Too clever for my own good: a warning

[lucho]

So, Here's a story with an important lesson inside I haven't been posting here; I've been letting my real life get in the way of my internet life. Now, I plan to fix that by telling one of the things that kept me busy.

I can´t really say that I´m a noob when it comes to Linux. I used to compile my own kernels before I got too lazy to bother with it. Even so, I´m always learning new stuff. I always mess with the guts of the system just to learn how things work.

Anyhoo, I thought I was clever, and boy was I wrong. I keep an installation of Debian Stable (first Sarge, then Etch, now Lenny. It´s that old ), and one of the reasons is GRUB. There, I have it point to the shortcuts "initrd" and "vmlinuz" of each partition; I can do any and all crazy stuff to the partitons as long as those two links point to a kernel & initrd.

Sounds clever, right? Well, when I updated to a sidux kernel on my Debian Sid installation, apt-get always got spammed to hell with error messages about update-initrdfs. An unconfigured kernel boots and works fine, but you lose some things like deborphan and autoremove. I spent weeks futilely searching through Google trying to find the error. I almost gave up, until yesterday I looked at the output of synaptic and my jaw dropped to the floor. You see, I always read the final lines of output of apt-get/synaptic and saw "error:9."

It never occurred to me to scroll up a bit to read the other error message that said my links were confusing apt-get. Erasing the links before updating the kernel solved everything. (I only need to recreate them after updating, and everything is shiny)

So, the moral to this long story? Show more intelligence than the author of this post: listen to your computer, it is very good at telling you what´s wrong. Read the error messages; you will save untold time and grief poring over Google search results.

[lucho]

So, anybody else have a palm-to-the-forehead moment?

[D-cat]

I could have had a V8!

When you say links, are you referring to symlinks?

[Freston]

So, anybody else have a palm-to-the-forehead moment?

I was playing with virtual machines on my headless server. The good thing is that I can do this anywhere where I have access to a Linux box. So I was sitting at work, it was a slow day and I thought I'd build a bridge between my physical interface and the guest OS. This was the last part that I needed to get it to work.

Well, without going into to much detail. The way you build a bridge basically comes down to this: You take down the interface. You build both ends of the bridge. You tie this to the physical interface. And you bring the interface back up.

So I was sitting 25km away from my server, logged in over SSH. And I performed step 1; take the interface down. I was already typing the next command, but nothing ever came to my screen. Nothing. I waited. I waited more. And more. And nothing. Only a physical reboot later did I get it to work.

[lucho]

When you say links, are you referring to symlinks?

Yeah, or at least I think so. it's just this command:

ln -s /path/to/kernel/ <name of link>

it makes GRUB much easier with multiple OSes.

I was playing with virtual machines on my headless server. The good thing is that I can do this anywhere where I have access to a Linux box. So I was sitting at work, it was a slow day and I thought I'd build a bridge between my physical interface and the guest OS. This was the last part that I needed to get it to work.
Well, without going into to much detail. The way you build a bridge basically comes down to this: You take down the interface. You build both ends of the bridge. You tie this to the physical interface. And you bring the interface back up.
So I was sitting 25km away from my server, logged in over SSH. And I performed step 1; take the interface down. I was already typing the next command, but nothing ever came to my screen. Nothing. I waited. I waited more. And more. And nothing. Only a physical reboot later did I get it to work.

*DOH*

Damn, at least no DoS attacks on that server

[Freston]

Damn, at least no DoS attacks on that server

Yes, indeed, it's the single most effective way of handling a DDoS attack.

Or to quote the BOFH: "No service, therefore no denial"

[Hal343]

I rebooted my machine today to change into another distro and got the dreaded grub error 21. After about 5 tries, I realized that my external USB drive is the first one on the grub menu. Turning it on solved the problem.