Snow, beautiful snow! We've got tons of snow coming out of the sky today. It's big and thick, what they call fourrure de lièvre (rabbit fur) in Quebec. It's hard to believe we are having snow this late in the season (halfway into Germinal!), but it's kind of nice to have some snow. Especially since the United Nations report saying that Canada will lose its snow cover by 2100. Snow, please snow.
tags: snow season climate change
JFS
So, I'm one of those idiots who uses the IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2) as his root partition. Why? Because I've tried all the different journalling filesystems for Linux (reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs) and JFS is the one that works for me. It just seems to be the low-profile, clean, nicely-working FS.
Unfortunately, I've been tracking Feisty Fawn for the last couple of weeks, and somewhere in there the JFS utility package, jfsutils, got uninstalled. Who knows why? But when I rebooted my machine today to try out a new kernel, my root partition came up in read-only mode -- because the system couldn't check the partition, because fsck.jfs couldn't be found.
The fix, of course, would be to boot a live CD, chroot to the hard disk, and apt-get install the jfsutils. I typically use Finnix for this and other rescue/recovery projects, but in this situation Finnix failed me. My main computer is a honkin' amd64, and the x86 Finnix disk didn't want to let me chroot and run any amd64 binaries (like the stuff I needed to apt-get install jfsutils).
So I ended up downloading and burning a Feisty live CD, dicking around with boot parameters for a while (noapic nolapic nosplash nonothing...), and finally got to a nice, friendly Gnome terminal. I mounted the hard drive using the Nautilus tools, and then tried to chroot to it -- D'OH! Permission denied. Took me a while to figure out that Nautilus mounts drives noexec by default. Once I got that working, I got jfsutils installed and was able to boot my machine again. Yay.
Moral of the story: figure out a way to make packages that are crucial to you crucial to your package manager, too. Oh, and Finnix needs an amd64 build.
tags: jfs feisty fawn ubuntu jfsutils finnix nautilus
YULblog
YULblog meetup tonight at the Quincaillerie. YULblog is our local Montreal monthly blogging get-together. It's pretty fun, and has the highest female-to-male ratio of any technology event in Montreal. Which is great. I have a ton of work to do tonight (since I spent the afternoon dicking around with live CDs), but I'm going out anyways. YULblog comes but once a month, after all.
N hours later
Good time, that! I walked down rue Rachel to the Quincaillerie this evening around 9PM through a storm that was like being in a snowfight with Borribles. Thud thud thud! Big chunks of snow. But the Q. was pretty hoppin' for a snowy night in April, and I got to see Robin, Steve, Niko, Patrick and others. It was a fun time; the snow made it all the more special.