Brice Goglin's Blog

XFCE moving icons around when changing monitor sizes

bgoglin — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 20:52:43 GMT

XFCE saves desktop icon positions in a file whose name depends on the desktop size. It means that icon positions are not preserved when switching from laptop-only to laptop + external screen.

Now I run this at the beginning of my XFCE session. Whenever a new positions file is created, I move it back to the default filename (which doesn't depend on the desktop size).

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

    my $dir = "/home/bgoglin/.config/xfce4/desktop/";

    chdir $dir;

    open WATCH, "inotifywait -m -e moved_to . |"
      or die "Failed to notifywait.\n";

    while ($line = ) {
      next unless $line =~ m/(.*) MOVED_TO (.*)/;
      my $file = $2;
      next if $file =~ m/\.new$/;
      next unless $file =~ m/icons.screen0-.*\.rc/;
      unlink "icons.screen0.rc.bak";
      rename "icons.screen0.rc", "icons.screen0.rc.bak";
      print "Moving $file to icons.screen0.rc\n";
      rename $file, "icons.screen0.rc";
    }

Besoin d'un GPS? Evitez Tomtom, c'est de l'arnaque

bgoglin — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 15:27:16 GMT

Je suis l'heureux propriétaire d'une voiture avec GPS intégré. Si c'est pratique au premier abord (notamment le joystick sur la console centrale), ca devient beaucoup plus compliqué quand on creuse un peu.

Tout d'abord, la carte Tomtom n'est mise à jour que tous les 3 mois, il faut payer pour avoir la mise à jour, et elle n'est en fait jamais vraiment à jour! Combien de fois on se retrouve en plein champ parce que Tomtom n'est pas au courant des travaux réalisés il y a un an... Tous les sites proposant des cartes sur Internet y arrivent mais pas Tomtom.
Ensuite, leur fameux service Live marche bien, à condition d'attendre 5 minutes avant de démarrer. Il est si long à récupérer les infos de trafic qu'on est déjà coincé dans les bouchons avant qu'il nous prévienne. Pas du tout pratique en ville. Et je ne parle pas des nombreuses fois où le Live ne répond pas.
Jusqu'il y a peu, il proposait une recherche Google pour trouver tout et n'importe quoi. Tous les clients qui paient pour ce service l'ont vu récemment remplacé par Tomtom places qui est juste d'une nullité incroyable. Au final, on se retrouve à chercher sur son smartphone puis à entrer le résultat dans le GPS. Super... Quitte à utiliser le smartphone, autant prendre un GPS dessus...
Bref, on se demande à quoi ça sert de payer pour leur Live ou pour des mises à jour de carte.

Pire, leur méthode de distribution logicielle est nulle. Impossible de revenir à une version antérieure quand la dernière est bugguée. Et quand la dernière est bugguée au point de planter définitivement votre GPS (de nombreux utilisateurs ont récemment du aller chez leur garagiste pour réparer), ils la laissent en ligne sans prévenir qu'elle va peut-etre aussi planter votre GPS. Entre fin novembre 2012 et mi-janvier 2013, des centaines de clients se sont fait avoir alors que Tomtom savait dans quel cas le bug se produisait. Mais ils ont refusé de le préciser dans là où on télécharge les mises à jour. Bravo.
Et inutile de demander une indemnisation. Ils se considèrent comme non-responsables des délais de réparation soi-disant imposés par nos garagistes. Sauf que ces derniers ne savent pas réparer (ben oui, un garagiste répare des voitures, pas des GPS) et Tomtom ne leur fournit pas d'info, donc ca prend des semaines. Bref, un mois et demi avec un GPS planté et un service client qui nous ignore. Sympa.

Quand on voit qu'un GPS gratuit comme Waze sur smartphone a une carte plus à jour et des infos de trafic aussi bonnes, inutile d'envisager de donner un seul euro à Tomtom.

Remote Console Access with IPMI on Dell R710

bgoglin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:34:15 GMT

Our local servers are moving from Dell Poweredge 2950 to R710. A couple years ago, I wrote a guide for Remote Console Access through IPMI 2.0 on the 2950. Some noticeable changes are needed for R710, so here's a new updated guide. I also added some notes about R815 and R720 at the end, since they are very similar.

You should first choose a new sub-network for IPMI. Although the IPMI network traffic uses a regular physical interface, it has a different MAC address and should use different IP address. If your boxes have 10.0.0.x regular IP addresses, you may for instance use 10.0.99.x for IPMI. Adding corresponding hostnames (for instance xxx-ipmi for host xxx) in your DNS or /etc/hosts file might be good too.

At the end of the BIOS boot, press Ctrl-e to enter the Remote Access Setup and enable actual IPMI Remote Access (note that some models can also be configured from Linux using ipmitool after loading some ipmi kernel modules).

Set IPMI over LAN to on (requires iDRAC6 LAN)
Enter the LAN parameters menu:
- Keep NIC Selection on Shared
- Set IPv4 Address source to Static
- Set IPv4 Address to 10.0.99.x
- Set Subnet Mask to 255.255.255.0 and set Default Gateway if needed
- You may set Host Name string to something like xxx-ipmi but it does not seem that useful anyway
Enter the LAN User Configuration menu:
- Set Account User Name to some login
- Enter a password in Enter Password and again below in Confirm Password
By the way, while you're there, you may enter LCD Configuration and set your user-defined string in LCD Line 1

IPMI is now configured correctly. You should be able to ping the IPMI IP addresses for the master node (assuming you properly enabled the 10.0.99.x network there).

    $ ping 10.0.99.x

Now, you may for instance reboot a node using the following line. Replace cycle with status to see the status, off to shutdown, on to start.

    $ ipmitool -I lan -H 10.0.99.x -U login -P passwd chassis power cycle

Now we need to configure console redirection. It makes it possible to send the BIOS, GRUB, and kernel output through IPMI on the network. Note that the Second Serial port should be used. So usually you will use COM2/ttyS1. After booting, press F2 to enter the BIOS. Go in the Serial Communication menu:

Set Serial Communication to On with Console Redirection via COM2
Keep External Port Address to Serial Device1=COM1,Serial Device2=COM2 (some models enforce Device2 for the serial redirection)
Set External Serial Connector to Serial Device1 (some models don't allow using the same device here and for console redirection)
Keep Failsafe Baud Rate to 115200
Keep Remote Terminal Type to VT100/VT220
Set Redirection After Boot to Enabled

With this configuration, you should see the BIOS and GRUB output remotely using:

    $ ipmitool -I lanplus -H 10.0.99.x -U login -P password sol activate

Then we want to see the kernel booting remotely. This is done by adding the following to the kernel command line:

    console=tty0 console=ttyS1,115200n8

With GRUB2 on Debian, you should open /etc/default/grub and add these options to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX. By the way, you probably want to uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console and remove the quiet option nearby. Everything will be propagated to /boot/grub/grub.cfg when running update-grub.

And finally, you might want to get a console login remotely through IPMI. To do so, add the following line to /etc/inittab:

    T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS1 115200n8 vt100

With all this setup, the above ipmitool sol activate line will display the same thing than the physical console on the machine, which makes it very nice to configure the BIOS, change the kernel, debug, ... Note that ~ is the control character when using the console redirection. And ~. may be used to leave the console. Also ipmitool sol deactivate may help if somebody did not leave the console correctly.

Update for R815 (2012/05/30): The configuration for the R815 is very similar. I met some harder constraints about serial device configuration in the BIOS, everything is already explained above.

Update for R720 (2012/05/31): On recent PowerEdge models, the IPMI config is directly available in the BIOS setup menus, no need to hit Ctrl-e during boot anymore. Just go in the BIOS with F2 as usual, then enter the iDRAC config. The following menus are similar to those described above. The other difference is that the R720 doesn't seem to work well with the IPMI lan interface. Always passing lanplus instead of lan to ipmitool -I seems to work fine.

Brice Goglin's Blog

XFCE moving icons around when changing monitor sizes

Besoin d'un GPS? Evitez Tomtom, c'est de l'arnaque

Remote Console Access with IPMI on Dell R710

Encrypting part of /home

Debian/X.org notes - Radeon KMS in unstable, enabled by default

Debian/X.org notes - Bug triaging while waiting for DRM 2.6.33

Debian/X.org notes - Radeon KMS and DRI2 in experimental

Fun with SuperMicro BIOS and PCI-NUMA

Debian/X.org notes - i865 fixed, Xserver 1.6 entering testing soon

Debian/X.org notes - Quick Updates

Debian/X.org notes - Intel 2.8.0 in Sid, enforces UXA and DRI2

Debian/X.org notes - DRI2 fixed in unstable, and more

Debian/X.org notes - Why some X drivers like firmware-linux

Debian/X.org notes - Howto get DRI2 on Debian?

Debian/X.org notes - X behavior changes in experimental

Debian/X.org notes - Howto Input-hotplug?

Debian/X.org notes - Xserver 1.6, Intel 2.6.1, ... what's up in XSF?

MMU notifiers brings into Linux what we've been wanted for HPC for a while

myri10ge broken in 2.6.26, will be fixed in 2.6.26.1

Debian/X.org notes - xserver-xorg-video-radeon in unstable

Debian X.org notes - X.org in Lenny (and more)

Debian X.org notes - Radeon Textured Xvideo in experimental, r128 and mach64 split out

Debian X.org notes - No, DisplaySize and DPI are not (always) broken

Debian X.org notes - One year of X.org BTS maintenance

Debian X.org notes - ATI 6.7.197 in unstable, AtomBIOS r500/600 support in experimental