[conspire] Utility to rescue formatted EXT3 partition & distribution, choice?

[Edmund J. Biow]

Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 12:07:21 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Utility to rescue formatted EXT3 partition &
> 	distribution choice?
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Message-ID: <20070309200721.GZ28151 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Quoting Edmund Joseph Biow (biow at bigfoot.com):
>
>   
>> I'm looking for a utility to recover a formatted EXT3 partition. 
>>     
>
> I am terribly sorry to have to give you the bad news:
>
> "ext3 No Undeletion" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems 
> (item description: "Why undeleting files on ext3 isn't possible, even
> though it is on ext2")
>   
Well thanks for confirming it, Rick.  I did point testdisk at the
partition after deleting it with QTPARTED and testdisk only saw the
inchoate files from the lost+found directory of the new partition, so I
just went ahead and installed Sidux 32 over the partition.
> I am very sorry about your data loss.  I hope you didn't have much work
> invested into it.  (When the pain fades, start thinking about
> backup/restore.)
>   
No real data loss, just a few hours of adding programs and configuring
various files.  Actually, a large dollop of time with that install was
spent setting up my home directory, which was its own partition.  My
user preferences survived the reinstallation.

I'll take a closer look at rsync and rdiff-backup at some point in the
near future.
>> Some people seem to really like Dreamlinux, Linux Mint, and SabayonLinux
>> for 3D / "desktop" sorts of things.  You're more than welcome to come to
>> Saturday's CABAL meeting and make exact media copies of any/all of them, and
>> of as much of http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/installfest/#distros as you
>> like.  (Reload that link, if you aren't taken right away to the top of
>> the distros list.)
>>     
I've got copies of most of those and have even installed a couple of
stripes of Mint and DreamLinux on various boxen.  Actually, my copies
may not be in such good shape since I tipped over a glass of whisky on
my CD rug while trying to hook up a friend with DreamLinux Saturday
evening, but discs are drying out in my attic and I still have the ISOs
on my server.  Do you think rotgut scotch will delaminate the surface?
>> MythTV?  Before you attempt an installed distribution for that, save
>> yourself some pain and try the (installable) KnoppMyth live CD, which is
>> set up to Just Work:  http://mysettopbox.tv/doc.html
>>     
I played with it a year or two ago without much success and it doesn't
look like it is progressing too rapidly.  First I've got to get a low
profile card that is compatible with Linux.  Any suggestions on that score?
>> I'm having some second thoughts about installing 64 bit anything. 
>>     
>
> If you don't have several gigs of RAM, it doesn't really buy you
> anything.  With more modest amounts of RAM, you should still go with
> x86_64 distros _unless_ you're feeding a proprietary-software addiction,
> which creates problems because those asshats tend to still offer
> i386-only binaries -- which still can be supported by pose varying
> degrees of hassle.
>   
This box only has two slots, both filled with gig sticks.  However I did
notice that the 64 bit version of Sidux did "feel" considerably snappier
than 32 bit Sidux.  That rather surprised me, I figured it would be an
"only the benchmark can tell for sure" type of difference.

Unfortunately, I like my Flash movies.  I don't subscribe to cable, so
that's about the only way I can experience a large chunk of Americana,
the Daily Show or Colbert Report, for instance.  Please don't hate me. 
Flash 7 barely worked on Linux.  Pictures or audio sometimes didn't
play, there were synchronization issues, occasionally flying monkeys
were emitted by my USB ports.  Flash 9 generally works pretty well.  My
understanding is that Gnash can play up to version 7 Flash videos (and
some 8 & 9), but can't handle ActionScript (no YouTube).  Other free
players top out at SWF v4. 


>> Also, at this point I'm also wondering about my choice of SIDUX.  I'd
>> like to be somewhat closer to the cutting edge than Sarge (which
>> periodically updates me to the latest revision of Firefox 1.0.4).  I
>> figured this isn't a great time to install Etch, since it is about to go
>> stable in a couple of months.  At the beginning of the next release
>> cycle Etch will probably become much more like Alpha software, no?  I
>> don't really want to experience major breakage every few weeks.  
>>     
>
> Um, you're stuck in a very common mental trap -- which is interfering
> with your analysing this situation correctly.  You're thinking of 
> Debian-branch installion media as endpoints, rather than as initial
> mechanisms intended solely to get you onto one of the three moving
> (i.e., evolving) development tracks (stable, unstable, testing).
> This is an understandable error because (1) most _other_ distros are
> release-oriented with huge discontinuities between releases, and (2) 
> one of the Debian tracks ("stable") mostly follows those other distros'
> example, except with smoothly managed transitions between releases.
>   
My misapprehension was not immediately dispelled by several previous
visits to www.debian.org, which really seems to emphasize Stable to the
exclusion of other varieties.  It took following four
not-particularly-intuitive links to get to a page where I could click on
a Testing download.  When I looked at the CDIMAGE page last week before
downloading SIDUX it mentioned that the latest weekly versions were
suffering from some sort of apt/archive key interaction issue and might
fail to install, which enhanced my trepidation about playing with Etch
at this juncture.  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/

I probably do not need a jigdo of all 22 ISOs in testing, but then
again, the netinst may not quite give me a complete system with X and a
window manager, so I gather that the 1 CD KDE image may be a good place
to start.  Bandwidth isn't much of an issue (I have DSL), so I could
grab the first DVD image, as well.
> "testing" is always an _approximately_ constant degree of beta-ishness
> away from the cutting edge.  Presumably, you installed using the Etch
> installer in 2007 because you _like_ the current tradeoff it gives you
> of recent app versions versus beta-ishness.  If so, you should 
> _leave sources.list alone_, forget about all the Toy Story names 
> (Sid, Buzz, Rex, Bo, Hamm, Slink, Potato, Woody, Sarge, Etch, Lenny), 
> and remain comfortably on the gradual ride that is "testing", with the
> rest of us.
>   

 I followed SID via Kanotix for a couple of years until the machine that
it was on was mothballed last fall.  I had to restrain my desire to do a
apt-get upgrade every time I booted or I would have been downloading
probably a gig or two a month, plus, on that old PIII 550 installing the
new software took forever if I didn't do it regularly. Once or twice I
had some serious breakage, but generally things cleared up in a day or
two with a few more updates.  Eventually the machine just felt too pokey
even though it had 384 MB of RAM.  I'm not sure if that was because I
ended up just installing too many packages trying to get things to work
or if there were underlying problems or if a machine of that vintage
just couldn't gracefully handle the latest stripe of KDE.

My only real experience with Etch was Mepis 3.3, but though it was a
snapshot of Etch, it didn't evolve with it, and at some point it fell
too far behind Etch.  When I did a few things to try to catch up it
broke the install badly enough that I abandoned it (I could have kept at
it, but it was early in my Linux experience and I hadn't allocated
enough disk space, anyway, so it was easier to just scrap Mepis and
start over).

Anyway, tracking real Etch should be a breeze compared to those two
installs.  I going to be out of town for a while and RC 2 should be
posted by the time I get back, so I'll probably just install the 64 bit
version on my new system along with Sidux 32 (which is working very
well, thank you). 
> (I note that Warren Woodford reportedly got into annoying amounts of
> trouble trying to converge MEPIS onto Debian-testing.  I don't have
> details, but suspect he simply hadn't realised the effect of the
> above-described KDE dependency-hairball issue, and how it interacts with
> variable quarantine delays.)
>   
 I experienced that joy first hand.
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 14:06:25 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Utility to rescue formatted EXT3 partition &
> 	distribution choice?
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Message-ID: <20070309220625.GD28151 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Quoting David E. Fox (dfox at m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com):
>
>   
>> How is the 3D acceleration? Have you tested anything like beryl or
>> compiz (they are not on the sidux distribution CD, but Knoppix has
>> them.) 
>>     
>
> Finding these things packaged for Sidux / Debian-unstable doesn't
> actually take much looking, e.g.,
> http://www.sidux.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-618-highlight-beryl.html
>
>   
>> I take it that all that comes with the installation CD is the
>> non-proprietary driver, and you might need the proprietary one.
>>     
Actually, the video on the 32 bit version of Sidux worked very nicely. 
Unlike the 64 bit version, the installation script set up xorg.conf
acceptably (1024 on the 17" CRT monitor I was using), and the Sidux
Nvidia installation script worked properly. 

Setting up Beryl was very easy, as well.  I just set up the "relatively
stable" Beryl SVN "Repository of Shame" put together by some British cat
who is active over at the Sidux forum:
http://shame.tuxfamily.org/repo/
Then I installed a meta-package that downloaded everything at once
including all sorts of plugins and themes.  You've got to love a command
like:
    apt-get install beryl-shame

I restarted X, kicked up the beryl-manager, and everything worked
beautifully, as much as I've played with it. There is a lot to explore.
>   
>> But with Xen being in the offing (as well as kernel support for HW
>> virtualization) one wonders why you couldn't run a i386 program inside
>> of an amd64 kernel (I suppose you would just boot the other root
>> partition as a virtual task).
>>     
>
> It's actually easier to just have i386 support libs present -- or, for
> recalcitrant proprietary apps, running them in chroots.  And that's
> certainly one heck of a lot faster and less RAM-chewing.
>   
Good to know.  I'm actually going to try to shun all proprietary
software on my soon-to-be new 64 bit Etch installation and see how far I
get with it.  I'll just Gnash my teeth.   I guess I'll have to set up a
separate user identity or else I'll experience weirdness going back and
forth between Beryl/Proprietary on Sidux 32 and open source settings for
Etch 64. 
>   
>> If your sources list tracks 'testing', you always are using 'testing'.
>> Caveat though if you do that when Etch becoms stable - at least for a
>> while (anyone else had issues like that during transitions? they seem
>> to come up now and again on debian-user).
>>     
>
> Very nervous / skittish people who've been tracking "testing" might
> retreat onto stable=etch at the time of release, rather than following 
> the "testing" symlink automatically onto testing=lenny at the time of
> etch release.  I've never bothered to do that, in the past, and never
> regretted just letting the system work as intended.
>   
I'm not doing anything mission critical, I'm convinced to just stay on
the Testing track with my new machine.

But I intend to keep my little Via C7 server running stable.  It has
been a champ..  Anybody know off hand if stable automatically update my
kernel from 2.4 to 2.6, or should I do that before or after I do the
"apt-get dist-upgrade" or should I just keep running 2.4?

Speaking of server issues, one thing I noticed was that Sidux comes with
both SMBFS and CIFS, which I've never seen before.  I had assumed that
it used CIFS, since most distros released in the last year do.  I set up
CIFS in my FSTAB and the performance was just unacceptably wretched,
both in 64 bit and 32.  When I looked over at the Sidux site for hints I
noticed that the manual had instructions for how to set up SMBFS in the
FSTAB, so I tried that instead and the performance was MUCH better
(still a little pokey, 2-3 mbps transfer rates, not great directory
rendering speed).  I still haven't tried any big transfers using SSH or
RSH.  Maybe I should give NFS a try.  I seem to recall that NFS had
security issues if you didn't run NIS.   I have a wireless router
running WPA-PSK so my neighbors can share my connection. Eh, I can live
with my SAMBA performance.
> [Sidux:]
>
>   
>> This has also been a concern of mine. There are a lot of 'small'
>> distros (small in the number of users/developers, not in the sense
>> of 'small' footprint) that seemt to just coem and go, cause a flurry
>> of attention, and then they're gone. Many don't (unless they're a
>> fork of debian) have a clear upgrade path.
>>     
>
> One nice thing about Sidux is very limited downside risk if the Sidux
> developers ever hang up their hats:  You have a fully functional "sid"
> system.
>
> You can at that point just keep following pure "sid" or converge onto
> some other Debian-compatible offshoot, just by changing a couple of
> lines in /etc/apt/sources.list.
>   
There were scripts & repositories out there to aid conversion from SID
and KANOTIX to SIDUX for a while, though I gather they are no longer
maintained and the supported transition window has passed.  If something
happens to SIDUX I suspect something similar to transition you back to
SID would pop up.
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 17:32:14 -0800
> From: Eric De Mund <ead-conspire at ixian.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Utility to rescue formatted EXT3 partition &
> 	distribution choice?
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Message-ID: <17906.2718.397976.812585 at bear.he.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
> The impossibility of undeleting files on ext3 refers, of course, to
> software methods. In case of real emergencies, one needs to keep in mind
> the (typically costly) option of hardware recovery, as a minimum of the
> last seven writes to magnetic hard disk drives are recoverable. Cf.
> Peter Gutmann's classic paper:
>
>   
That's why a local computer recycler will charge you $10 per hard drive
to run your disk under his degausser, plus another $10 to remove the
drive from the case for you.
 http://www.accrc.org/#fees
Of course, the magnetic field renders the drive useless as a storage
medium, though it still makes a spiffy paper-weight.  Personally, I
would just take a ball peen hammer to the thing, though I suppose that
might reduce the drive's aesthetic appeal as said paper-weight.

Onwards,

-e

If he wasn't a nice person why would he be doing 500 hours of community
service?