irc problem

I use BSNL dataone service. Today, after connecting to the internet, I when I fired up Kopete to connect to IRC, I was not able to. I checked my connection with a ping to www.google.com and found my connection to be working fine. So, I checked my Kopete settings to ensure they were alright and so they were. Kopete does not show messages from the server. So, I came back to command line and fired up irssi. I got the following messages:
Irssi: Looking up irc.freenode.org
Irssi: Connecting to irc.freenode.org [213.232.93.3] port 6667
Irssi: Connection to irc.freenode.org established
*** Looking up your hostname...
*** Checking ident
*** Couldn't look up your hostname
*** No identd (auth) response
*** Banned: You have a host listed in the DroneBL.
For more information, visit
dronebl.org/lookup_branded.do?ip=59.93.128.10 Please contact
kline@freenode.net with questions. (2009/05/11 08.32)
ERROR Closing Link: 127.0.0.1 (Banned)
Irssi: Connection lost to irc.freenode.org

I visited the site indicated and found that it had been banned for running an insecure SOCKS server. Now, BSNL assigns a different IP each time you connect. So the obvious solution was disconection and reconnection thereafter.

I requested for removal of the ban because whoever caused the ban is no longer on that IP(, though he may return on it).

Adventure of a Gentoo install

My first Gentoo install was on an x86 laptop. It worked fine. I wouldn't say it was a piece of cake as I would say for a SuSE install. However, it was pretty much close. I was trying to get the GUI installer to work but realized gradually that it was broken and I should try my hands on the command line. After few years of linux experience, I wasn't scared of the shell. The install completed fine. I successfully configured a dual boot system. I liked Gentoo's performance and ease of tweaking. So, I decided to try Gentoo on my old desktop at home.

Now that I am enjoying vacation at home, I decided to embark on the Gentoo installation adventure (I wont be calling it an adventure, were it not in retrospection.). Recently, the desktop was upgraded to an core 2 duo processor (E7200). So, I thought of giving the amd64 version a shot. I started from the command line. Everything went fine till the grub installation. I configured my bsnl broadband to work with it. I shall write about it in my next post.

The minimal install cd kernel showed the partitions as /dev/hdbx (x being the numbers differentiating partitions). So following the instructions of the handbook, I decided that hdb7, my root partition which contained /boot folder (I do not use a separate /boot partition.) translates to (hd1,6) in grub terminology. I created grub.conf with hdb7 as root and tried install grub with root on (hd1,6). However, I was surprised when an error message told me that no such device existed. I cross checked the handbook and found I was doing as it said. I decided to get some expert opinions on this. So, I switched another virtual terminal and fired up irssi. I talked to people in the #gentoo channel. They also confirmed that I was doing fine and I didn't get any reason for such behaviour. Then I was suggested to try grub-install. I thought lets give it a shot. There were more surprises to come. The device map showed the following translations.
/dev/fd0 -->> (fd0)
/dev/hdb -->> (hd0)
/dev/sda -->> (hd1)
/dev/sdb -->> (hd2)
I reported back at #gentoo and people there were surprised too. I thought I should try in #grub channel as well.

After joining the channel, I read the channel topic. They were basically focusing on grub 2. After confirming that I could about previous grub versions, I put forth my situation. They told me that the device map isn't much predictable as it depends on the BIOS. They also told me that grub is designed such that almost always the device from which the system can boot is (hd0), as happened with me: grub-install made the / partition as (hd0) as it was going to boot from it.

Now that I had understood why and how grub was translating my partitions, (unlike as described in the Gentoo handbook,) I edited my grub.conf to reflect the changes and installed grub manually. After successful install, I was happy to see the splash image and multi-boot options; but the adventure was far from over.

First, I checked if my windows partition was okay. It was relieving to find that it was perfectly alright. Then rebooted again to resume my adventure and headed straight into the next hurdle. I started my newly installed Gentoo system only to run into a kernel panic. The error message came from VFS telling me that it could not find the root partition /dev/hdb7. The first thought that came to my mind was: probably I was right in the beginning in suspecting about the success of the install when I saw hdb instead of sdb. My doubt was based on the fact that irrespective the disk drive being ATA or SATA, newer kernels use to refer to them as /dev/sdx, where x is a letter differentiating drives. The kernel panic message also told me that I should try with /dev/sdxN format. The reason I had not done it before was because I trusted the live cd kernel's behaviour. As the minimal install cd was burnt from an iso generated by the latest autobuild, I did not think that the live cd kernel would be outdated or behave like an outdated one. I checked at #gentoo and was advised to file a bug (my first bug report) after double checking.

I used the minimal install cd again and chrooted to my root partition. I editted my grub.conf and fstab to suit newer kernels' format. After a reboot, I was happy to have successfully installed Gentoo.

sreadahead on gentoo

Sometime back I also tried sreadahead on Gentoo. Here are the results.

I didn't find much difference. According to a bug assigned to Gentoo developer, Jeremy Olexa not much success haas yet been met in this area: the upstream developers don't seem to be making much progress either.

Multi-tasking in openSUSE

This post is testimony to my satisfaction with openSUSE 11.1. On my Compaq Presario v6409, I am freely multi-tasking wihtout bothering for system crash or hangs.

On the same system, with a Windows OS, I would not try music, Firefox with multiple tabs, Thunderbird, two open pdf files simultaneously ever; but with openSUSE I can do even more and it runs smooth. Actually, here I have got a couple of KWrite sessions, an emacs session and a chat sessions on as well. Moreover, if it were Vista, it would be crawling halfway through the trial. By the way, I also edited the blog images in Gimp with all these open.

Qtcurve updated

I updated qtcurve-gtk2 to version 0.62.5-8.1 on my opensuse 11.1 and the results were apparent in my Thunderbird buttons.

Fine tuning boot on openSUSE 11.1

Recently, I have been trying to fine tune my bootup process. I installed sreadahead from openSUSE build service. I also installed mkinitrd, aaa_base, bootchart, udev, and sysvinit from the devel:playground:fastboot repository. Here is the result.

The disk usage is more frequent but bootup time increased. Also I found that while shutdown the drives could not be umounted properly and my system time was configured to UTC instead of IST.

Next I installed module-init-tools, libvolumeid1, sysconfig, glib2, glib2-devel from that repo and tested. Here are the results.

The disk utilization has improved. Another observation was uniformity in CPU utilization. Earlier it used to be heavy at some periods, and nearly no CPU utilization rest of the time.

Next I have tried installing gconf2, gconf2-devel, gvfs, gvfs-backends, gvfs-fuse, kbd, libbonobo, libbonobo-devel, libgio, libgio-fam, libglib, libgmodule, libgobject, libgthread, libgvfscommon and xorg-x11-driver-video.

Bootchart on opensuse 11.1

After my trials on my Gentoo system, I wanted to chart out the bootup of my opensuse system.

Opensuse has parallel boot by default. It is interesting to see that out of the box, without any tweaking it is one of the fastest booting systems.

Improving on bootchart

From the the bootcharts I posted in my previous post, it is obvious that sleep times could be eliminated to bet better boot up performance. So I thought of looking at boot messages to find processes that I could do away with or at least do something about. During boot-up, the boot process was looking for ethernet connection, i.e. it was trying to bring up net.eth0. As internet wasn't always connected, it was waiting longer when started with no connection. So I created an offline runlevel and added a new entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst. The procedure is described well in the Gentoo handbook. Here is what I got: a reduction of about 30 seconds in boot-up time.

Bootchart on Gentoo

Recently I tried to chart out my system's boot-up. I got bootchart on my new Gentoo. Then I added a line to my menu.lst as described at the bootchart site and rebooted to test my boot-up. Here is what I got.

I read little more about it and found that I can turn on RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP in /etc/conf.d/rc to get slight improvement in speed. I read that in the comments of the rc file. It was also suggested that I should turn on RC_VERBOSE. So I did it. I got a five seconds increase.

Here is the output of uname -a (I have cut out unnecessary parts like system time)
Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r8 #1 SMP i686
Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz

Here is the bootchart with a scheduled filesystem check.