook tried downloading them and everything got stuck… again. I’ve closed the laptop and got to sleep. I had enough for one night.

Today, a bright day in history, I tried again IMAP in Outlook, with no success. Last time I had the “big e-mail, everything is stuck”-problem (was one >10MB e-mail, I know: people have huge bandwidth outside Romania) I’ve used KMail to get the e-mail, remove it from the mailbox and make Outlook work again. The same thing happened now: I’ve started KMail, created an IMAP account, opened my father’s mailbox, deleted the bounced e-mails and… everything was back to normal - Outlook successfully downloaded the rest of the e-mails.

Now, I’m very sad that the only application I really liked on Windows - Outlook - behaved so bad. Outlook has probably the worst Queue Manager (& IMAP support) I’ve seen in the world of e-mail clients (I live in a very limited world of e-mail clients: Outlook, KMail, Thunderbird). Unless Microsoft does something about the Queue Manager and the IMAP Support, I’ll have to retreat the title of e-mail client from Outlook, leaving it with Best Application on Windows excluding e-mail clients .

Hope for the best in the future, or I might change my father to use Kontact when KDE is ported to Windows (with the help of Qt4 which is said to be GPLed for Windows also).

When I first configured my P3 450MHz LAN server I wanted to add support for active FTP connections from behind NAT. Linux is smart enough to do this with connection tracking (old article describing Linux connection tracking).

It didn’t seem to work… until I came across a web page mentioning the unknown to me kernel module named “ip_nat_ftp”. I manually loaded it up, it loaded its dependencies and everything started to work.

[root@server:~]# lsmod | grep ftp
ip_nat_ftp 4720 0
iptable_nat 22692 2 ip_nat_ftp
ip_conntrack_ftp 71600 1 ip_nat_ftp
ip_conntrack 30348 4 ipt_state,ip_nat_ftp,iptable_nat,ip_conntrack_ftp

Pretty impressive. Simple and elegant solution, exactly how I like it.

I’ve got my Linux back working.

I’ve reinstalled a fresh ArchLinux on my system, with a little regret that I couldn’t continue moving my system from one computer to another. pacman -Syu brought my computer up to date. It even works better that my previous installation.

The recovered data from the Linux partitions doesn’t look bright, meaning that there is much data scattered throughout numbered dirrectories, which is supposed to be correct data. I am finding bits and pieces every day, but I don’t know when this recovering process is going to be over.

I had 3 tar.gz files containing my home dir backup on one of the partitions of the damaged HDD. The archives had ~1GB each and I didn’t have where to put them, that’s why they remained on the HDD. Fortunately, I was able to recover one archive - the oldest one (December 2004). It is something. I managed to recover data files which, on the recovered files on the /home partion, appear to be zeroed files (copying a bad sectors results in putting zeros at the output).

Overall, a successful but lengthy operation, which still isn’t over.