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Wisdom (or otherwise) of using software RAID5 across 4 USB drives
by Mark Rogers 30 Nov '12

30 Nov '12

I have a USB caddy that takes 4 drives, on USB3. I have four 2TB SATA disks in it and have just set up a RAID5 array across the four disks, formatted to ext4. cat /proc/mdstat currently reports: md1 : active raid5 sdi1[4] sdh1[2] sdg1[1] sdf1[0] 5860145664 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_] [>....................] recovery = 1.2% (24142492/1953381888) finish=1134.2min speed=28348K/sec That's about 20hrs to complete the build, running at max speed (/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max is 500000 so I'm not hitting the upper limit there). To be honest, rebuilding an array comprising 4x2TB disks over USB in 20hrs seems pretty good to me, so I'm not overly concerned. But should I be? Is running this configuration likely to cause me grief in future? The purpose of the array is to store backups, so read/write speed is relatively unimportant. At this point the array is empty so wiping and starting again isn't a big deal if someone has better ideas. (As an aside, does the above look right for USB3 speeds? It's my first experience of USB3 and I'm using a cheap PCI-E USB3 card so I have no idea how well it's performing.) Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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XtreemFS
by Mark Rogers 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

Anyone here have any experience of Xtreemfs? http://www.xtreemfs.org/ Distributed replicated file system for Linux (and Mac/Win). Looks like an interesting package to experiment with but as it's not in my distro repositories (Ubuntu) I figured it can't be all that well established yet? Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER`

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"Signal out of range" when booting from Ubuntu 12.10 LiveCD
by Mark Rogers 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

I'm trying to reinstall an old server with Ubuntu 12.10 (it was previously on 12.04 I think, but had accumulated a lot of rubbish and a fresh install was the way to go). When I boot the LiveCD, at the point that (I believe) lightdm starts, I get "Signal out of range" on my monitor and can't get any further. I have tried various boot options (nomodeset, fb=false) without luck. I've also tried creating an xorg.conf file manually from the terminal and restarting lightdm - that has got me closer but I don't know my way around xorg.conf well enough to get this to work. (I copied xorg.conf.fallback to xorg.conf and added VertRefresh and HorizSync parameters, which got me a low resolution (800x600?) display but the mouse was all over the place and I managed to break it in the end so had to (hard) reset, losing my changes). What is the "correct" way to fix this? Is there a way to tell Xorg to dump its current settings to an xorg.conf file so that I can tweak it? What's a good "default" xorg.conf file that should work? Or a minimal one that might get me 1280x1024@75Hz (fglrx as the driver from memory). -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Reassembling a RAID array
by Mark Rogers 28 Nov '12

28 Nov '12

I have four drives containing mdadm RAID partitions: /dev/sda1 through /dev/sdd1 I believe they were previously set up as RAID5, although it might have been two separate RAID1 arrays or one RAID10 array. How do I work out what they were, which drive is which, and configure the array on a new PC to access the data? (Obviously I need to do that without losing the data on them!) Mark Rogers -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Why am I seeing "Waiting for Network Configuration" when I have configured a static address?
by Chris Green 24 Nov '12

24 Nov '12

I used to use another (small) machine as my LAN DHCP/DNS server (using dnsmasq) but that machine's other uses disappeared so I decided to move the dnsmasq configuration to my desktop machine. My desktop machine is on all the time because it's also a web server and I access it to read my E-Mail when I'm away from home. So, I have configured my desktop to have a static IP on the LAN with /etc/network/interfaces containing:- auto lo iface lo inet loopback iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1 dns-domain zbmc.eu dns-search zbmc.eu dns-nameservers 127.0.0.1 195.74.113.58 194.72.0.114 auto eth0 That 127.0.0.1 in the dns-nameservers is (I believe) correct, it makes dnsmasq act as a local caching nameserver. Everything seems to work OK once booted but I'm getting a message on the xubuntu boot screen saying "Waiting for network configuration", that seems odd to me as it indicates that Network Manager is waiting for a DHCP response from somewhere and it doesn't need it. I have removed the "dns=dnsmasq" line from NetworkManager.conf so that Network Manager isn't trying to run its own copy of dnsmasq. -- Chris Green

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Console editor with 'linebreak'
by James Freer 21 Nov '12

21 Nov '12

Who know's the editors! Is there an editor apart from Emacs and Vim that does 'softwrap' or 'linebreak' (as vim calls it). I want to use a console editor for editing text words (as opposed to programmer's code). Despite hundreds available it seems that emacs and vim are the only two that offer this. My preference would be for wordstar bindings (yes i'm that old! and i still think they are the most efficient keybindings like a lot of writers). Joe does all i want other than coping with long lines. [I seem to recall a discussion about editors a few years ago and someone on here uses Joe]. Point is i want to save in long line form but view and edit in wrapped form - just like one does in gedit or leafpad. Using nano/pico ^W^J justifies the entire file and saves it in that form... like Joe's ^B - which isn't what i want. I don't really want to have to learn either vim or emacs as they are too complex for my more basic uses but it seems i don't have much choice. So who's experimented and can advise on the many editors available. Nano has an option --softwrap or $ - it truncates but doesn't wrap like vim's linebreak. It seems surprising that no one's done a console editor with CUA bindings. thanks james

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Re: [ALUG] Uninstalling Ubuntu and installing another Linux OS
by Bev Nicolson 17 Nov '12

17 Nov '12

By the way, I've just had a shufti through Synaptic and xorg is still included, so, given that, would configuring the graphics card be a sensible option? (Choosing i915 as the driver, since it is.) The instructions I've got are for Breezy Badger so I guess some things have changed a bit since then. Bev.

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"singing" generation software?
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 17 Nov '12

17 Nov '12

Greetings all! Some of you probably know the versatile specch-generation program "espeak", which from textual input can generate audio speech, with variations in pitch and duration (and with an impressive choice of dialect accents too ... ). Whaty I'm looking for is a program which can generate a audio song along similar lines, i.e. from suitable input the output will sound like someone singing the words (tune, tempo, voice, timbre, etc., under the control of the user's input). Any suggestions? (For Linux, of course). Motivation: Following a very humorous conversation, in the polling booth on Thursday, with the six electoral registrars at the desks, where I was the only other person present, and we discussed how to liven up the proceedings, we concluded that we needed music, song, and dance. So I would like to create a song, which sets to the tune of "We're all going on a Summer holiday", the words "We're all voting for our Police and Crime Commissioner ..... ". With thanks, Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 17-Nov-2012 Time: 19:05:34 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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Determining what memory I have
by Mark Rogers 17 Nov '12

17 Nov '12

Is it possible from a Linux command line to find out what memory I have? By which I mean how many slots I have, how many are filled, and what by? I've used tools like Crucial's memory scanner (on Windows) in the past to determine what is in a system and from there to decide what best to upgrade with, and I'm looking to do something similar on Linux. The fact that Crucial can do it suggests the info is there somewhere. If not at the commandline, then GUI-based would suffice for now (but would limit usefulness). Initially I'm looking for something that works on Ubuntu 12.10 (64-bit). -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 16 Nov '12

16 Nov '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back on Monday, 19th November, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. No idea what we'll be discussing this month. Will be hard to top last month's gathering with our surprise Norwich brethren! We can almost certainly ask the question about whether we want an Ipswich ALUG Christmas Meal, I guess. :) If anyone's going to stop by later, do drop me a message so I know to stick around if it's quiet. Cheers, Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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