So yesterday I decided to upgrade my installation of Ubuntu from 9.04 -> 9.10 on my file server at home. This system has no screen attached to it and no keyboard so I just ssh’d in and followed the how-to on the Ubuntu website for doing the distribution upgrade.

Everything went smooth until I rebooted the system, and after a while when I tried to get back into it I noticed it hadnt come back online. I plugged a monitor a keyboard into the system and rebooted it to see what the issue was and I saw this screen.

mountall: /proc: unable to mount: Device or resource busy
mountall: /proc/self/mountinfo: Not such file or directory
mountall: root filesystem isn’t mounted
init: mountall main process (2025) terminated with status 1
General error mounting filesystems.
A maintenance shell will now be started.

So I hit the internet and tried to figure out wehat was going on, and found out this appears to be a problem for a lot of people, but none of the solutions I found worked for me, mostly because my fileserver has no cd drive and booting from a flash drive doesnt seem to work either.

From what I can gather the main reason this issue is happening is becase Grub is broken during the update process and is pointing at the wrong drive/kernel. Most solutions involved booting into a live cd and fixing menu.lst from there or using grub-update. Eventually I managed to fix the problem by going into grub and manually editing the boot command to point at the correct drive and the correct kernel. The easiest way to do this for your system is to use tab completion as it will tell you all the options and using a little trial and error you can get it going.

Hopefully this saves someone else from hours of torture.

I’m pretty sure that there are only 2 people who read this blog carefully, and out of those 2 I would say that about 50% of them just click ‘next’ on their feed reader, however I thought I might try and get a bit of publicity for a new site I’m going to be writing for.

One thing I have been following very closely for a long time now is Android. For those of you who don’t know what Android is, it is an operating system made by Google, aimed at smart phones, but also moving into lots of other devices as well.

I have now signed up to be a contributor to a new site, www.newzealandroid.co.nz. I’m aiming to try and shed some insight from what I’ve found about Android (hopefully have more insight when I can actually BUY an Android handset). If you want, check it out. The site isnt open yet, and I’ll post again once it is.

This site, along with a couple of other sites, have all now been moved to a nice new shiny server. Once I finally got around to setting everything up it hasnt seemed too bad, and looks to be right back to where it was a week ago before moving over.

So a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the Mono Migration that my work was attempting in an effort to reduce costs and enable us to move our product onto EC2 as we are looking at some new projects that require us to be able to expand our system quickly and easily.

Since then we have had quite a lot going on at work, and are only just starting to focus on the migration again, so here’s where we are up to at this stage.

Firstly. we are going to move the database from MS SQL Server 2000 to PostgreSQL. This in itself will be a massive task as there is no easy way to move the hundreds of stored procedures over (or so I’m told, I havent looked into it much yet). Once this is done we will be running the code as is against the new database and hoping that it works. I’ll let you know once that is done and where we are going from there.

On a side note, this blog along with a couple of others hosted on this server will be moved to a new server before the 30th of September. As long as everything goes smooth there should be minimal downtime for the site, and I should be able to keep all the info currently on here. I’m going to be backing everything up just in case though.

So recently I put some files up on a file server I rent with a couple of mates, mostly ones used in my CV so that prospective employees can check papers etc that I have written. In an attempt to try and figure out who has accessed these files I, with the help of my friend Paul wrote a smal script that uses the access log, grep and whois to figure out the domains that have accessed the file. To be honest its a small script, and if I had more experience with bash I probably could have written it myself. In fact, if Paul had wanted to, I know he could have written it no problems, but it was all experience. In case someone wants to use it, here it is.

#!/bin/bash

FILE=”/tmp/$(basename $0).$RANDOM.$$.txt”;

echo Searching for access to files with $1;

sudo cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* | grep $1 > $FILE;

if [ -z "$2" ]
then
echo “no exclusions”;
else
echo “excluding files containing $2″;
cat $FILE | grep -v $2 > $FILE;
fi

cat $FILE | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f 1 | sort | uniq -c > $FILE;

for i in $(cat $FILE)
do
echo -ne “$i    -       “; whois $i -H | egrep ‘OrgName|descr’ | head -n 1 | cut -d ‘:’ -f 2;
done

To use it, just copy the script (replacing the part that says *PUT YOUR NAME HERE* with your username) into a file, set it as an executable using  chmod +x, then run it. The first argument is the string you are looking for access to, e.g. pdf will show all pdf’s, and there is a second optional string for if you want to exclude files with names containg a certain string.

Well I promised I would be updating on how the effort was going to migrate our VB.Net/ASP/SQL Server 2000 product here at work to Mono, and as the first steps are now underway, I have a few things to talk about.

For starters we are looking at porting our code to C#, rather than VB.Net in Mono, and removing the ASP stuff from it etc. We are also looking at implementing localisation of the site. Originally when looking at this in Visual Studio we would have to look at purchasing a tool to pull out all the translatable strings in the program. Luckily, I found out mono-develop does this for free. Awesomeness.

At this stage the idea is that we are going to go for a proof of concept and move the code over to Mono as it is in it’s VB.Net/ASP form, then we will look at doing the actual port, as time is a little critical for us.

The first step is to setup a virtual machine for running Ubuntu (our OS of choice for the cloud) and install Mono/PostgreSQL etc on it. I choose to use VirtualBox for 2 reasons, 1) I hadnt used it before and it looked very interesting and 2) VMWare was causing my machine to go into an infinite “Cannot load Drivers” loop on the windows host, so it wasnt really an option at all.

Once I had completed this I downloaded and ran MoMA. This tool will scan the assemblies for your program and tell you what problems there are with running the code on Mono. We have a few problems on ours, but most of it is SQL calls that aren’t implemented, so I’ll find a way around this.

At the end of the MoMA tool there are links to a few sites that have definately helped me in moving the code over for the first test. Now there is just one last step before attempting to build the code in Mono and see how badly it breaks.

Clean the code. It is pointless trying to port everything over unless you need everything. I have currently removed about 50k of code from the site that is either no longer used and, thanks to my predescessor, has never been removed. I also found thousands of table entries and a good 30+ tables and another few hundred stored procedures that are either not used or obsolete. I’m still in the process of cleaning up before I try the build, but once that is done I shall let you know how things go.

Here at my new job we develop in ASP/VB.Net, running off of an SQL Server 2000 (yes, it horrified me too when I found out). The company has been around since ~2000 and we have decided now that it is a time for a change. We are hoping in the next few months to be moving away from a single server based model that we have now, onto something a little more modern, a cloud.

At the same time as we do this, we are wanting to make the move to using OSS. This is going to be quite a move, with our development enivronment being firmly embedded in MS technologies at the moment. So we have a few steps that we are going to be going through. I am hoping over the next few months to share my experiences in moving our product from the MS environment to running on Ubuntu server using Mono (the C# variety) and Postgresql. It will be interesting, with the need for a demonstration of the new product by mid-August.

Also, on a side note, I have moved out of where I was staying temporarily into a new place, and once I have sorted out my internet issues I shall be looking at finally getting around to working on MPLS again.

Thats right folks, after many months of neglect I have finally gotten around to upgrading my site, and fixing all those things that havent been working since the last upgrade.

So now I should be posting more here, or at least more of my FreeBSD posts will be syndicated here. I’ll be posting about a new project from work that I think a few people may find interesting…

Lastly I would also like to apologise for the amount of posts that are going to come through once the syndication to my FreeBSD blog picks up the posts I have made recently and dumps them on the site.

So I noticed today that there hasnt been a post made to this site for a very long time. Thats not that unusual, except for one thing. I have been posting, just not directly here. I have an automatic syndication of my FreeBSD blog to this site, but what I didnt realise was that the plugin I use to do this was broken when I upgraded to wordpress 2.7. This weekend I hope to fix the problem, so dont be suprised if a few posts come through that seem to belong from a while back.

That is all.

So it has been a while since my last post, and while thats nothing really unusual, I actually have things to post about, so I thought I better get round to doing them.

First off, my new job. As I said in my last post I had a pretty quick turn about from the first interview to starting work (phone call on the Tuesday concerning an interview, started work the following Monday). Things are going not too badly here, now that I’m settling into the role. The job is working for a company called TechCertain, who develop, maintain and operate a system which handles the paper work for insurance companies online (issue proposals and policies, automatic quoting/underwriting e.t.c.). My role is the companies Business Analyst. My main job is to work with the clients to determine what it is they need, and then work out how we are going to acheive this. I also do a lot of the companies research and development (more on that later), write the front end for the clients, and manage the development team (read: the other guy who works mostly on the backend haha). The language is VB .net and Microsofts SQL, which is actually pretty funny because the day I started this job I had never worked on or studied either of these, so I pretty much had to learn all of that on top of everything else that comes with a new job.

I mentioned before that the company had some R&D going on. Seems strange for a simple web application company like us to have R&D but it’s true. Currently we are looking into porting our code over to mono, and we are looking into running our service on a cloud rather than the server it is currently on, so at least that is keeping me busy.

In the next few weeks I am also moving into a house up here in Auckland, which will be great because I have been living in my friends parents garage since moving up here (it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds) but it’ll still be nice to have a real room e.t.c.

One last thing. I just wanted to say good work to the team that made Ubuntu Rescue Remix. A friend of mine has an 8 year old Acer Travelmate 240 sitting at home, and recently it started telling him that there was imminent drive failure, and refused to log into windows anymore. Using the rescue remix I was able to create a live cd, boot into the command line, plug in my flash drive, and rescue thousands of files off his laptop for him. Now all he has to do is go through and sort them all manuallly.