At some point during the last five years of upgrades on my laptop, the ethernet port went from being eth0 to being called eth2. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how or why this happened. I also couldn't figure out how to undo it. Well, during my recent pogo issues, I finally ran into some web pages which told me all about it. In a nutshell, it is udev. Here is the file that can be modified to change the device name of your ethernet devices.
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
# PCI device 0x14e4:0x170c (b44)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:15:c5:3c:e6:4d", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="eth2"
What happened to me was that eth0 and eth1 were assigned to MAC addresses based on my previous laptop. Dell had to replace my laptop and when that happened the new MAC addresses had to be given new names as eth0 and eth1 were already taken from my old laptop.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Pogo down
Currently battling an issue with my pogoplug. Unfortunately it provides everything like email, home automation, database etc. It seemed two nights ago that it just stopped responding to network traffic. ping worked, but ssh and web were refused. So I power cycled it, but the result was the same. I could hear the disk booting the OS, but this time pings to the machine wouldn't even work. ARP showed that the it hadn't even asked for DHCP (no arp mapping).
Concerned about my HW, I rebooted into the original pogo linux and the network came up fine. I tried an fsck on my root drive and it showed no issues and still no network. I even tried another pogoplug without success. I think either the kernel is corrupt or something is running out of order in the init process such that it hangs before bringing up the network.
This morning I installed a fresh debian onto a usb key and it booted. This evening I will attempt to determine the difference between this fresh install and my broken one.
Update: I have mostly recovered my system. I am still not sure what the issue is. If I kept ping running to that machine while it was booting it would consistently fail, but then come alive for 4-5 pings and then go offline again. The last message I could find in dmesg (when mounting the drive from another machine) was a normal message from the NFS kernel module.
I tried disabling various services in startup to try and narrow it down (including nfs and misterhouse). At one point my system came alive but I went in and restored some of the init and it wouldn't boot to network again. I tried setting my root disk to mount errors=continue instead of errors=remount-ro thinking that it was remounting root ro and making it impossible to write any run time files or update devices. That fix seemed to help, but subsequent boots were hit and miss.
Finally, I commented out all the local usb drives I had in fstab. I just left root and the home dir disk. Magically the system became stable. I have no idea how or why this was causing a problem with the network on boot. None of those disks were network mounted. I guess I'll be reading more on mount and fstab to see if I can explain this. In the meantime my email, home automation, and vbox images are back online.
UPDATE: 3/24/2011
I managed to restore fstab to automount all the usb drives. I had to remove the "auto" fs type to make it work. My pogo now reboots without network issues. I could have sworn that it worked for a while with the auto fs in place, but maybe not.
Concerned about my HW, I rebooted into the original pogo linux and the network came up fine. I tried an fsck on my root drive and it showed no issues and still no network. I even tried another pogoplug without success. I think either the kernel is corrupt or something is running out of order in the init process such that it hangs before bringing up the network.
This morning I installed a fresh debian onto a usb key and it booted. This evening I will attempt to determine the difference between this fresh install and my broken one.
Update: I have mostly recovered my system. I am still not sure what the issue is. If I kept ping running to that machine while it was booting it would consistently fail, but then come alive for 4-5 pings and then go offline again. The last message I could find in dmesg (when mounting the drive from another machine) was a normal message from the NFS kernel module.
I tried disabling various services in startup to try and narrow it down (including nfs and misterhouse). At one point my system came alive but I went in and restored some of the init and it wouldn't boot to network again. I tried setting my root disk to mount errors=continue instead of errors=remount-ro thinking that it was remounting root ro and making it impossible to write any run time files or update devices. That fix seemed to help, but subsequent boots were hit and miss.
Finally, I commented out all the local usb drives I had in fstab. I just left root and the home dir disk. Magically the system became stable. I have no idea how or why this was causing a problem with the network on boot. None of those disks were network mounted. I guess I'll be reading more on mount and fstab to see if I can explain this. In the meantime my email, home automation, and vbox images are back online.
UPDATE: 3/24/2011
I managed to restore fstab to automount all the usb drives. I had to remove the "auto" fs type to make it work. My pogo now reboots without network issues. I could have sworn that it worked for a while with the auto fs in place, but maybe not.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
No news is good news?
Well, it won't be long lived. Recently I started having memory leak issues in the OS. After about a day, all the memory would be used up leaving an unusable system. It started with a power manager, I can't remember if was the gnome one or not. But after kill -HUP on that process, another process called polkitd would start leaking memory. I have to HUP polkitd once a day now. Some googling showed that there are some instances going back to Lucid (I am on Maverick right now). I can't believe that something as core as polkitd would go this long unfixed. (Apparently polkitd is some sort of policy daemon, security or power I am not sure).
On another thread, I've been having VOIP issues. Whenever Rosalia calls me at work, the line is frequently choppy which usually means UDP packets are getting lost or delayed. I found this great article on how to configure Tomato QOS which finally explained to me how to use Rate and Limit properly.
http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=60304
Rate is actually the min guaranteed bandwidth for a class. So now I make sure my rate percentages all add up to 100%. Calls since this fix appear to be much better, but I still can detect a few dropouts here and there.
On another thread, I've been having VOIP issues. Whenever Rosalia calls me at work, the line is frequently choppy which usually means UDP packets are getting lost or delayed. I found this great article on how to configure Tomato QOS which finally explained to me how to use Rate and Limit properly.
http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=60304
Rate is actually the min guaranteed bandwidth for a class. So now I make sure my rate percentages all add up to 100%. Calls since this fix appear to be much better, but I still can detect a few dropouts here and there.
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