Regular Chain Reaction of Packages Crashing

[WesCycle]

Greetings,

I'm having a re-occurring problem that I would greatly appreciate some help fixing. I often experience a chain reaction of pop-ups stating that applications have crashed. When I attempt to use the submit information to developers it usually says something along the lines of not enough information.

This often happens when I'm listening to music stored on a network storage device (abbreviated to NSD here on) accessed using Samba using Amarok. I'm assuming that it is probably little to do with the applications that are crashing since they are so varied, and rather something more fundamental. I'll get a list next time but it often includes Firefox, Rekonq, Dolphin, K-Notifier, and a few others.

In the absence of any known solutions I would like to try a few things:
* Swap to using NFS rather than samba. Is there any way to say what credentials like: UID, GID, username, password to use while mounting at startup from the fstab? Getting the UIDs and GID to match on the computer and NSD is a pain!
* How do you change the mythtv backend (installed using apt-get) from running all the time to only running when you start the front end?
* Can someone suggest an application to run that will periodically check the music store on the NSD and mirror it to the local machine? The backup applications I've seen seem to want to create an archive file, I don't need anything that complicated!

Thanks,

Wesley.

The NSD is mounted in fstab with the following line:
//192.168.85.50/Wes /mnt/nfs-Wes cifs sync,noatime,_netdev,nobrl,noperm,nounix,nodev,noe xec,credentials=/etc/samba/auth.smb, 0 0

My system hardware information:
Motherboard: out of a HP system (will find info another time if needed!)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3700+
Memory: 3GB (2 x matching 1GB & 2 x matching 500MB)
Hard Drives: 2 x Seagate Barracuda 200GB in Raid array ST3200822AS (I think this is /dev/dm-0p)
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce 6200se TurboCache PCI/SSE2
Sound Card: Creative Audigy II connected to AMP via analogue 6ch
Optical Drives: HP DVD 640 DVD r/rw
Other Drives: 2.25" drive & multi card reader - rarely used.

My system software information:
Kubuntu 11.04 KDE 4.6.2
(myth TV backend running)
Grub 0.97-29ubuntu61
Amarok 2.4.2
Open GL: 2.1.2 Nvidia 173.14.30
No other OS installed

NSD Info:
Iomega StorCentre ix2-200 2 TB (mirrored array so 1TB)

[oshunluvr]

Re: Regular Chain Reaction of Packages Crashing

rdiff-backup or rsync are the most common choices. However, if your NSD is a mirrored array, why a third backup? Just curious.

For mythtv questions, you really should go to the mythtv forums. I don't know of anyone here who's using mythtv.

As far as NFS goes, I assume since you're asking your NSD supports NFS exports. There are a couple of ways to handle the UID/GID issue. My preferred way is to map the users to a common user on the server side. Then everyone has the same permissions. If this is not what you want, you can use sticky-bits on the mounts to allow a particular group but maintain user ownership. It really depends a lot on your needs for safety (from user deletion and such)

My client mount:
server://media /shared nfs auto,intr,users,rw,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0

My server export:
/media 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,async,secure,no_subtree_check,noh ide,all_squash,anonuid=65534,anongid=560)

This export maps all users to "nobody" and all groups to "shared". If I go into and take ownership of a directory or file, it remains in the "shared" group but is then owned by my admin account and thus becomes readable to all, but not delete-able. I also export a backup directory this way:

/home_backup 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,async,secure,no_subtree_check,noh ide)

This export does not control UID/GID so only the owner has access. I use rdiff-backup to automate my home directory backups to this export on my server.

[WesCycle]

Re: Regular Chain Reaction of Packages Crashing

Morning, and thanks for the reply. Looks like rdiff-backup will work fine for me thank you.

Using rdiff-backup would keep a copy of all the data (critically the library of FLAC music files) on the NSD on the local machine. Currently it is only stored on the NSD. My aim here was nothing to do with data security, moreover trying to reduce the number of times the NSD is being accessed to see if that reduced the frequency of the crashes. This will have the added benifit of keeping the NSD a little quieter!

So far as data security (as in minimising the chance of loss rather than access control) goes I do need another backup. The NSD is a convenience backup. I purchased this to ease system upgrades etc. Since all my workstations also use mirrored arrays this wasn't really about protecting against data loss. The final backup (which I'm yet to set up) is to protect critical data from situations such as theft, fire, flood, disruptive power surge, etc, and I'm looking into Internet based services for this.

I will look at the mythtv forum another time. I have since found away of disabling the autostart by renaming a file in /etc/init. Whether this renders the program unusable or not is yet to be seen!

The fault has occurred once today without Amarok running. The fault seemed to start at Firefox and took out the Printer applet followed by kpackagekit. The latter two were reporting segmentation faults. Unfortunately webpages frequently hang on rekonq. I Shall try konqueror instead as the main browser for a while.

Finally the NSD doesn't offer direct access to the directory export commands, so I can only set username, groupname, UID, GID on the server. Is there no way to set the fstab to mount the directory masquerading as a particular username/group/uid/gid?

If the fault re-occurs with out mythtv, or firefox running I'll run without the NSD mounted for a while to rule that out or in.

Thanks for your help.

Wesley.

[WesCycle]

Re: Regular Chain Reaction of Packages Crashing

It's since occurred to me that it would be a wise move to run a memory test. Not something I've done before. Currently downloading knoppix.

Firefox, Amarok, and mythtv-backend not running and still getting crashes that have taken out the window manager amongst other things. I'll report back progress again soon.

Cheers,

Wesley.

[WesCycle]

Re: Regular Chain Reaction of Packages Crashing

Morning All,

Just following up to say it was the memory causing the problem as since replacing the memory I've had no crashes.

Couldn't get the memtest to work. Some Internet threads seem to suggest it isn't to happy when you've got a Raid Array set up in the BIOS. I wasn't comfortable about turning this off in the motherboard in case it destroyed the array, and so just bought the RAM and tested it.

Thanks for the help.