Filesystem Tuning

I got fed up with Mint running slowly, especially compared to the beast of a machine at work.

Added the noatime,nodiratime options to /etc/fstab and ran the following command I found:

tune2fs -O has_journal -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda5

to disable the journal on the root partition. Waiting for Dropbox to sync and then I’ll try rebooting.

Work and the Bike

I’m cycling to work! Hooray :) Since half the route goes through Khortytsia, the exhaust fume problem is cut in half โ€” almost no cars there. On top of that, leaving home at roughly the same time, I arrive at work 20โ€“40 minutes earlier than I would by minibus: no waiting time, no pauses at every stop, no kilometer-long walk, and the cycling route is also a bit shorter โ€” about four kilometers less. True, this advantage is somewhat offset by the need to change into office clothes, which eats up a noticeable chunk of time. However, I’ve run into two other difficulties: 1. My back under the backpack sweats very actively compared to the rest of my body. Practically, it’s the only part that does. 2. There’s no way to listen to audiobooks on the way.

Disqus

Finally got Disqus comments hooked up to Blogger.

Apologies for any lost comments โ€” once I figure out how to migrate them, I’ll bring them back.

If the new comment form isn’t showing up for you, you’ll need to allow JavaScript from this domain.

Firefox

Looks like I’ll be rolling back to Firefox version 3, because version 4 keeps crashing on Windows โ€” a pile of open tabs, and bam โ€” crash.

With version 3 there was none of that, none of that…

slowly, but (hopefully) surely

In the 8 days since starting to create a local repository, 39 gigabytes have been downloaded and it has reached the letter L in the largest repository universe.

It’s rough living with a slow internet connection. And mostly it’s because after every disconnection the download stops and only resumes a) manually b) after re-hashing everything already downloaded.

today the whole day was spent recalculating those 39 gigs. what will it be like later when updating all this stuff?

LVM and Repositories

As I mentioned, I’m setting up a local mirror of repositories โ€” so that the fleet of Linux machines gets updates quickly and over Ethernet. For this, I attached a 100 GB disk to a virtual machine, and now a specially crafted script is downloading repos for two architectures (i386 and amd64) of one distribution โ€” 10.10. If the percentages the script prints to the screen are to be trusted, the final mirror size will be around 60 GB. I think I’ll also need to download repos for 11.04 (and eventually 11.10 as well), so expanding partitions with LVM is becoming practically useful โ€” and even necessary. Once the download finishes (currently at about 15%), I’ll try it out and post recommendations there.

Moving 2

Recently I got my own domain: http://disfinder.com

My Tumblr blog โ€” the one at http://disfinder.tumblr.com โ€” is now hosted there.

Here, at <p.disfinder.com>, there will be a Blogger blog. I’ll tinker a bit with themes โ€” everyone seems to praise Blogger. Let’s see how it goes.

Having as many as three diaries is a bit of a drag โ€” this one, LiveJournal, and Tumblr.

The current breakdown is roughly this:

  • Tumblr โ€” only about IT, and with at least some practical value
  • LiveJournal โ€” about personal life
  • here โ€” about IT stuff with no practical value. For example, “Microsoft bought Skype. Oh no oh no.”

Happy reading, my dear readers!