My main server, Tanukimario, has a 120GB hard drive in it and it’s started to become annoying to butt up against that limit. I have an 512GB SSD that I only used for a couple years that I wanted to use as a replacement. In order to reduce the annoyances that come from setting things up from scratch, I decided to try and use Clonezilla to copy the drive over. Since the hard drive is so small, it told me it would only take 40 minutes, so I was jazzed I’d be able to do it in the afternoon while everyone was out and I wouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.

A while back I created a copr repo for HDR Merge. I hadn’t kept up with it because there weren’t regular HDRMerge releases going on, but I noticed the git repo has been very active, so I decided to create a new RPM for Fedora 29.

And recently I learned that for the newest version of MakeMKV if you want to be able to extract Closed Captioning from older DVDs of TV shows that use an embedded CC track rather than subtitles you need ccextractor, but there wasn’t a package available for Fedora, so I made one.

It’s been six years in the making, but GIMP is finally out with their GEGL-enabled version. Although some pros had made use of it, it is now 90% of the way towards being a Photoshop replacement. The next+1 release with non-destructive layer edits will finally get it there. I’m also happy it can use RawTherapee as a RAW image editing plugin.

Hitting alt-F2 then typing email (contact name - eg Danielle) and enter and then it presents me with an email window to send an email. No need to navigate to gmail.com or go over to the screen running Kmail (actually, usually Kontact).

It’s been a while since btrfs was first introduced to me via a Fedora version that had it as the default filesystem. At the time, it was especially brittle when it came to power outages. I ended up losing a system to one such use case. But a few years ago, I started using btrfs on my home directory. And even developed a program to manage snapshots. My two favorite features of btrfs are that Copy on Write (COW) allows me to make snapshots that only take up space when the file that was snapshot changes and the ability to dynamically set up and grow RAID levels. I was able to use this recently to get my photo hard drive on RAID1 without having to have an extra hard drive (because most RAID solutions destroy what’s on the drive).

With modern technology, here’s the pattern I’ve noticed since college. New tech comes out and I can see that it’s neat, but not how I can make use of it. A few years later, I finally come across the right article and it all makes sense to me. I first noticed this with VMs. I couldn’t see a reason to want to use it outside of a server context. Then I used it to review Linux distros. Then I used it to run my network’s services. The same happened with tablets, smart phones, and Docker.

This was the status at the end of the scrub:

[root@supermario ~]# /usr/sbin/btrfs scrub start -Bd /media/Photos/
scrub device /dev/sdd1 (id 1) done
 scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:49:29
 total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors
scrub device /dev/sda1 (id 2) done
 scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017 and finished after 05:20:56
 total bytes scrubbed: 2.31TiB with 0 errors

I’m a bit perplexed at this information. Since this is a RAID1, I would expect it to be comparing info between disks - is this not so? If not, why? Because I would have expected both disks to end at the same time. Also, interesting to note that the 1TB/hr stopped being the case at some point.

Here’s the output of the status command:

[root@supermario ~]# btrfs scrub status /media/Photos/
scrub status for 27cc1330-c4e3-404f-98f6-f23becec76b5
 scrub started at Tue Mar 21 17:18:13 2017, running for 01:05:38
 total bytes scrubbed: 1.00TiB with 0 errors

So on Fedora 25 with an AMD-8323 (8 core, no hyperthreading) and 24GB of RAM with this hard drive and its 3TB brother in RAID1 , it takes about an hour per Terabyte to do a scrub. (Which seems about equal to what a coworker told me his system takes to do a zfs scrub - 40ish hours for about 40ish TB)

A little under 3 years ago, I started exploring btrfs for its ability to help me limit data loss. Since then I’ve implemented a snapshot script to take advantage of the Copy-on-Write features of btrfs. But I hadn’t yet had the funds and the PC case space to do RAID1. I finally was able to implement it for my photography hard drive. This means that, together with regular scrubs, I should have a near miniscule chance of bit rot ruining any photos it hasn’t already corrupted.

Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:

lxc-ls

That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:

lxc-start -n lemmy -d

As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:

lxc-console -n lemmy

That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did: