Adding to today's failures...

[elfs]

Reserve

As if death and poverty weren't enough stress, I tried to update a small corner of critical software on my laptop that's been needing attention for a while. Like a good elf, I backed everything up onto a USB drive, then ran the upgrade and rebooted.

It didn't come up. Fuck me twice. And worse, I couldn't restore! Because the problem was in the "Unified Device Driver" (udevd), which, in upgrading from revision 149 to revision 151 had somehow forgotten how to recognize my hard drive, and the kernel has become so dependent upon udevd that there's no manual override. I'm looking at the hard drive shouting "It's right fucking there!" and of course it doesn't listen, it has no ears.

So I boot off an ancient (very ancient) Gentoo Rescue Disk, only to discover it has no SATA drivers.

By luck, I have a (very) old version of the kernel that doesn't use udevd sitting on the hard drive, and through deep geekery force the boot loader to find it. It comes up. But no, it has no ethernet capability, because that was shifted from the IPW subsystem to the IWL subsystem several years ago, and this kernel is too old to use IWL!

USB Stick! I boot up my ancient desktop, which I never use. It can't recognize USB devices. I just rebuilt the goddamn thing, and it doesn't recognize USB storage devices!

Desperate, I shove the USB stick into Omaha's macintosh, scp the files for the udevd downgrade into the known address there, then shove the USB into the laptop. Blessed be, it recognize the files and downgrades successfully. A reboot later, and I'm back up and running.

Linux is great when it works, but tonight, trying to get my creaking desktop and my crippled laptop to exchange a single goddamn application archive was like trying to get two autistic children to talk to each other.

I'm now re-backing up from the current (working) endpoint. I'm embarrassed I had to use a Mac, but I suppose this makes up for Omaha needing my Linux box to pull files off her borked Mac harddrive a few months ago.

Oh, and I covered the back of my screen, and the backs of the USB drives, with velcro. Works great to keep them out of the way.

Comments

[funos.livejournal.com]

I keep a null-modem cable around for just such emergencies.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

/me wonders how many modern kernels bother with serial drivers?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

holy crap on a cracker, batman! I assume you're gonna make yourself a newer Gentoo Rescue Disk... and file a bug on udevd and hope to hell the devs get it right next time?

There's a reason I have a strong tendency towards Ubuntu LTS releases and CentOS on systems I have to depend on...

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Let alone how much modern hardware has serial ports. I know my laptop doesn't, at least not connected to the outside world. I suppose if I wanted to start soldering onto the motherboard, but at that point I'm waaaay beyond "I'm doing this because it's the easiest thing that works" and should have just pulled the drive and loaded it into a USB adapter long ago.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Are you running Gentoo on that thing? Gentoo is kind of.. rotting. Has been for a while now.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

udevd has caused me no end of trouble, to the point I've made a point of crippling major swaths of it to disable it's ability to 'remember' any hardware between boots at all.

I'm sorry, I'm on a laptop. I'll have (at most) one wireless port, and one ethernet port, and one hard drive. There should never, under any circumstances, be a sdb, eth1, or wlan1. Having all three of these occur at various times is what made me go through whole-cloth and minimize udevd entirely. Hell, it's gotten to the point the newer kernels support a devfs-style 'build minimal /dev on boot managed by the kernel again' option if you root around enough.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

I keep hearing that, but see about the same level of activity on each emerge --sync for actual data changed on /usr/portage as I always have... so why's it rotting, praytell? What crucial part of their structure up and left that isn't obvious?

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

drobbins, for one thing. I guess he's back now, or so it appears. Maybe Gentoo has ceased rotting - I pretty much gave up on it some time around 2007, I think. I still have one Gentoo system, rarely updated, thoroughly insulated from the 'net. I fear to update it at this point since last time I did it took me hours to get it working again.

for the record

[amberite2112.livejournal.com]

just because you don't understand when two autistic children talk to each other, doesn't mean they're not having a party without you.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you make a big jump in versions it all goes to hell. On the other hand, if you use oneshot wisely and do an "emerge world" once a month or so, in general all is well. Even if you have a ton of stuff unmasked in portage.keywords.

It turns out that my problem was a kernel setting; I had very old kernel settings active to handle an obscure brand of electronic picture frame, and the udev install didn't catch those.

Re: for the record

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm totally sure those two were giggling behind my back the whole night long.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

through deep geekery

Nevermind the fact that by this point in the entry, you had already lost 3/4 of your audience.

TBH, I seriously doubt that I could have followed what you glossed over with those three words, but it's worth noting that I would have tried recovering the drive from another computer instead. :)