Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
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Thu, 01 May 2008

People who really get the strange humour - 23:15
So I have mentioned from time to time how funny Fafblog can be. Today I have once more been reminded why we need posts from Fafnir in the world. Though I try to come up with strange stuff at times I can never seem to do it with such polish and style and such a well thought out voice as Faf. Sure there is some political bent to Fafblog, however at times like today there is no obvious hint of political content and still the humour is there. On that note I am out of time for today.

[/amusing] link

Another Ubuntu annoyance - 22:03
I was bitten once more today by Ubuntu forcing the use of UUIDs for disk labels (in grub and other places). We have a lot of systems at work (student labs) where we update or synchronise them with rsync rather than some install mechanism such as cfengine and fai. Thus if a grub menu.lst or an fstab is copied over and not automatically modified a machine will not boot if it uses uuid for a disk label.

Unfortunately in Ubuntu there is no way to disable this in grub, the uuid change is hard coded into update-grub in /usr/sbin. At least in Debian it is still optional. Anyway I had forgotten to modify update-grub to remove the uuid stuff and had installed a new kernel on a student server, then reboot the machine and hey presto it did not come back online.

If it were not for the need to run this server on Ubuntu to be similar to the lab image and easy environment for a student to duplicate at home it would be so much easier to run Debian on it again. Of course to compound the issue this was a server I had to wait until after normal hours to take offline so I was messing around with after 7pm.

[/comp/linux] link