Every Flavour Beans

I was satisfied to some extent with my Internet connection but was never too happy about it. I had always thought that it could have been better. So when I got a chance to test out another provider, I latched up on the oppurtunity with both the hands. But there was a glitch in it - they had a bizarre assumption about their users that all of them would be using the Windows OS. You need a client to first login into your account to be able to access the Internet; and the client was available only for windows. In short: no Windows, no Internet.

I had already paid the the amount in advance and so was in a complete mess now. I spend more than 90% of my time in GNU/Linux and can’t do without Internet there. The sales person assured me that he will find out what he can do about my situation and get back to me, but ever since, I had been having a tough time in finding that sales person instead.

I could have fought with them to give my advance payment back to me but my gut feeling was that there should be a way out of my problem. I found out that the client for windows is 24Online Client used with the Cyberoam servers. I knew the open source versions of these clients are available both for windows and gnu/linux, so i downloaded the gnu/linux version of it and tried to login using it. Unfortunately, there was no success here for me.

I thought I can always open the source code and see what exactly is not working but already being neck-deep in the other works, I postponed it to some other day and got back to my earlier Internet connection. Few days after that, my brother came to me describing about another open source client for the same cyberoam network and how it claims to handle all the versions of its protocols. It took some time for me before i could understand it all - there is a program called ‘linc’ which is a gnu/linux client for cyberoam. I downloaded it, built it using make, edited its configuration file and finally gave it a go. it just connected me to the internet right away, no fuss at all!

What more, I can ask it to send any MAC address of my choice in the request which enables me to connect to the Internet from any machine at my home, circumventing the restriction that I should connect only through the computer which was configured by the sales person. What a ridiculous resriction that was! But not for the gnu/linux users

The hero of the story resides here: http://linc.sourceforge.net/ and its written in beautiful C++ code, making the entire source code very readable.

It happened like this: I once rebooted my machine and got back a grub call-whatever-you-like error at the boot prompt with the consequence that there was no gnu/linux or windows for me for the time being. I had so many operating systems installed on my computer, but I could not boot into atleast one of them as the boot loader itself had deserted me. What to do? Re-install all the operating systems again? Re-install one gnu/linux os and recover the others using it? Or recover the entire hard disk from the backup drives? The last option looks like the most sensible one, provided that I had taken such a backup in the first place. I did not.

I keep the Live CD of Knoppix OS just for such occassions. It allows me to conveniently boot into the gnu/linux environment right from the CD without having anything to do with the hard disk(s) present on my computer. Once there, I could connect to the Internet and ask for help. But I had my recipe to recover from such situations written safely in a corner of my mind and I decided to make use of it on this occassion. I opened the terminal emulator and got on with the job:

This listed all my disks and their partitions, inducing a sigh of relief in me, and I started mumbling to myself “Everything is fine mate, everything is fine!”
Then it was time to see if I had lost any data.

I panicked for a moment as the mount failed with an error. I knew I need to run ‘fsck’ now, so headed straight to that step:

and accepted all the suggestions from it(pressed ‘yes’ to all the questions). My filesystem was ‘apparently’ fixed but i wanted to confirm it. I tried to mount it again:

Celebration time! The partition was successfully mounted and I could browse all the data present in the partition. I happily repeated the procedure with other gnu/linux os’es and then turned my attention to the boot loader.

I quickly chroot‘ed to the root partition of the Ubuntu OS(whose boot loader was installed on my MBR) and entered the following commands at the command shell:

That’s it! My system was back to its normal state, with the familiar grub bootloader greeting me with all the operating systems that were installed on my computer.

In related but different situations, there are variations of the above procedure which I had to follow to get my system working again. After one hard disk failure, for example, ‘fsck’ refused to work with my filesystem; I had to first run ‘badblocks’ to scan for any possible bad blocks on the disk, and then run e2fsck with an alternate block number as the main super-block was corrupted.

If there is currently no partition that has a valid super-block, then the trick is to make a new file with an equal number of blocks as the corrupted partition, and then finding an alternate super block by applying the above procedure to this newly created file.

Anyway, there is atleast one way to get out of the trouble if you have a GNU/Linux Live CD handy with you. If you don’t have one already, go and grab it right now.

A list of popular gnu/linux live cd’s is here.

Suddenly people have started to publish their favourite operating systems in their blogs and I thought I too should have some fun by doing the same. Currently I have these operating systems installed on my computer:

• Ubuntu (Debian based)
• Zenwalk (Slackware based)
• Fedora
• Microsoft Windows XP

My favourite, as must be evident from the above list, is Debian. Because I use Debian OS as the main server for my network, I thought I should install a different flavour of it on my pc. I may try Mepis os the next time, but currently I have Ubuntu.

The best thing I like about Debian based distros is its package manager called ‘apt’. also there is a huge repository of packages ready to be downloaded and installed for debian. Two dvd full of software can be kept handy by those who need to install them on multiple systems or have a slow internet connection. Two step installation process of debian, where you can install only the base system in the first tier and then continue with the additional packages once the first part is successfully installed, gives a lot of flexibility to the user. Debian is also very secure and stable, more than any other gnu/linux distribution. This is also the reason why latest versions of many softwares are not included in debian, but the tradeoff has been utilised by ubuntu and you get the latest, cutting-edge versions of all the software by sacrificing a bit on security and stability in it. Because ubuntu is generally meant to be used on desktop only(all kinds of server applications can be installed on it, but I can’t convince myself to use it as a public server machine), the security issue is not critical. But ubuntu comes with a single dvd worth of software and any additional packages have to be installed from the Internet. For KDE users, there is Kubuntu.

Slackware is another interesting distribution that is best known for its simpilicity and efficiency. The operating system, as well as its packages, get installed in real quick time. Its package manager is also extremely simple to use but the repository of packages for slackware is not as big as that of debian. Because I use it for development purposes it suits me perfectly well and I have found it as the fastest of all the popular gnu/linux distros. Zenwalk is a flavour of Slackware and installs only one software per every category - i.e. one browser, one word processor, one email client only - saving a lot of disk space. Its default desktop XFCE is also sleek and stylish. Though the first thing that I had installed on Zenwalk was the KDE package, which took less than one minute, I still spend most of my time in XFCE.

I had installed Fedora to check out the Core 4 version of it, but i am already thinking about installing PCLinuxOS or some thing else over it.

I use Windows XP primarily for development on .NET platform and for heavy printing jobs. I also keep most of my partitions meant for storing data under windows file system and manage them from windows xp because its easy to access windows partitions from gnu/linux than the other way round. My testbed machine contains 6-8 operating systems on it and the list keeps changing every 3-4 days. My brother is very fond of Gentoo OS.
Final word? Debian as a server, Ubuntu for most of the desktop jobs(multimedia, internet etc), Zenwalk for development work and Windows XP for .NET and data storage.