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A scene from Ireland

Neil @ Home

  • in Linux
  • 1 min read

mdadm 2.5 released

I have just released mdadm 2.5. It is available from kernel.org and freshmeat knows about it.

It had originally expected this to be a fairly small update of assorted bug fixes. But when it came to putting it together, there turned out to be quite a lot of enhancements.

One - the major one - is the auto-assembly that I mentioned in an earlier past. Others were due to the fact that the maintainer of the Debian package took decided at the same time that it was time to sort through bug reports and forward some to me. Still others were just normal stuff on the linux-raid list.

All it all there is a reasonable amount of stuff in there. Hopefully it will get some testing, and even better: will get some feed back. The only way to make it the best is for people to tell me what is wrong with it.

  • 1 min read

Mozex is cool

Thanks to a slightly off-topic discussion on linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, I recently discovered MozEx: http://mozex.mozdev.org/.

This is a very cool extension to firefox and friends.

In particular, I can tell it to use my favourite editor (emacs in my case) to edit the content of a text-area.

That means that instead of having to use the text editor that is built in to firefox (which is fairly lame) to edit my blog entries, I can use emacs, and get all it's nice features like flyspell etc.

I haven't tried it extensively yet, and have only just hacked emacsclient to open files in new frames (as my emacs is usually in a different workspace when I am using firefox) but I am using it for this blog entry, and it seems to work just fine.

  • in Linux
  • 4 min read

Auto-assembly mode for mdadm

Probably the most wanted feature of mdadm is auto-assembly. People want it to just do-the-right-thing. They want to simply be able to assemble all of their arrays without having to worry about creating and maintaining config files or anything like that.

I've always been against blind auto-assembly as it can (and occasionally has) cause problems when the wrong thing gets assembled.

However it is possible to find a middle ground, that isn't completely blind, but that requires minimal configuration effort. I've finally figured out how I want to implement that and scheduled the time to do it, and so it should appear in mdadm-2.5.

The core idea is to report the host name of each raid array. mdadm can then assemble every array that it can find, providing it is for 'this' host.

Free Indeed

What would you say is the biggest difference between "The Western World" (by which I mean Australia, NZ, UK, USA, Canada, Western Europe, and similar countries and their cultures) and the rest of the world?

I think one answer would have to be freedom. The US in particular seems to make a big deal of individual freedom, but they are by no means alone in enjoying it. Most western cultures do, while many African, Asian, and East European countries do not enjoy as much freedom (I'm not sure about South America..)

By freedom I mean many things. Freedom to speak one's mind in public. Freedom to worship as one pleases. Freedom to choose how to uses one's time and property. Indeed, freedom to own property. It also includes the concept of a free market to buy and sell goods and services.

Freedom from poverty, freedom from ignorance, freedom from curable disease are also important parts of freedom and whiile they may not be as prevalent in the west as we might like, they are much more prevalent thant in the rest.

So where does this freedom come from? The answer would seem to be "From Christians".

TODO list for mdadm

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.

TODO list of Linux md/raid

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.

  • 1 min read

Who am I ... really??

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.

Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?

Cope with that, I can.

Spiritual Gifts of Spiritual People

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.

suidrun - for providing setuid to customers when you want to mount with nosuid

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.

User-space touchpad driver for ALPS in Latitude D800

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"