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2008/05/17 Ubuntu, what the fsck is wrong with you?
π 2008-05-17 23:41 by Merlin in Public

Since Ubuntu Hardy had just come out, I figured it was a good time to upgrade my laptop and mythtv server to the new version (the rest of my machines still run straight debian, and I just apt-get install stuff on them from testing without ever doing apt-get dist-upgrade).
Since I'm not totally stupid, I upgraded my laptop first and things pretty much went OK (X broke, but that's because of my unsupported ATI firegl 5200 chip, that required the fglrx binary only driver at the time.

So, I decided to upgrade my mythtv next. I figured I might have to fix up a few things after the mythtv 0.20 to 0.21 upgrade, but things couldn't be so bad, could they?
Well, what actually happened is that my server never rebooted after I upgraded the kernel. Ok, no biggie, I wait to get home and see what's up, and what was up was that /dev/sda1 would mount, but none of my other partitions (/usr, /var, and others) would mount: e2fsck said the partition was busy, and /bin/mount refused to mount the partition because it was busy too.
WTF? They were not used in /proc/mounts, or anywhere. I was quite stumped, and debugging without /usr or /var wasn't fun (BTW, thanks debian/ubuntu switching from one crappy editor in /bin: ae, to another crappy editor: nano. What a lot of crap, just compile a small minimalistic vim or other vi clone and put it in /bin already!
Anyway, after much searching, I found out that the problem was due to evms. The upgrade helpfully removed my lvm2 scripts and stuck evms in there. Not only that, but they forced me to switch to evms!
But it gets better, the evms init script makes the partitions busy and prevents mounting them from their normal location (/dev/sdax) and forces the use of /dev/evms/sdax , unless you a using a non standard kernel patch that isn't in my kernel.org kernel.
And I love how the fix that is typically given is "apt-get remove evms" when that, in turn, removes lvm support and screws me over too...
To the geniuses who thought it was ok to pull that kind of crap: you suck. I don't care if it was somewhere in the release notes, you can't just force me to switch to evms, break/remove my lvm scripts, and depend on a non standard kernel for me to be able to see and mount my regular partitions and my lvm partition.
You cost me several days of myth downtime, lost shows, and therefore have blood on your hands!
And I don't care if evms is great, it's not the agreed upon future of linux, so forcing people to switch in a non revertable, non compatible change is just wrong on too many levels!

Ok, now I can focus on fixing what broke/changed in mythtv 0.21...
2008/05/13 Ongoing Stupidity of Airline Security
π 2008-05-13 12:42 by Merlin in Public

So, Jennifer and I flew to Chicago during the weekend, and for reasons that are a bit long, I didn't have my driver's license with me.
Not to worry though, I knew that for a local flight, licenses or IDs were not actually required to travel within the US.

At the checkin, I showed them a copy of my real license, which they could have looked up by number, but they have no way to do that. I also had a real copy of my old license, which had expired driving privileges, but was still a perfectly good ID.
Why expired driving licenses aren't good IDs if the picture matches, is beyond me...

Anyway, I got the SSSS (special security screening something...), and the sole security guy at SJC proceeded to inspect every single pocket of my scottevest jacket while complaining to me that had too many pockets and too much stuff (he actually missed a couple of pockets).
Then, he started working on my backpack and asked me "is it as bad as your jacket?". I told him yes, he started and then just gave up because by then he had backed up the security line for 10mn.

So, outside of the fact that going through all this when I actually had a fully legit but just expired ID, and a copy of my real ID that they should be able to look up, is pretty sad.
Where they failed is that I was going through security with Jennifer, we had a combined ticket, she didn't have the SSSS, and they didn't search anything on her even though she was with me the entire time.

On the way back, it got worse though: we showed up a bit earlier at the airport (Chicago/ORD). Since I was somewhat annoyed that the previous guy emptied all the carefully sorted pockets in my scottevest, I just gave my jacket to Jennifer, I got the SSSS again, the guy barely looked at my backpack and couldn't look at my jacket since I didn't have it with me (not that he would have bothered apparently), and I went through.
Then, it occurred to me that the only reason I got SSSS was that they had written SSSS on my printed at home boarding pass. Next time, I can just print two boarding passes, they print SSSS on one, and I show the other pristine one at security.

Seriously, this stuff is just a joke!

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