I finally got around to fixing the Vertigo theme to include a random quote in the sidebar. While I was at it I opened up the layout a bit, making it easier to read code snippets and such in the main text. The newspaper-style narrow column layout is great for prose but it’s a bit constraining for technical postings.
Archive for September, 2007
I’ve been struggling for a while trying to get udev to maintain device names for vmxnet devices when running in a virtual machine. Well, I finally figured it out. The 75-persistent-net-generator.rules script in Gentoo was making rules that looked like:
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"
These seemed to be silently ignored.
After an emerge --sync; emerge -u world last night, the vmware devices started getting IDs following the highest-numbered eth device. These rules would be added to 70-persistent-net.rules, and on the next boot the devices would move up even higher, causing all network device config settings to be ignored.
I noticed that the new rules added to 70-persistent-net.rules were of the form:
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"
(ATTRS was replaced with ATTR), which just means the match is done on the specific node rather than checking all of the parents.
After a lot of painful attempts to fix this, I finally found the problem. Apparently the DRIVERS key is unset at this point for the vmxnet driver. I removed that test, so that I have:
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"
which now works.
Phew!
Moving to Vista
Sep 8
My desktop PC’s power supply blew up (literally) a few days ago. The family was unwilling to wait for the RMA process, so this gave a good excuse to upgrade (which, of course, I’ve been itching to do anyway).
Of course, the new machine came with Vista, which actually runs fairly well (the quad-core 2.4 GHz processor may have something to do with that… or it could be the 3 GB of RAM or the SATA RAID hard disks…). I put the drive from the old system in and started moving things over, but I ran into problems trying to delete some old directory trees (particularly the old Cygwin install) due to permission problems.
A bit of poking around on Google led to a useful tip on Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog: Windows Vista Secret #11: Deleting the Undeletable. The short version is:
takeown /f directory /r /d y
icacls directory /grant administrators:F /TWorks like a charm. Just use a command prompt with administrator privileges.