Category: Revelation

Quick update in point form

  • Knees : stabby
  • Database code: not working 100%, but good enough to let QA start hammering it
  • Due date: today
  • Overtime: ending today
  • Airplane: booked
  • Weather: doubtful
  • Other plans for weekend: massive amounts of sleep and TV watching
  • Mood: cautiously optimistic

inittab, telinit, and Ubuntu

Sorry about this, but I’m going to use a blog post as my personal note pad once again.

Every time my colo box reboots, I need to restart some stuff that automatically restarts on my home box, mostly ssh tunnels. In the old days, I’d use “kill -1 1” or “telinit -q” depending on how traditional I was feeling. That tells init(1) to re-read /etc/inittab and kill any of its daemons that isn’t in the file any more and start anything that’s in the file that isn’t running.

But Ubuntu has replaced the old inittab with files in /etc/event.d. And now, you restart those with a much simpler (but much harder for me to remember when I need to) “sudo start ssh_tunnel”. One of these days I’ll remember that.

It isn’t just USB 1’s fault, it’s this stupid thumb drive

I don’t know what it is about this 2GB thumb drive, but it’s incredibly slow in USB 1 mode, but not too bad in USB 2 mode. I tried copying this 600+Mb ISO to it from my Linux box with it formatted at ext3, ext2 and FAT32, and the fastest time was over 35 minutes. The same file to a 1Gb thumb drive in the same USB slot was only 11 minutes.

On my Powerbook, USB 2.0, that same file copied to the thumb drive in 2:43. Copying it to the 1Gb thumb drive took 2:04. So it’s only on USB 1 that the other one is dog slow.