Ethernet device renaming

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.

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.

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.

KDE again

When Ubuntu went to KDE4, I quit. That is I quit being a KDE user. Initially, I found it to be much more interesting than Gnome, but Ubuntu's hasty jump to KDE4 sealed its fate with me. By that time, Gnome was in pretty good shape and I found it to be more stable and more intuitive. I still liked certain KDE apps though, like Amarok (before the screwed it up) so I kept the kde libraries on my system when I converted to Gnome.

Fast forward a couple years. I now use Kmymoney and Digikam. They are great apps and do what I need. At least until I upgraded ubuntu from Lucid to Maverick. Now all my KDE apps suffer from insufferable lag. I first noticed it with Kmymoney. It would take about 3-4 seconds every time I committed a new transaction. Previously it took under a second. Now I am finding that Digikam is pretty much unusable. It takes 5-12 seconds for it to respond to the delete button or clicking on a different photo. Makes it kind of hard to tag and prune any pictures I take. I don't know what's wrong as there isn't much explanation I could find via google. And this comes right at Christmas time when I am taking a ton of pictures.

This is exactly why upgrades scare me. Unfortunately, I am always forced to upgrade to get fixes for other issues. Linux, can't live without can't live with it. I feel more and more that it is not an OS that I can depend on.

Ethernet woes

So an old problem has recently revisited me. The b44 kernel module which provides the driver for my broadcom ethernet chip has issues. Mainly it likes to reset under heavy traffic. You wouldn't normally notice except that when using vpnclient it disconnects the VPN connection which is very annoying. I did some searching around previously and found some commentary by the driver maintainer that this resetting behavior was on purpose and they had no plans to change it. So I went to ndiswrapper and after some futzing around I got this to work. So now it doesn't disrupt my vpn session, but apparently it causes the vpn kernel module to sometimes crash and hang parts of my system after I disconnect the vpn :( This is what I call typical linux behavior. I am constantly trading one bug for another. Sometimes it's my choice, sometimes not :)

Now, if I can just figure out how to stop the system from loading b44 at boot. blacklisting it didn't seem to stop it.

Here we go again

Last night was another exercise in frustration. I decided to try skype again so I called up the parents and waited for them to log on. I call them and get audio and video from their side, but they can't hear or see us. No LED on the webcam confirms it's not working. I try "rebooting" the camera by unplugging it and plugging it back in again. Another call and video is working! However, audio is still not working. I go into the sound manager (Gnome) and see that the webcam is not selected for input (can't the system mix different inputs?). I select it and see the VU meter working but still no sound in skype. Restarting skype and everything works. I don't understand why pulse or whatever isn't making the microphone available to skype dynamically.

Here's a nag from the archives - my video woes on my E1705 laptop. It has an ATI x1400. Short story - I've never had reliable 3d from this card. Long story: In the beginning I had to use the ATI catalyst drivers and like everything else in linux it was a trade off. I had to trade sleep/hibernate for opengl. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get Beryl or Compiz to work. Eventually, ATI stopped supporting the X1400 in their driver updates and it still had issues with suspend (there were probably some other issues as well). By that time the open source driver supposedly had 3d support. I found that some things seemed to work, but googleearth would crash after a minute or two. So I've never got full use out of that video card, except of course when I actually ran windows :(

In the beginning

Well, I decided that it was time to start documenting my many frustrations with linux. This is going to be a venting space for me. I hope it helps relieve the anger that I sometimes feel. I should be clear in stating that I use no other operating system at home besides linux. I flirted for a few years with OSX, but found that I couldn't upgrade the OS with out upgrading the hardware. As far as linux goes, I have been using it at home since 1996 or so. Perhaps I know too much.

I was originally a Red Hat user, but I became really frustrated with the packaging system. You had to "discover" dependencies one layer at a time as you installed. I kept seeing this thing called APT being referenced on Slashdot and finally gave Debian a try. I really haven't looked back since, although I run mostly Ubuntu now.

Tonight's frustration is with Skype (again). Last week I rediscovered the magic environment variable I needed to set before running Skype to have video actually display. Turns out that running the GL version of Cairo-dock prevented video overlay from working (unless you set the magic environment variable). That's just great. I should note, this is a prime example of linux "just not working". I had originally run into that problem trying to get mythtv frontend to display video, but had forgotten all about it by the time I tried running Skype.

But I digress. I'll sum up past frustrations in a future post, but tonight's issue is with sound. It started fine, but then audio pretty much stopped. After killing skype and trying to edit sound settings, the sound settings tool gave me "waiting for sound system to respond", which it ultimately fails to do. Seems that pulse has gone out to lunch. Restarting pulse didn't fix the issue. Seems I am faced with Yet Another ReBoot (YARB). I might get away with restarting, but I haven't tried anything yet. I decided to start this blog first.

This is the latest in a long series of frustrations with Skype and linux on this computer (Dell zinoHD , ubuntu 10.04) and my laptop (Dell E1705). I swear, every time I use skype to talk with my parents, something goes wrong. My dad is really not impressed. His windows box never has a problem. Why is this so hard with linux?

Time to reboot. I'm sure I'll be back within the week.

update: unplugging the webcam (logitech c260, uvc driver) then plugging it back in had some success. Audio output started to work, but then the microphone on the webcam would not show up in the sound preferences. Is there some magic to make this happen? I guess so - I had to unplug and plug it back it twice more after which the microphone started working. Skype lasted about 10 minutes before sound input and output ceased to work again. *sigh*