The Treehouse Blog

The desktop upgrade from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 was about on par with the upgrade from 14 to 15.  Instead of the disaster that is Gnome 3, we’re instead greeted with GRUB 2 and new systemd quirks.

The main portion of the upgrade itself went smoothly.  No unexpected surprises from anaconda until the notice that the bootloader didn’t install right.

GRUB 2

So apparently Fedora 16 incorporates GRUB 2.  While its error messages seem far friendlier than GRUB classic, I really did not delve into all of its supposed benefits.  One downside is that when built with RAID support (which I seem to need since my /boot partition is mirrored), the core.img file ends up >32KiB, and thus does not fit in the post-MBR gap present on my drives.

To address this, I used a gparted live CD and resized and moved the first partition of each drive (which happen to be NTFS drives for my Windows 7 install, one of which was the system volume).  This provided a 2MiB gap between the MBR and first partition.  Booting back into the Fedora 16 rescue mode and using grub2-install on both drives successfully installed GRUB2 and, following a reboot, allowed Fedora 16 to load.

Unfortunately, these partition table and file system hijinks left Windows 7 with a bit of a problem, seeing as it would not boot.  The recommended method of using the Windows 7 installer’s “Startup Repair” feature was unsuccessful.  The “bootrec /fixboot” would not fix it, giving an “unsupported filesystem” error.  Using diskpart to set the Windows partition to active appears to resolve this, and the fixboot succeeds.  Naturally, I ran fixmbr at some point, which wiped out GRUB again, and thus it had to be reinstalled.  Success with booting both Windows 7 and Fedora 16 was then achieved.

NFS mount

The machine has one NFS share mounted via /etc/fstab.  After the upgrade, this would fail to mount during boot, but would have no difficulty being manually mounted after boot.  After researching a variety of wrong paths with various systemctl changes, the one I found to resolve this was “systemctl enable NetworkManager-wait-online.service”.

Update 1/8:

The upgrade of my HTPC wasn’t too painful.  Mucked with partitions to make room for GRUB2 ahead of time, had to change my lirc init script to not confuse systemd, disable screensaver in gnome 3 (yes, shouldn’t be using gnome to run mythtv – need to add that to the list), re-enabling services that weren’t automatically figured out from existing init scripts, switched mounts from /dev/md* to UUID-based to get the ordering right in the new boot sequence, mythtv ownership changes, etc, etc.

Firstly, I’m not a mechanic, but with electrical problems I’m willing to take a stab.

A few weeks ago, I was driving my truck (2005 Ford Ranger) back from a hike with a friend when the engine stopped.  I shifted into neutral and tried to restart, and it would crank but that’s it.  We got pushed off the road and checked for fluid leaks, etc.  Eventually I decided to try the fuel pump shutoff inertia switch and the truck started immediately.  I wasn’t completely convinced this was the problem – that maybe whatever the problem was had resolved itself around the time I reset the switch.  There was no jolting of the vehicle that should have set off the switch.  Researching the problem online, there was some indication that passenger’s wandering feet are sometimes the cause of the problem, as the switch is located in the passenger foot-well, and other indications that if it trips once reset it, if it trips twice, replace it.  I was content to reset and forget, as my passenger also indicated he may have been repositioning his feet when it happened.

A week later, the switch tripped again.  The same passenger was present, but this time there was no recollection of any bad feet positioning.  Resetting the switch was the first remedy attempted and was immediately successful.  It was now clear that replacing the switch would be the next step.  Researching Ford’s parts database found that in addition to a replacement switch, a “conversion kit” was available that would move the switch from its foot-well location to behind the trim panel (“cowl”) next to the fuse box.  I had initially decided against this (it was 4x as expensive), but the Ford dealer indicated that the kit was the appropriate resolution, so I bought one.

Installation was very straightforward, though it is difficult to position your drill in the necessary orientation to drill the pilot holes for the switch mounting bracket.  After breaking the head off a ground screw while trying to remove it (remedy: different screw), and breaking the pop-off holding the cowl in place (remedy: zip tie), the switch was finally in place.  Upon starting the vehicle, however, the airbag light began flashing a sequence.  Panic.  Must have drilled through airbag wiring or something.  No!

Fortunately, Google translated that code “27″ was indicating that the passenger airbag off light was burned out.  Interesting coincidental timing.  So, I disassembled the portion of the dash and removed the offending keyswitch/light module for a little repair work.  I de-soldered the light and replaced it with a resistor and LED.  It ended up being a lot dimmer than the factory bulb, but the airbag computer is fine with it.

So far, so good.  Hopefully no relapse is on the horizon.

References

My Haynes Repair Manual does little more than acknowledge the existence of the fuel pump inertia switch and air bag system, so here are some of the resources I found.

• Inertia Switch Teardown
• Inertia Switch, notes on a kick shutting it off
• Inertia Switch problems
• Inertia switch over-sensitivity
• Airbag Code 27 and Bulb Replacement Instructions
• Airbag Codes

It looks like deconstruction may be commencing at Gunter Valley Dam. Last summer there was an underwater construction company working at the dam, presumably repairing the gates on the intakes. This summer the reservoir has been consistently at very low levels, and in the past few weeks has been drained to the bottom. Sometime this past week, the access road has been improved and earth moving equipment arrived at the dam. A mound of rocks has been placed encircling the intake tower, and an access road for earth moving equipment has been created from the dam breast on its face to the level area near the spillway, and then down to the floor of the valley around the intake tower. There were several groups of people touring the site on my visits Friday and today.

UPDATE 2010-10-22: It looks like whatever the task was is complete for now.  The access way down the face of the dam has been closed up and all of the equipment has been removed.  A hole has been cut in the intake tower above the lowest intake, possibly for repair of the piping contained within (not sure).

A while back I had to diagram interactions between components in a KRB5+LDAP+NFS4 system.  Instead of laying this out by hand, I went with GraphViz.  I think I had known of its existence, but when I forget what the name of it is, I tend to look up this diagram of Ender stories from Wikipedia.  The diagram I made is below, if you happen to have a Celerra laying around.  Recently, I’ve started playing with GraphViz again to do some stuff for my current job, but have found out that one thing it doesn’t really do are the directory-tree type layouts one expects to find in most file managers today.  Maybe they’ll add that as a different layout engine at some point.