Week of 10th October, 2005

Middle shift starts today - the midday start. And I was handed a Tape and Breaks shift - several TCs were off sick. So it was a routine day.

It started well, too.Katy was on the 'phone before 9 o'clock, wanting to get the ADSL router set up before she went off to a lecture. And we did it - despite her habit of reading prompts she doesn't understand in a monotone, very fast, and mispronouncing them because of her dyslexia. But I had the router manual on screen in front of me, so it was easy enough. Took about 20 minutes, and they're getting a 1Mbit connection - maybe Postie haven't upgraded the Aberystwyth exchange yet, or else the line quality isn't good enough for 2MBit.

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More tapes and breaks today. And I got the 'phone call from Katy - web pages are slow to open. Why?

Well, at work I can't tell, so I said we'll work on it tomorrow.

Turning to local computing - I've done some research on getting Tux to use his big disk partition for data, rather than the root partition. And it looks like I can do it. More later.

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Changing the actual location where data resides on a linux (or, indeed, *nix) box is easy - you just mount the new location on the old directory path -

mount /dev/hda3 /mnt

which will mount partition 3 on hard disk 1 on the directory path /mnt and that whole partition will then be visible to the rest of the system as if it had always been there.

If, however, you don't want to put a whole disk partition there, you need to use links. Specifically, since we're trying to link across partitions, you need symlinks -

ln -s /mnt/home/* /home

which will mount all the subdirectories of /mnt/home on /home, assuming that there is something on /mnt, as above. That works fine. If you then say

ls -l /home

you get this

total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Oct 12 14:35 geoff -> /mnt/home/geoff
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Oct 12 14:35 linkstation -> /mnt/home/linkstation

showing the symlinks. But if you say this

ls -l /home/geoff/

you get a listing of your home directory, as you should

total 44
-rwx------ 1 geoff geoff 487 Jul 6 11:57 comics
-rwx------ 1 geoff geoff 96 Jan 25 2003 comics2
-rw------- 1 geoff geoff 2 Oct 3 13:22 dead.letter
-rwx------ 1 geoff geoff 340 Jul 6 11:56 gettoons
-rw------- 1 geoff geoff 19136 Oct 3 13:22 mbox

You have to move anything already on that mount point, or you will lose access to it. I copied the home directories elsewhere, and then symlinked them back.

Then I did the same thing with the /var and /usr directory trees. Those 3 trees can grow arbitrarily large, and when you only have 180MB on your bootable partition, you need to be careful.

Then I reinstalled leafnode, and pointed it at a list of newsgroups on Demon's NNTP server. Some while later, the download completed - but leafnode was completely silent while the transfer happened. If I hadn't been able to see the activity lights on the router, I might have suspected a software crash.

Then I had to convince Tux that the Acer was good to know, which involved a quick edit to the hosts.allow file to declare the Acer as trusted. Then I could read news direct from Tux - which is a result, provided I can get fetchnews to run from cron. Tomorrow will tell me that.

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A routine weekend - not much else to report.

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