Comments for Ever on and on

Comment on cpan, passive FTP, and sudo by kaufman

kaufman — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:55:04 +0000

a) Do you have a link for convincing CPAN *not* to start with 6 different flavors of FTP before zippily HTTP’ing the download? Because that was of course where I started, and I was unable to convince CPAN to adjust its heuristics.

b) Interesting link. So the argument is, that I trust your code to run in my production infrastructure and handle my data, but I don’t trust your build process? Sure, every hole you close is a good thing, but in the big picture the vulnerabilities are not reduced. In some environments I’m working in now, far more harm could come from user apache mishandling the confidential data than from user root spewing over the system config and forcing us to fail over to the backup node.

Comment on cpan, passive FTP, and sudo by knobunc

knobunc — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:28:33 +0000

a) Use HTTP not FTP, you get resume of downloads and stuff

b) Don’t run cpan as root… http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.qa/2007/10/msg9430.html

(you can do all that when you first config it when it prompts you, but I bet you have a working one)

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by quddus

quddus — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:17:20 +0000

I have seen and checked your script and is waiting for your swap option in the script to test if it works.

I have been trying to use my own but failed each time.

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by ScApi

ScApi — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:52:06 +0000

As I and You expected it didn’t worked , this had something to do with firstboot script, but I didn’t digg deeper.

Something about the web management pakages.

X-Wrt is working except installation of packages via WebGui.

Gargoyle is working except graphs (their missing, code is pointing to empty tmp dir)

OpenWrt web – not yet tested, will try tommorow,

And something that I’v added to the script, include swap utils, and makeswap + swapon, it really speeds up my device.

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by kaufman

kaufman — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:31:16 +0000

@ScApi, you can build the USB image however you want, you just need to be prepared for it not to work . Since you can just pull the USB stick and power-cycle, it seems like the experiment is pretty low-risk. Let us know how it works out.

The space requirements (on flash) for ext3 are nearly the same as for ext2, but ext2 is a completely valid choice. The upside of ext3 is the journaling, which gives better recovery from an unclean shutdown. The downside is that the frequent journal-writing will kill your USB stick faster. I choose safety, and anticipate replacing USB sticks.

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by ScApi

ScApi — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:30:48 +0000

I’ve switched to ext2, formatted usb stick to ext2, and finaly boot works, I think it has be something in image creation, sine 520GC has only 2mb flash, I removed almost everything from flash to add required modules, I’l try to change to ext3 in future but now another question, can i simply copy contents of image builder temp dir to usb stick (dir with I think all flash files) ? or it has to be copied from working flash ?

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by kaufman

kaufman — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:33:05 +0000

@ScApi, if the pivotroot script works after you booted then the usual reason is you’re preloading the wrong kernel modules (foreach loop with insmod in it). The right kernel modules get loaded when the boot completes, and then when you try pivotroot again it magically works.

Another possibility is that your flash drive is an ext2 not an ext3 (since e2fsck works it out for itself, but the mount line is hardcoded to ext3).

Another possibility is that the /flash directory is missing. But these latter two possibilities don’t explain why the pivotroot would work after booting. For that, kernel modules are the most likely explanation.

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by ScApi

ScApi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:50:18 +0000

I forgot to mention something, pivotroot script is working fine after booting openwrt normally and then plunging usb stick and firing the script

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by ScApi

ScApi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:27:54 +0000

I have a problem, openwrt simply isn’t booting from flash, I think that something is wrong with usb flash drive but simply don’t know what.

My pivotroot.log
pivotroot loading kernel modules: usbcore usb-ohci scsi_mod sd_mod usb-storage e
pivotroot checking /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1: clean, 414/115200 files, 17189/459852 b
fsck status is 0
Mounting /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
mount status is 255

Comment on A better pivotroot for OpenWRT by kaufman

kaufman — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:14:48 +0000

@nathane, that's an interesting question, because I prefer that /etc on flash not be in sync with /etc on the USB drive. I wrote a blog post explaining why.