David A. Harding
Thursday, 12 Apr 2007
Last Tuesday (3 April 2007), I had the pleasure of attending two LUG meetings in the same night.
Hardware SIG: Ubuntu Sendmail Weirdness
The first meeting was the
LUG/IP
Hardware SIG
at 19:00. Hardware SIG meetings are very informal: everyone finds a seat
and anyone who needs help asks for it. The first person to ask for help
said he was using
Ubuntu,
and had installed sendmail, but now his computer was
booting up very slowly. I attached myself to him and began
troubleshooting.
The error displayed on his screen during boot up fingered
sendmail. It said something like sendmail
can't write to /etc. It seemed sendmail
was being run before the root filesystem was remounted read/write, and
so we poked at init scripts and the /etc/rc*.d directories for a
bit, but couldn't figure out how sendmail could be running
before the filesystem mounting code. Some head scratching and a
grep command later, I discovered a sendmail init
script had been installed in the /etc/network/if-up.d directory
and Ubuntu, with its new
init
replacement,
was running the network initialization code before finishing the
filesystem mounts. I bet we'll see a lot of these resource conflicts in
Ubuntu systems in the near future.
RUSLUG: Kira Morrow Presents ZFS
I left the Hardware SIG (in Hamilton) at about 20:10 for the
Rutgers
University LUG
(in New Brunswick) and arrived at the meeting start time of 21:00.
Except, instead of starting, we ate pizza and talked for 40 minutes. The
pizza was delicious and the talk mildly entertaining; I think it
would've been better if we had chairs, but then we probably would've
talked for another hour.
Kira Morrow
presented
ZFS
as part of her role as an official
Solaris
ambassador to the campus. I don't think she prepared the slides and I
don't think she's played with ZFS very much. However, the slides were
informative: ZFS is included in Solaris and
OpenSolaris
10 and uses something like
RAID-2
for automatic data mirroring. ZFS has features for compression, quotas,
reservations, and snapshots and is controlled through two tools,
zfs and zpool.
After her slideshow, Kira played a 3 minute movie about ZFS that demonstrated configuring and maintaining a ZFS filesystem plus enabling some of the features mentioned above. That concluded Kira's presentation, and I then ran a mini-ad hoc keysigning party (as announced). Three of the seven people who attended the meeting, including me, participated in the keysigning.