I not only have a TODO list for linux/md/raid, but for mdadm -- the userspace md management tool -- too.
It is mostly focussed on getting 2.0 ready for release, but there are some bits that can wait until after 2.0
It includes a test-suite, a '--hostid' flag to tie arrays to host and make automatic assembly more possible, and improvements to support for version-1 superblocks.
I've just spent a while hunting through old emails and todo-lists and patches and my brain, to try to create a fairly complete TODO list of md/raid in linux.
Rather than keeping it to myself, I thought I would let you, my loyal reader, see it too.
It mentions various enhancements including not kicking drives on read-errors, backgroup check/repair, sysfs support, adding devices to linear arrays and fixing particularly involving version-1 superblocks but also improving read-only mode, making 'linear' cope with v.large devices and other things.
So I did the pop-personality test, at http://tk421.net/character and it told me I was ...
Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not - for my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life greets it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, and binds us. Luminescent beings are we, not this crude matter! You must feel the Force around you, everywhere.
Cope with that, I can.
One of the topics that often receives, and requires, teaching in the Christian Church is that of so-called Spiritual Gifts. This is hardly a new thing. Paul was teaching about it in the first century to the Corinthians (1Cor12) and the Ephesians (Eph 4) and others (e.g. Romans 12).
But it is still an important thing to teach about as there seems to be much confusion about it. One of the divisions in the Protestant Churches of today seems to between the so-called "Charismatic" and "Evangelical" movements and a large part of that division seems to be based around the understand of spiritual gifts. This is particularly ironic as in the places where the New Testament particularly teaches about theses gifts, the over-riding focus of the section in on Unity within the church.
So why am I saying all this? Because I recently gained a perspective on gifts that I find very helpful. It seems to put things in the right context in that it focuses on people, and people are what God is really interested in: People and their relationships to Him and to each other.
My observation is simply this: That some of the most significant gifts that I have received from God are people. The greatest gift was certainly a person: Jesus. Other gifts are very often people: people who encourage, or teach, or challenge, or care, or reveal God in some other way. I wouldn't say that gifts from God are exclusively people: God is much bigger than that. But it seems that when God wants to speak or act in someone's life, he prefers to do it with another person.
We have several thousand customers, mostly students. Many of them have no idea what a setuid bit is, and don't really need to know. This has lead to several hundred setuid or setgid files that really should be set-id. This may not actually be a real security threat (a setuid image file cannot do much) but there is the potential for a security problem.
Also, allowing setuid files means that someone with temporary elevated privileges can (a workstation left logged-on) can easily elevant them to permanent privileges. This can be alleviated by reguilar scanning, but for this you need a lisdt of allowed setuid programs, and if you have decided to have such a list, there are better ways than scanning.
So I have written a little program that can give setuid functionality to customers whose homedirectory is on a filesystem that is mounted with nosetuid. The program requires all setuid programs to be recorded in a control file - /etc/suidrun.rc. Providing such files pass some simple tests, they can be run as though the setuid bit were really working.
The program in available under the GPL from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/suidrun/.
See the man-page for more details.
Over the past few months (too many!) I've playing with a user-space driver for the touchpad on my Dell Lattitude D800 note-book - an ALPS touchpad.
The 2.6 Linux kernel does contain a driver for the ALPS touchpad, but I am unconvinced that the kernel is the right place for such a driver, and it doesn't let me do interesting things and experiment easily.
Anyway, I now have a user-space ALPS driver that does what I want. I supports corner-taps which give me access to all 3 X11 button, and side-stroking to get a scroll wheel. It also allows me to continue dragging something after my finger hits the edge of the pad.
The sourcecode is at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/D800/ALPSmouse.c. It should compile quite easily. You just run it (as root) and tell X11:
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Well, mdadm 1.12.0 is out now. You can find it at the usual places: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/ or http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/.
It seems that whenever I try to type 1.12.0, it comes out as 1.20.0! It happened twice while creating this article, and it happened when I was creating the
freshmeat announcement.
I noticed just after I clicked the final 'commit' button. I looked around
to see if there was any way to update a pending release, and there wasn't. I guess that makes sense as I had already been asked to check it.
Anyway, the mail went of out to mdadm-subscribers telling them that 1.20.0 was released :-( But when the daily fm-news came out, someone had corrected my blunder to 1.12.0 (I just mistyped it again!). Thankyou to freshmeat!
Now to get stuck into a new release of mdadm 2.0-devel. I want to add a '--hostid' option so that mdadm can determine if a given array was create for "this" host, and can then automatically assemble it safely.
No entries for several months... Why? Maybe I just lost the urge.. or maybe there is something more.
I am a person who is keen on structure. Not everything I do it totally structured, but where structure exists I like to find and make use of it. The thing about a blog is it is largely unstructured. It it just a time-ordered series of thoughts. I think that is great, but I would like there to be extra structure as well.
Sometimes different blog entries at different times are connected by a theme. That connection should be made apparent somehow. But this blog doesn't let me.
So I tried creating sub-blogs (look over on the right hand side) but there didn't really get anywhere.
So where next?