Category: Geekery

I noticed my backup USB drive wasn’t mounted, so my nightly backups hadn’t been happening for I don’t know how long. And when I tried to mount it, it mounted in USB “fast speed” mode, rather than “high speed”. I tried a few things, and I still couldn’t do it. So what the hell, I thought, it’s been over 6 months since my last reboot – yum has installed several new kernels, this will be a chance to use one of them.

Nice plan, but unfortunately the damn box wouldn’t boot. The first message I saw:

INIT: version 2.85 booting
mount: error while loading shared libraries: libcryptsetup.so.0:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
awk: cmd. line:1: fatal: cannot open file `/proc/mounts’ for reading
(No such file or directory)

I booted with a rescue disk, and discovered that the thing it’s complaining about, libcryptsetup.so.0, is in /usr/lib. And guess what: /usr is a different partition than /, so it isn’t mounted before /etc/rc.sysinit runs. After a bit more investigation, I found that /usr/lib/libcryptsetup.so.0 was installed by a weird rpm, and that it’s used in mount and umount. I couldn’t understand why the Fedora team would be so stupid as to disobey one of the first tenants of Unix: that the system should be able to boot without /usr. mount is installed by the util-linux rpm, and I had this strange util-linux…crypt.i386.rpm. That word “crypt” in the name was evidence that it wasn’t a normal rpm. And “rpm -qi” showed that it didn’t come from Fedora. That’s when I realized that when I’d installed the yum repository for “postgrey”, I hadn’t excluded all the other packages from that repository like I should have. And this had dragged in these crappy packages.

The first thing I did was try to “work around” the problem with files in /usr/lib by copying libcryptsetup.so.0 to /lib and booting again. But that failed, complaining about another file. So I went back to the rescue disk and tried the same work around with that file, but this time it complained about yet another missing file. I realized this could be a long process.

So now I had to get rid of the bogus versions of mount and the other files that depended on this stupid crypto stuff.

Next thing I did was go to the proper Fedora upgrade site with my laptop and download the latest real version of the util-linux rpm. Then I transferred it over to the Linux box using a USB pen drive (lovely useful things, aren’t they?). The rescue boot image mounts your Fedora file system under /mnt/sysimage, so I did a “chroot /mnt/sysimage” and tried to do an “rpm -Uvh –force” on that rpm, but it didn’t work. It gave some ioctl error. At this point I really wasn’t sure what to do. I contemplated trying to combine my / and /usr partitions into one big one and making that the boot point, but I didn’t relish the work it would take to stitch everything back together.

I started downloading the Fedora Core 5 DVD image as a backup plan, but Bittorrent was telling me it would take 6 hours.

As a desparation move, I tried booting a Knoppix 4.1 boot CD I had lying around. I manually mounted the disk partitions where they belonged under /mnt/hda6, and chrooted to it, and this time “rpm -Uvh –force” actually worked. Hooray!

I booted, and had a couple of minor hickups – nfsd had taken a socket that spamd wanted, so I was getting no spam filtering until I figured out who had the socket open and restarted everything that needed to be restarted. I also had to restart a ssh tunnel on my linode to get the mail flowing correct. I think everything is working – my blog is up, mail is flowing, news is flowing, I can NFS mount my music onto my laptop, and all seems right in the world.

But I’m up, I’m running, and I’m a little less sanguine about installing new repositories into yum. Time to go to bed.

Within minutes of my last blog post, I got notification of three trackbacks that didn’t get flagged by SpamKarma2 as spam. Each one had a somewhat spammy URL, and the last part was my subject line with “.php” appended. I went to one of them, and it was a blatant copy of my post, surrounded by their crap.

This is a disturbing new trend in the war between spammers and search engines – as well as getting a link from your site, they also copy your site’s content in order to get it indexed. Colour me annoyed.

I was spending some time reading Computer Stupidities, a fun little web site. Unfortunately some of the time you find yourself being more sympathetic to the poor “victim” of the story than the narrator because the narrator was being arrogant and not understanding of natural confusions that people new to computer might have.

One of the stories put me in mind of something that happened to me, and rather than submitting it there, I thought I’d put it here.

I was at Sun’n’Fun 2002, a large Experiment Aircraft Association (EAA) fly-in in Lakeland Florida. A local Florida ISP had put some computers that you could use to connect to the internet, with a time limit and no chairs to keep the line short. Not a bad idea, and best of all it was free. In 2002 I had a laptop, but no wireless card, so a wireless hotspot wouldn’t do me any good – this was my only access option.

Now as an aside, I should mention that I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I’ve been using email since the late 1980s, and as far as I’m concerned there are very few reasons to use HTML in email – I don’t care what font and colour you think your words should be, I’ll judge them on their content thanks, and I certainly don’t want to activate web bugs or see your spam. So accordingly, I use a plain text email client on my home machine, which I access through ssh or telnet. Pure text, fast as hell, and I can use extremely small and dumb clients like a vt100 emulator on a PDA.

So every day that I was at Sun’n’Fun I went into this area, fired up IE which was the only icon available, and typed “telnet://xcski.com/” which brought up the Microsoft Telnet client. I’d log in, read my email in less than the time limit and maybe also fire up my text-only newsreader and read a few newsgroups, log off, and leave.

The second last day of the fly-in, I was finishing up and about to leave when the guy running the booth that day came over and said “I know what you’re doing. And I want you to get out of here.” I asked what he thought I was doing, and he said “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes,” I replied, “I’m using mutt to read my email on my home server.” “You need to leave now.” “Why?” “You know what you’re doing.” “Yes, but evidently you don’t.” That’s when he threatened to call security. Since I figured Rent-a-cops would know even less than him about what you can do on the Internet that doesn’t look like Hotmail, I left. He must have seen a plain text window on the screen and somehow thought I’d gotten into the MS-DOS shell and was trying to do something on his screen, but trying to show him that I was on a different shell on a different system just didn’t register with him.

After I got home, I told my story on a newsgroup I participate in. One of the other participants used to work for that same ISP and asked me if it was “this guy” and sent me a link to a page on that ISP’s site with a bio and picture of their sales manager. I confirmed that it was. He said that while the bio on the ISP’s web site said he had 8 years experience with the Internet, it was more like 2 months experience 48 times over.