Blog - /Tech

My USB hard drive enclosure and PCI wireless card came today. The enclosure was fairly easy to work with. When I noticed that my /etc partition would not mount, I copied it to a disk image using dd, ran losetup to turn it into a pseudo-device, and then ran fsck on the pseudo-device. It turns out that my /etc partition was badly corrupted, to the point where the only top-level directory was lost+found after running fsck — a first (or is that a new low point?) for a computer of mine. I don't care too much about that, because I remember the changes I have made since the last backup. The /home partition had mild corruption, but since it was still mountable, I opted not to take any chances with fsck, and was able to salvage the changes I had made since the last backup. My /stuff partition, which has everything that isn't strictly program settings, was completely free of corruption.

This is why multiple partitions are a Really Good Idea: I've yet to lose any files on that /stuff partition, even though it has resided on three different consecutive machines. The only exception was when I clipped about 40MB off the end of the partition some months ago by using resize2fs and lvresize with differing byte counts. This is why volume groups should have at least a few GB of free space as wiggle room — you really don't want to shrink those things unless you know what you're doing.

The PCI wireless card had a chipset made by the same manufacturer as my Mac Mini (namely, Atheros). I was hoping that it would be able to act in access point mode, even though the card vendor did not advertise this capability. Sure enough, it not only was able to connect flawlessly to the local campus-wide wireless network with the madwifi driver built into Ubuntu Gutsy, it was also able to act in "Managed", or access point mode.