Load average

No comment:

  2:05pm  up 79 days  6:40,  5 users,  load average: 2948.98, 2948.04, 2945.49

(Later we found out that the load was actually "fake", the kernel had somehow died and everything accessing /proc/$pid/* was hanging in state D)

Don't Ask

(No, it was not me who made this necessary. Yes, we did reinstall the machine anyway.)

#!/bin/bash
while read p; do
  rpm -V $p > /dev/null && continue
  echo "fixing $p's file ownership..."
  while read x x u g x x x x n x; do
    chown -h $u:$g $n
  done < <(rpm -qlv $p)
done < <(rpm -qa)

Increasing the X resolution for KVM guests

Today I wondered again, why my KVM guests get only 800x600 display resolution, even though the framebuffer console is configured for 1024x768. While most of the time this does not matter for testing, it does once you want to evalutate desktop environments or such in a VM.
I checked the xorg log file and found, that the Cirrus card emulation apparently has no DDC channel implemented, thus cannot detect the monitor and then X.org falls back to a plain SVGA monitor. From the logfile:

Using default hsync range of 31.50-37.90 kHz
Using default vrefresh range of 50.00-70.00 Hz

Simply setting those ranges to something reasonable (I got my values from "hwinfo --monitor") helps quite a lot. Put this into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-monitor.conf:

  HorizSync   31 - 61
  VertRefresh 50 - 90

and you get a much more usable 1024x768 resolution.

"Could not find any loop device." WTF?

susi:~ # mount /space/FACTORY.iso /mnt/ -oloop
mount: Could not find any loop device. Maybe this kernel does not know
       about the loop device? (If so, recompile or `modprobe loop'.)

WTF? That never happened to me before, so I assumed (obviously) that something was broken in current FACTORY and filed a bug.

Finally we found out, that the loop module was always unconditionally loaded on every machine by boot.localfs, which is no longer run since I switched to systemd.

As Kay pointed out in the bug, it is very easy to fix:

susi:~ # echo loop > /etc/modules-load.d/loop.conf

At least until someone fixes the Kernel's loop device behaviour ;)

CUPS "400 Bad Request" Problem - And its Simple Solution

Recently I wondered why the CUPS client machines in my network, all with a client only setup, could not print.
I finally found out that the CUPS webfrontend on port 631 was only reachable when called as "http://print:631/", with "http://print.home.s3e.de:631/", there was only a "400 Bad Request" error.
So as a first solution I configured the client to print on "print", not on "print.home.s3e.de", but that was of course still an issue that needed investigation.
Long story short: I had this line in /etc/hosts:

192.168.200.1 server.home.s3e.de server proxy print ntp

(I'm running dnsmasq on this machine to serve the internal network with DNS and DHCP, so those multiple hostnames are for the different functions of the machine).
Adding "print.home.s3e.de" to this line and restarting cupsd solved those issues.
No idea why CUPS looks into /etc/hosts (or if it is some libc function that does this), but maybe this post helps somebody else with this problem.

plasmoid-networkmanagement - How to connect?

After Will's talk about new KDE Features for 11.4 on the openSUSE Conference, I thought I'd finally give the networkmanagement plasmoid a try and installed it.
While it looks neat and apparently would show additional information about my connection (compared to knetworkmanager), I was unable to find a button or other UI element that would allow me to connect to a 3G Network.

Has anyone managed to use this for connecting? How?

I was just lucky that I had nm-applet installed, otherwise I would not even have had a way to get online at all... :-)

Nifty dnsmasq Trick: Reverse Lookup using a specific Server

With dnsmasq, it's easy to look up a whole domain using a special dns server. The option is

   --server=/foo.corp/10.11.12.13

This will look up everything "*.foo.corp" using nameserver 10.11.12.13. So far, so good. But today I also needed the reverse lookup for a specific IP adress zone to be done via a specific nameserver. Reading the manpage, I found no option for that, but then I remembered stuff that I had learnt in a distant past: that reverse lookups are actually a name lookup of the in-addr.arpa zone, with the "reversed" IP address. So I tried

  --server=/10.in-addr.arpa/10.11.12.13

and that one works fine, looking up everything 10.x.x.x using 10.11.12.13.

And it still was much easier than using ugly bind. That's why I prefer dnsmasq in daily use over bind, dhcpd and all the other crap. It just works ;)