Fail: Resizing /boot on Cinnamon

The current 128GB (119.2GiB) Plextor M.2 disk on cinnamon was created with a very small (256MB/243MiB) /boot partition. Turns out this was a mistake, as it will only hold 3 kernels, so I’m constantly having to go in and remove kernel n-3 to make room.
The remainder of the drive is a single extended partition, containing a 119GiB LUKS container, which contains a 119GiB LVM volume group, which has a root of 107.3GiB and an 11.7GiB swap. The root is only 13% utilized, and while it may grow a little it is in no danger or running out of space. The swap is also far larger than needed. I want to steal a couple of GB from one of them to increase the /boot, but I want to do this while retaining the contents of both the / and the /boot.
Long story short, turns out I wasn’t able to do it. But the journey was a great learning experience for me, so I’ve kept the notes, for future reference.
Continue reading Fail: Resizing /boot on Cinnamon

Mysql 5.7 on Fedora 25

Had a fair amount of trouble getting mysqld to run properly on Fedora 25.

One issue was that mysql 5.7 introduces expiration of passwords, and ALL my passwords expired, including root. I couldn’t do anything, including change my password. Catch 22.

Also, the tables were out of date, and I needed a mysql_upgrade. But I couldn’t do that, because my password was expired.

Eventually figured out that I could change the password with mysqladmin password “goop”

After this, I was able to get in as root, and eventually get all the passwords marked as legitimate.

I was also able to update all the tables with mysql_upgrade.

In researching and troubleshooting this, I discovered a bunch of errors on cinnamon, with innodb generating errors of the form:

InnoDB: Ignoring tablespace `xbmc_video90/directorlinktvshow` because it could not be opened.

I’m pretty sure what happened here was that I removed the files for old xmbc databases from /var/lib/mysql, but didn’t actually drop the databases first. This is a bad habit left over from pre-Innodb when you could get rid of a mysql database just by removing the files.

I made a lot of attempts to fix this with setting in mysqld.conf:

innodb_force_recovery = 1 (or 2 or 3)

but it never worked. In the end I managed to get rid of these errors by :

mysqladmin create xbmc_videoxx (or xbmc_musicxx)

and then

mysqladmin drop xbmc_videoxx

mysqladmin generates a whole bunch of errors and warnings about not being able to find the files, but it does seem to remove the dreck from the innodb files.

 

 

Upgrading to Fedora 25

Every upgrade is a little easier, as my restore scripts get better. This was probably the easiest in more than a decade.

This earlier post describes how I put the persistent parts of the system onto btrfs subvolumes, so that on a new system I only need to symlink most of the stuff.

I created a usb stick, containing the resore script, a keyfile for the encrypted drive containing the btrfs subvolumes (the drive is encrypted), and the Nvidia driver installer (which I didn’t need). Halted the system, changed to a different boot ssd drive in the 2.5″ removable drawer, and installed onto it from the downloaded Fedora 25 installer.

This time I made the /boot partition much larger, so that I’m not having to clean up old kernels so often.
Continue reading Upgrading to Fedora 25

Disabling ipv6

I was really keen to get ipv6, and very pleased when my provider (wretched hateful Comcast) finally gave me an ipv6 address.

What I didn’t know was that most VPN providers, including the one I use, are only tunneling the ipv4 traffic. So if you make a connection to a location that supports ipv6 (has an AAAA record) the connection will completely bypass the vpn tunnel.

I have temporarily turned off ipv6 on the external interface by putting this into /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv6.conf.enp4s1.disable_ipv6 = 1