Tag Archive for 'bug'

Flash has been broken in Ubuntu Gutsy for a month?!

Published
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on December 26, 2007
in Linux
. 10 Comments

There are things I dislike about Ubuntu Linux, like the inability to customize during installation and the silly orange theme, but I had always thought that Ubuntu was the very best representative from the Linux world for mere mortals. Alas, Ubuntu has failed to live up to this expectation of “everything just works” in a big way. Ever since Adobe’s release of Flash 9.0 update 3 (9.0.115.0) codename “Moviestar” on December 4th, it has been impossible to install Flash through conventional means like the Add/Remove panel, Firefox’s plugin installer, or Synaptic.

Flash is one of the essential applications that every normal computer user must have nowadays. For a typical computer user to be unable to install Flash for a month (and counting) on a major operating system is frankly ludicrous. I’ve always scoffed at those who claim that “every Linux distribution sucks; *insert my favorite distro* just sucks less.” But this time, I can’t help but agree. (For the record, Ubuntu is not my favorite, but it is the easiest to install and use and my distro of choice at the office.)

Read more about this Flash bug here.

P.S. In my eyes, Mozilla Firefox is still the lone shining jewel in the arena of open-source software for end-users. Everything really “just works” and when problems arise, like the recent regressions, they get fixed in a hurry and pushed out with a fool-proof automatic update mechanism. All hail the Mozilla wizards.

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Slicehost’s Rescue Mode rocks; Gentoo’s Xen guest /proc /sys mounting bug

Published
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on December 8, 2007
in Linux
. 0 Comments

This is a tutorial / fan post for Slicehost’s Rescue Mode. Rescue Mode saved me from my own stupid mistakes and also a known Gentoo bug.

While fiddling around in my /etc/fstab file (added “data=writeback” to the mount options), I rendered my Gentoo VPS unbootable. Oh well, I just need to boot a LiveCD and fix my stupid fstab. Wait, this isn’t a physical Gentoo box in front of me, but a virtual server hosted miles away from me…

Ta da, Slicehost’s Rescue Mode to the, uhh, rescue. I log into SliceManager, go to the Rescue panel of my slice, and click “Enter Rescue Mode”. SliceManager gives me a temporary root password, and finishes building the Rescue Slice in a few minutes. Instant LiveCD-like rescue environment!

To fix my fstab, I SSH into my Rescue Slice with the temporary root password. The partition holding my regular slice is available as /dev/sda1 (and my swap partition is /dev/sda2 if I need that for some reason). I mount my regular slice,

mkdir /mnt/slice
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/slice

fix my fstab file,

nano /mnt/slice/etc/fstab

and finally return to SliceManager and click “Exit Rescue Mode”. Problem solved. Slicehost’s Rescue Mode rocks!

Unfortunately, my VPS failed to boot again but with a different error. It died upon trying to mount /proc.

The "mount" command failed with error: proc already mounted

It turns out this is a known Gentoo bug when working with Xen. Apparently Gentoo Xen guests should not try to mount /proc and /sys. I don’t understand what triggered this problem or why I did not encounter it before.

So back I go into Rescue Mode to fix this by commenting out the section of /sbin/rc that attempts to mount /proc and /sys (if you only skip /proc mounting, the next bootup will die trying to mount /sys).

mkdir /mnt/slice
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/slice
nano /mnt/slice/sbin/rc

Around line 217, comment out these chunks of code like so: (source)

#       check_statedir /proc
#
#       ebegin "Mounting proc at /proc"
#       if [[ ${RC_USE_FSTAB} = "yes" ]] ; then
#               mntcmd=$(get_mount_fstab /proc)
#       else
#               unset mntcmd
#       fi
#       try mount -n ${mntcmd:--t proc proc /proc -o noexec,nosuid,nodev}
#       eend $?

and a few lines later:

#       if [ "$(get_KV)" -ge "$(KV_to_int '2.6.0')" ] ; then
#               if [[ -d /sys ]] ; then
#                       ebegin "Mounting sysfs at /sys"
#                       if [[ ${RC_USE_FSTAB} = "yes" ]] ; then
#                               mntcmd=$(get_mount_fstab /sys)
#                       else
#                               unset mntcmd
#                       fi
#                       try mount -n ${mntcmd:--t sysfs sysfs /sys -o noexec,nosuid,nodev}
#                       eend $?
#               else
#                       ewarn "No /sys to mount sysfs needed in 2.6 and later kernels!"
#               fi
#       fi

That’s it. Happy rescuing. :)