Mondo Rescue: News - May 2003 and earlier

New snapshots. Joshua has done some FreeBSD-related firefighting. Stan continues to test Mondo mercilessly; Jesse is working on setting up the cvs.

New stable finals! The Mindi packages are much smaller now because Mindi's failsafe kernel is now in a separate package. See under 'Anything Missing?' to download it.

Joshua Oreman's FreeBSD patches have been incorporated in the new 1.7x snapshots. I am releasing a set of new snapshots today.

Finally! I've figured out how to setup a regular user level cron job to mirror Microwerks.net/~hugo to Mondorescue.org - many thanks to Joe Cooper for his help (again). :)

New stable and unstable snapshots are out. I think I've fixed the ISO problem. Oh, and I've got a new mini-PC which means I'll now be able to start running some proper tests on Mondo.

New stable and unstable snapshots are out. Mumble bugfixes grumble logfiles. :) You know the drill.

Mondo v1.63 and Mindi v0.83 are out. They include numerous bugfixes. Owing to my recent relocation from the US to the UK, development is at a standstill. This will change when my insurance company replaces the lightly toasted Compaq, when TekHeads sends me a mini-PC that doesn't segfault after a few minutes of heavy activity, etc.

You see, the development PC was damaged in transit as I was returning from the States. When I plugged it into the wall, all the lights went out - in the building, not just the PC. (Yes, I flipped the switch to make it handle 240 volts instead of the Stateside 110 volts.)

Finally, I bought a mini-PC, a Shuttle XPC SN41G2, from TekHeads. It insisted on generating sig11 faults while compiling a kernel or backing up its hard disk. That is not good. I had to put a particular stick of RAM in a particular slot on the motherboard or the thing wouldn't run properly. It didn't matter which CPU I used. I shipped the whole thing back to TekHeads.

In the meantime, Norwich Union still hasn't replaced the toasted desktop PC. They have, however, managed to lose the paperwork once already. (I offered to mail them a copy of mine. Lo! and behold, they found it again.) Ho-hum. At least the laptop is behaving.

The crowning turd in the water pipe is the fact that I now have to upload 30MB+ via my 56k dial-up connection each time I release a new snapshot. That would be fine, except that BT OpenWorld likes to hang up the phone every two hours.

The laptop has been repaired. The desktop has been declared toast and will be repaired soon. Norwich Union is taking its own sweet time because it, like me, has trouble believing that the Department of Homeland Security managed to toast not one but two PCs passing through Customs in my luggage. Of course, I wouldn't dream of implying that it was their fault. They probably thought I was smuggling weapons-grade plutonium in my little $500 Compaq. That is just plain silly. Everyone knows Dell is the choice of the smart smuggler.

<ender> hugo: btw, I successfully backed up a phoebe system, using -Oi -d /home/mondo -s 4g and then burned the big ISO to DVD+RW (using growisofs), then booted/restored off that DVD disk.

<ender> to make mondo support it, it's quite easy. once the ISO is written, instead of cdrecord, just call: growisofs -Z /dev/scd0=file.iso

The new final stables and unstables are out. They are taking a little while to upload, so be patient.

The new snapshots are out. They work around some more eccentricities in your favorite Linux distributions. (Do you see a pattern here?) Also, my e-mail address is changing from hugo@firstlinux.net to hugorabson@msn.com; yes, please make fun of it because it's a Microsoft e-mail address. No-one has ever done that before. :) Please send all the spam you can. Thanks.

The new snapshots work around some more eccentricities in your favorite Linux distributions.

Happy New Year! The new 1.6x/0.8x snapshots include some minor bugfixes. The new 1.7x/0.9x snapshots include some additional features, such as the -J flag to let the user supply their own list of files to be backed up.

Mondo 1.61 and Mindi 0.61 are out! They incorporate major bugfixes, especially to Mondo's NFS support.

Should XMondo be written using Kdevelop, Kylix, Glade, ... what? Please vote at the Feedback page.

Jesse "KP" Keating has cleaned up my spec files a lot, bless his little cotton socks. (That's a British expression. No, it's not supposed to sound gay. That's just how we Britons talk. Go figure.) I am releasing new snapshots today which include his new spec files and a few minor bugfixes. If you have trouble with the final 1.60/0.80 packages then please try the snapshots.

Mondo 1.60 and Mindi 0.80 are out! Finally... :-) These are the new stable branches.

The old stable branches (1.4x, 0.6x) are still available and are being maintained by Jesse "KP" Keating. I anticipate they will continue to exist for 3-6 months.

You will see that the packages are now available for various specific Linux distributions. The generic packages were prepared on a Red Hat 7.3 Linux box; the others were generated by a nifty script - well, two scripts, really. One script copies a Linux distribution from its original CD's to the hard drive, where it stored it in (for instance) /root/distros/RT/7.3, in the Red Hat 7.3's case. The second script copies the standard Mondo (or Mindi) tarball into the directory, calls 'chroot' to make that directory the base dir, then builds the RPM/SRPM/whatever.

New 1.5x/0.7x snapshots incorporating KP's RAID patch and my multi-tape bugfix. Here is a quick'n'dirty way to test Mondo on multiple tapes. Do this:-

Terminal window A

Terminal window B

#mkfifo /tmp/st0

#rm /home/mondo-tape-*.dat#

#mondoarchive -OVu -d /tmp/st0 -I /usr -g1

#dd if=/tmp/st0 of=/home/mondo-tape-1.dat bs=4k count=50k [which translates to 200MB, approx.]

When prompted to insert tape 2...

#dd if=/tmp/st0 of=/home/mondo-tape-2.dat bs=4k count=50k [which translates to 200MB, approx.]

Press ENTER to continue.

When prompted to insert tape 3...

#dd if=/tmp/st0 of=/home/mondo-tape-3.dat bs=4k count=50k [which translates to 200MB, approx.]

Press ENTER to continue.

When asked to verify tape 1...

#cat /home/mondo-tape-1.dat > /tmp/st0

Press ENTER to continue.

When asked to verify tape 2...

#cat /home/mondo-tape-2.dat > /tmp/st0

Press ENTER to continue.

When asked to verify tape 3...

#cat /home/mondo-tape-3.dat > /tmp/st0

Press ENTER to continue.

This will save you from having to wait 3 hours to find that there's still something going wrong between your tape streamer, its driver and mondoarchive.