n900 broken
Yesterday, as I was trying to charge my N900, something bad happened. I must have applied slightly too much pressure when I tried to enter the battery charger into the micro-USB port, and I heard something crack. Next thing I know, I see the micro-USB port is not where it's supposed to be anymore, and it won't charge anymore, at all.
This isn't something that's unfixable, but it's not something that's in my skillset to fix. So I'll need to send it in for repairs, or some such.
Since the battery was almost flat, and the red traffic light behind which I'd been waiting at the time switched to green, I just switched it off to save battery life, and moved on. When I got home, I tried switching it on again so that I could take a backup of the device before sending it in for repair and/or finding someone to fix it, but the battery was apparently already quite dead at the time -- I could boot it, I could start the backup application, but around the time I pushed on the 'new backup' button, the phone decided that the battery level was just too low and powered itself down. D'oh.
So, here's a silly question:
Does anyone have the necessary skills required to help me solder the micro-USB connector back on? Alternatively, does anyone have a (charged) Nokia BL-5J battery that I can borrow for a few minutes so I can create a backup and store it on the micro-sd card?
Your help is very much appreciated. Mean time, I'll be off buying a temporary replacement phone now.
Restoring from backups using NBD
During the past Debconf, Joerg borrowed my laptop. I'd told him that he could basically wipe all files if he wanted to, since I had a full backup at home. With that, I mostly meant to say that he could reinstall the box, or add or remove packages as much as he wanted to.
What I didn't mean for him to do was to give it back to me with a completely wiped hard disk that it wouldn't even boot off of anymore, but that's what he did. Oh well.
So I hadn't done the restore yet, last week, since I'd been busy doing other things. Now, my backup consisted of a file called 'mbr' of 2KB; a file called 'backup.tar.bz2' of 66G, and an LVM volume called 'windows' that was written with 'dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/lvm/windows'[1]. Meaning, I could do a restore, but it was somewhat more involved than just running bacula and allowing it to do its stuff for a while.
I briefly considered mounting the external USB disk on which the backup was written to my other laptop, and streaming everything over the network, but quickly discarded that idea for speed issues. Instead, I created 4GB NBD export on that other laptop, ran d-i with my partman-nbd on the to-be-restored laptop, installed Debian to the NBD device, booted off of that, and could then do a restore while having a fully functional system. With the sole gotcha that I couldn't disconnect it from the network until the restore was complete, but that's not insurmountable.
The 'dd' restore has finished in the mean time, I'm still waiting for tar to complete its job. Once that's finished, I'll probably have to refresh grub to the internal hard disk, and then I'll be able to boot it.
I hope.
Having said that, doing a bare-metal restore while booting off of an NBD device is quite practical. I mean, sure, I could have downloaded a live system from the network somewhere, but that would've taken forever, would probably have had an impact on performance of the system while it was running, and overall isn't very ideal IMO. On the other hand, an NBD device is much faster than a local CD or DVD, can be written to without requiring a RAM disk, doesn't need squashfs to get you to reasonable sizes, and as far as the kernel is concerned it's just a local hard disk.
If the above paragraph sounds like I'm proud, then that's because I am. Two years ago, doing this would have involved much more manual work. Today, I had a system running root off NBD in minutes.
[1] Yeah, so my car has a builtin TomTom GPS that I can't do updates for under Linux, AFAIK. Plus some other stuff. Sue me.
Sigh.
[...] FAIL: integrityhuge ================================== 7 of 9 tests failed Please report to wouter@debian.org ==================================
Obviously, this new code is somewhat broken.
Hack hack, debug debug, oh, oops, there's still an nbd-server running, so bind fails, which is why the test suite fails. Maybe that's just it?
... yes, if I kill that other nbd-server, this test suite seems to work. Looks like I'm a better coder than I thought!
[...] FAIL: integrityhuge ================================== 6 of 9 tests failed Please report to wouter@debian.org ==================================
... except I'm not, I'm just very good (or very bad, depening on your point of view) in picking test suites to debug. Hrmpf.
Happy Birthday, Debian!
Okay, I'm a few days late, but still.
The 16th of August is Debian's birthday. It was on the 16th of August, 1993, that Ian Murdock announced the 'imminent' release of "the Debian Linux Release".
As such, this year Debian celebrates its 18th birthday. It's incredible, but this means that if Debian was a person, it could now legally drink hard liquor. At least in some jurisdictions.
What's more incredible is that I just realized that, since I've been involved with Debian for over 10 years, I've actually got first-hand experience for more than half Debian's lifetime.
Time sure flies.
At Steve's, again
for the second time, I'm at Steve's for his yearly barbecue.
After I'd done my waffles back at Banja Luka, I off-hand suggested to do them again at the barbecue, which people replied to with an enthousiastic 'oh yes!' from multiple mouths. So that's what happened.
I did overdo it on the amounts, though since after I'd baked 750g flour worth of dough, everyone still awake had already had a waffle; and I still had 500g flour worth to go. Since the dough can't be conserved overnight, I had to finish all of them. Which meant that I was still making waffles at 2AM, and no-one was eating them anymore. Bummer. Oh well, some people (including myself) had waffles this morning instead.
Speaking of waffles, and by popular demand: A few years ago I blogged the recipe of my waffles (hidden in a blog post about a large number of other things).
The rest of the barbecue was fairly nice, too. I mean, obviously it is: good food, good beer, good people to talk to, what more would you want? Exactly.
Right now I'm waiting for food that is being prepared, after which I'll probably get in my car and start driving home again. But that's not for now just yet.
Debian-installer support for NBD
Folkert asks, not without reason, whether my debian-installer support for NBD is available for testing. The answer is: yes, it is!
At DebConf11 in Banja Luka, I sat down with Otavio, who helped me get the necessary modules uploaded in the correct way. As such, you can now install debian to an NBD device with a regular debian-installer build—although for now, you'll probably still need a daily build to get it to work[1].
To test, you should do the following:
- Download a daily image for your architecture.
- Either boot d-i with the extra boot-time argument modules=partman-nbd, or boot it in expert mode and select the partman-nbd module in the the 'download installer components' menu.
And that's it! Everything else should Just Work(tm).
Well, almost. There's some loose ends that I need to fix, which I haven't had the time to look into yet. Hopefully that won't take too long.
[1] It's possible that cdimage builds will work too, but I haven't tested that.