/dev/chat - 2019-06-17

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5:17 AM

I see this message every day - presumably a cron job.

> Device: /dev/sdg [SAT], 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

Why isn't the issue (whatever it is) fixed automatically? Should I consider getting another external drive?

2 hours later…

7:10 AM

@FaheemMitha unreadable sectors aren’t replaced until they’re overwritten, in the hope that the drive will manage to read them at some point

2 hours later…

8:52 AM

@StephenKitt Could I tell the drive not to try to read them?

I'm guessing that wouldn't be a suitable question for the site.

@FaheemMitha yes, by writing them

9:45 AM

@StephenKitt How would one do that?

@FaheemMitha when I'm happy with the commit message I will send a PR, yes.

@sourcejedi Ok.

(If the error persists even after you have written to the entire drive, there is a workaround for that drive quirk: superuser.com/questions/531772/… )

ah, I don't know if that's the exact same counter though

@FaheemMitha internet articles suggest that a SMART scan will report LBA_of_first_error, and since you only have one, that's all you would need

@sourcejedi You mean, plug in the number that the SMART scan reports?

A SMART scan should run at a good speed, whereas I am not sure how efficient the "badblocks" program is on modern drives.

@FaheemMitha yeah, use it (carefully :-) with dd bs=blocksize count=1 if=/dev/zero of=... seek=block_number

Probably your LBA's are for 512 byte blocks, but you need to be sure :-P.

9:58 AM

@sourcejedi Sounds tricky. Thanks for the hints. I wonder it would be better to just get a new drive. Unfortunately, new drives do cost money.

@FaheemMitha yes, using sourcejedi’s recipe, and you can check you’ve got the right recipe by trying to read first

@StephenKitt Oh, I didn't notice that he wrote that answer.

Read that particular block?

@FaheemMitha yes, if it fails then you know you’ve got the right one

@StephenKitt Makes sense. Thank you.

The safe advice is definitely to get a new drive :-), in case it starts getting more bad sectors.

10:01 AM

Agreed, I replace drives when they get a bad sector, or move them to scratch use (e.g. for huge test builds where the resulting binaries are thrown away).

@sourcejedi Yes, it's hard to know how much to trust a drive once it starts going bad.

@StephenKitt Do you use a lot of drives?

External drives seem more fragile than the internal variety. Or they simply get more exposure.

Maybe sometimes people see bad sectors from some one-off error, e.g. the drive was jostled / shook once while it was being written, and will be fine afterwards. But I do not know. Other times you get very little warning time before the drive just becomes entirely unreadable.

Backups are good :-)

@sourcejedi To be clear, this is a backup (external) drive.

2 hours later…

12:13 PM

Shame about those fancy new editors:

threatpost.com/linux-command-line-editors-high-severity-bug/…

@JeffSchaller yes, who needs M, just stick to Vi or Eacs

or ed of course

M of course is itself a pretty decent editor

@StephenKitt we can't keep losing keys like this, though:

1

Q: Letter "E" Stopped Working - Linux Mint

Can't login to my Linux Min 19 Cinnamon Laptop because I singular key stopped working! Any ideas around this?

@JeffSchaller indeed

This turns up quite regularly for some reason...

an unforeseen risk in today's world of (longer) passphrases over (shorter) passwords

just to tie this back to yet another U&L Q, if you take advice from above and plug in a new keyboard, you better not be using DVORAK:

2

Q: Prevent keyboard layout reset when USB keyboard is plugged in

Whenever I plug in a USB keyboard, the layout of all keyboards is reset to some system default (a US layout which doesn't have modifiers and other keys the way I want them). I've observed this on many Debian and Ubuntu systems, including Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. This behavior has been around for a...

x11 keyboard keyboard-layout not-root-user hot-plug

3 hours later…

3:24 PM

Ah, someone accepted an answer I wrote 2.5 years ago. Nicely.

2 hours later…

4:57 PM

@Jesse_b Not so sure about that. My computer only has daemons, no devils.

@Kusalananda I'm somewhat disappointed that it sounds like it writes /var/log/authlog in plain text, not some weird binary format

@derobert :-)

Open an issue.

@Kusalananda github.com/reyk/systemd-openbsd/issues/3

On a related note, when I came in to work today my workstation had been slowed to a crawl. Turns out Clementine (music player) had decided to allocate a ridiculous amount of memory, something it sometimes does for reason's I don't know ... so I had systemd put it in a cgroup and limit its memory. Which fairly quickly swapped it out, making everything fast again. So systemd dramatically increased my swap usage... and I'm happy about it.

grumble crontab -e is far too closes to crontab -r. Time to visit the Bareos console...

5:23 PM

sigh the things you see when you go looking under rocks ... this is part of an init script for an unnamed vendor's Linux app:

tomcat_pid() {
  echo `ps aux | grep org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap | grep $TOMCAT_HOME | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'`
}

almost makes me want to write a while true; script with some creative arguments

I can guess why they did it, though. I doubt the pidfile is in a standard location across distros. Or ways of installing Tomcat.

oh they package tomcat, so they're in full control. besides the fact that this is a systemd-based system and they're still putting out init-scripts

ok, that's pretty ridiculous, then. Sort of curious why they need the tomcat pid, signaling it? That'd be even more ridiculous, should ask systemd to do that.

to see if it's started during start and to kill -9 (of course) it during a stop()

no systemd unit files to be found; none expected (vendor has a pretty low bar)

systemd makes unit files out of init scripts... so they could still ask systemd to do it, even if they write init scripts

but, yeah, I've had the fun of vendor code too... and it's amazing how @!#*! a lot of it is

5:29 PM

@derobert yeah, but I'm sure they're not even aware of the sysV generator...

it works, ship it

I'm not sure that's a low bar. I mean, I've certainly experienced "it works most of the time, restart it if it doesn't, ship it" from e.g., race conditions

I dunno, do words mean anything? If they say they support RHEL7, do they mean it? The answer is no

"runs there, probably"

"Bob got it to run once"

what's that phrase, "some days it's just not worth it to chew through the white straps"

Had it wrong, it's the restraints, not the straps

2 hours later…

7:49 PM

Hmm. I don't have enough score in either of the tags to suggest the synonym, but probably libvirt and libvirtd should be the same thing

(I would suggest libvirt, as that's the project name)

6

Q: Merge libvirt and libvirtd tags

Shouldn't libvirt and libvirtd tags be merged?

discussion tags tag-synonyms

@JeffSchaller ... which looks like there was consensus to merge them, but it never happened?

@derobert looks that way!

if only there was a mod around who could fix that :-P

yeah! those lazy sons of -- oh, right

starring the post so I can re-discover it after I learn how to merge tags

7:57 PM

4

Q: How do I merge tags?

Example: azure-kubernetes and azure-aks, arm-template, and azure-template. I don't see an option; I see a synonym option, but I need somebody to upvote the synonym (if it even achieves the same).

support tags retag-request tag-synonyms

... maybe?

really we just want a synonym, right?

oh, both concepts exist. first, synonym, then merge. hmm

Yeah. I'm guessing you can probably just create the synonym, then do the merge

> This may take some time for a moderator to get around to

especially if it's their first time doing it

LOL, yeah. Maybe @terdon knows how to merge tags

they're not even suggested synonyms

yeah I'm treading carefully because I remember him having trouble with it

8:00 PM

@JeffSchaller I can't suggest them (because I don't have the +5 in the tags), but I'm guessing you can... because it probably ignores all restrictions for mods

Gilles particularly uses the word "merge" and they tend to know their way around the place

unix.stackexchange.com/tags/libvirt/synonyms

just because I'm a mod doesn't mean I know what I'm doing :) I want to make sure I achieve what the goal is

which you get to by going to a tag page, then clicking the info tab (confused yet?), then clicking synomyms

so I've suggested a synonym.

8:02 PM

but yeah, I understand wanting to ask someone first, it's not like it's suddenly urgent.

the tag could really use an excerpt and a wiki cough

I'm surprised yours doesn't just happen. It looks like it only took it as a suggestion for people to vote on, just like if a regular user suggested it

maybe there's something terdon's been meaning to tell me

nope, diamond's still there

@JeffSchaller Better check to make sure it's not actually cubic zirconia.

of course, there's a different page with an "approve" link

and the moderator said, let the link be clicked. and lo, there was a synonym

so now there is a magical merge link on the page

this seems like a good place to stop and take a breath

8:07 PM

ok. I'm bothering to write a tag description and wiki :-/

thank you!

darnit, I thought answering it would bump the question on Meta

Huh! "Home - Active" is different from "Questions - Active"

I'll revisit in a week, or sooner if Gilles writes back saying "go"

unix.stackexchange.com/tags/libvirt/info

First stab at writing tag info for it

@derobert excellent - thanks for doing that!

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