Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Hopefully, today will be a more productive day than yesterday.

Bad start

Mac laptop shows a black screen. Cursor is moving. Can ping, but not ssh. Fans are spinning like crazy. Force reboot.

Next reboot, I get in the same state within minutes of the boot. I had just started Mail.app, and I suspect it was just another instance of Mail.app eating all file handles (this happens semi-regularly).

What is going on with system software these days? I have a dozen machines running and VMs all kinds of operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows), and not a day goes by without one of them going "poof".

And there are plenty of little things that are really annoying when you encounter them on a daily basis. Like for instance these regular stalls in network capabilities. Copying a Windows ISO file over ssh happening at 28Kb/s, with regular "stalled" messages? What is going on?

Or right now, macOS has decided, on its own accord, to rebuild its Spotlight index, apparently from scratch. Meaning my Command-Space reflex for launching applications is completely short-circuited. I get web sites instead!!! Aaaargh.

This is especially annoying for applications that I use continuously and which are not in the regular spots, like Screen Sharing (hidden somewhere in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/ScreenSharing.app, talk about being easy to launch when Spotlight is off...). Same thing with Wireless Diagnostics, which I use routinely to check if I'm correctly connected to the nearest Wi-Fi.

PC order

PC order price clarification. I got a quote at 2117€, the internal ordering processes comes back, for the same system, with 2930€. Pushing back.

Raspberries

Finished the apt-get dist-upgrade on the two Raspberry Pi. The steps are well described in this document but the macOS hang this morning interrupted the upgrade on Pi2. As a result, I lost networking. It took me a while to find where the issue was. The /etc/network/interfaces file had invalid setup for eth0 (it was set to manual instead of dhcp and the line auto eth0 was missing).

Windows guests

Following up on Windows guest installation:

• Installing Cygwin in my Windows XP guest
• Trying once more to figure out bridging for my Windows 10 guest. Still failing. When restarting the host network with systemctl restart network, I get

  ● network.service - LSB: Bring up/down networking
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/network; generated; vendor preset: disabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Tue 2017-03-28 12:13:08 CEST; 9min ago
       Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
    Process: 12588 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/network start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Mar 28 12:12:23 muse.dinechin.org dhclient[12825]: DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12 (xid=0xe1aee659) Mar 28 12:12:35 muse.dinechin.org dhclient[12825]: DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9 (xid=0xe1aee659) Mar 28 12:12:44 muse.dinechin.org dhclient[12825]: DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13 (xid=0xe1aee659) Mar 28 12:12:57 muse.dinechin.org dhclient[12825]: DHCPDISCOVER on br0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11 (xid=0xe1aee659) Mar 28 12:13:08 muse.dinechin.org network[12588]: Determining IP information for br0... failed. . Finally found a solution: manually running dhclient br0. So I may finally have a working Windows 10 guest... Without network

• Downloaded Windows 7 and Windows 8 images

Guest migration

I'm fed up with futile attempts to make bridged networking for user sessions work. Giving up, migrating the relevant build guests to qemu://system.

Jenkins setup

Finished the Jenkins setup, have build and elfe compiling and testing successfully on the linux, macos, cygwin and linux-arm (Raspberry) platforms. Now I can test the recorder correctly.