Monday, 21 July 2014

I have a couple of virt-manager virtual machines for doing DHCP-related work. I have one for the DHCP server and one for the DHCP client, and I have a private network between the two so I can simulate DHCP requests without messing up anything else. It works nicely.

I got a bit carried away, and I use LVM to snapshots for the work I do, so that when I'm done I can throw away the virtual machine's disks and work with a new snapshot next time I want to do something.

I have a cron job, that on a good day, fires up the virtual machines using the master logical volumes and does a dist-upgrade on a weekly basis. It seems to have varying degrees of success though.

So I fired up my VMs to do some investigation of the problem for #749410 and discovered that they weren't booting, because the initramfs couldn't find the root filesystem.

Upon investigation, the problem seemed to be that the logical volumes weren't getting activated. I didn't get to the bottom of why, but a manual activation of the logical volumes allowed the instances to continue booting successfully, and after doing manual dist-upgrades and kernel upgrades, they booted cleanly again. I'm not sure if I got hit by a passing bug in unstable, or what the problem was. I did burn about 2.5 hours just fixing everything up though.

Then I realised that there'd been more activity on the bug since I'd last read it while I was on vacation, and half the investigation I needed to do wasn't necessary any more. Lesson learned.

I haven't got to the bottom of the bug yet, but I had a fun day anyway.

Zoe is still waking up on the early side, thanks to the jet lag. I think she woke up around 5am and jumped into bed with me. At least it's nice and dark.

The drop off at Kindergarten went well. Zoe was happy to see Megan again, and wasn't particularly clingy or anything. I was able to get away relatively quickly.

I spent the day getting stuck into some Debian work, and it was good to be able to use the day for its intended purpose for a change.

Megan's Dad, Jason, has a job this week that makes picking her up from Kindergarten impossible, and her parents asked me if I could pick her up on Monday and Wednesday. Zoe was very excited to have Megan come back for a play date, so I picked up both girls and brought them back home.

It was a pretty easy afternoon really. I let the girls just self-direct themselves, and they did a good job of playing on their own with minimal supervision from me. Megan had made a "portable zoo" at Kindergarten for her stuffed panda. It basically involved a shoe box and a couple of pieces of foam for bars. Her and Zoe spent a chunk of time blinging it up with Zoe's craft supplies.

Megan's Mum, Laura, picked up Megan not too long before Sarah did to pick up Zoe. Anshu arrived in the middle as well.

The jet lag is still seriously kicking my butt in the evenings. I'm hoping it will pass by tomorrow.