Author Archives: Alan V
Protected: Sigh
Photos
Photos 2 got another 4 galleries today of random things that have been happening over the past month or so. I haven’t yet had a chance to go through Thailand/Europe photos, but those will be posted at some point as well.
Random (not in photos2):
Chocolate tasting:
Urban hiking:
Twister chess:
Fourth of July:
Please forgive the framing issues. Almost all of these were taken with the camera upside-down to counteract the shutter issues it’s having and, for some reason, it’s harder to frame things correctly that way. I still need to buy a new camera at some point…
Weekend
There was an awesome weekend. Other people have already summarized much of it, so I won’t do so here. Instead, I will post this, courtesy of Tim:
But mainly, I wanted to say that SF transportation is epic failing. Fares have gone up and BART workers are possibly going to strike starting this Thursday.
Tip for all of you trying to get to/from the airport… the SamTrans 292 costs $3.50 from SF to SFO, and $1.75 from SFO to SF. Better that than the $8.10 on BART (WTF $4 airport surcharge?!). You can also take it to San Mateo in lieu of the Caltrain (for $0.50 less on the Southbound trip, $2.25 less Northbound) if you don’t mind taking an additional 30 minutes to an hour.
Photos from Thailand, Europe, and this past weekend will be posted to photos2 at some point. I am just being lazy about going through them.
VM Fail
Work today was full of fail.
It started out with a push-update to my Windows VM from IT. Simple enough, right? Well, this update somehow pushed my VM over the edge of hard drive usage and caused it to start reporting low space errors (the VM thinks it’s a 130GB drive, but it’s located on a 60GB partition, and it had eaten up around 59.7 GB). This meant I could no longer run automated tests in it, which was my primary work for today. Ok, fine, spend some time cleaning up the VM.
This, unfortunately, isn’t enough… since the VM HD files are in 2GB chunks, cleaning up stuff inside the VM and reducing the used HD space down to 26GB doesn’t reduce the VM files’ sizes any. So I attempt a defrag. The available space on the drive very quickly goes down from about 300MB to 110MB, at which point I decide this is a very bad idea and stop.
Spend the morning finding tools to resize the physical drive partitions to give the VM some more room (as it is now running in the 110MB of free space and is generally unusable). Finally fall back to Gparted and discover that the partitions are actually logical volumes, so I have to resize them within the OS. Great.
Spend most of the afternoon figuring out how to boot Ubuntu into a command line as root so I can unmount the appropriate drives to reduce the logical volume size of /home so I can increase the logical volume size of /. (Issues mainly stemming from the fact that all of the physical drive space was already allocated between the two logical volumes, so I needed to reduce one to increase the other, and reductions cannot be done while the partition is mounted.) Discover that I first need to reduce the file system size. Finally succeed at doing so and at giving / an additional 2GB of memory. This was around 4 PM. Success!
Finally get the VM booting back up, and it’s running mostly ok. I then stupidly decide to resize the HD size within Windows so it doesn’t eventually use up the newly allocated 2GB and die again (which is something most of the online conversations on VM sizes I’m finding recommend anyway). This kicks off and starts eating up the newly-allocated 2GB. Eventually, it has 0KB left on its partition, signals an abort, and kills the VM in the middle of the process.
So yeah, now I have a VM in an unbootable state on a partition with 0KB available space (so it can’t boot anyway). Awesome.
I filed a ticket to IT to either get a new VM or get help in adding a VM I have to the corporate domain, but that won’t happen until Monday. Blah. Unfortunately, as there was no VM backup and it was an image of my old Windows workstation, everything I had on there is lost. Oh well.
So yeah, I essentially got nothing done at work today because of stupid VM issues. As soon as I get a new VM working, I’m going to snapshot it and set it to revert to snapshot every shutdown.
Edit: For my own future reference, the relevant commands were:
umount /home
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/home 19609750
lvreduce -L -2G /dev/mainvg/home
mount /home
lvresize -L +2G /dev/mainvg/root
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/root somenumber