Transfer network-manager connections to new computer

I just recently got a new Laptop (a T440p) to test it, if it suits my needs. The old x220 is still a nice companion, but I kind of need a bit more horsepower on my daily companion.

Let me tell you something about the magic of Linux - I just removed the old SSD from my x220 and put it into the T440p. It booted out of the box, with all my configurations and everything in place. No need to reconfigure or even reinstall anything. I could be productive in a couple of minutes. Also transferring the SSD was a matter of some screws, so no problem at all. That's how it should be. That's one of the reasons, why soldered-in SSD suck so badly.

So, everything was working nicely, except for some reason NetworkManager seemed to have forgotten all the Wifi connections. Except, they were still there and configured, just for the Wifi interface of the other laptop. And reconfiguring all of them is kind of boring. There has to be a better way

NetworkManager & System connection

NetworkManager stores all the connections in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections. They are there as plaintext files (restricted to root through)

Turns out, the line we need to change in every file is the following

This is the mac-address of my old laptop, and I just need to replace it with the MAC of my new laptop. Easy as goo pie. The following one-liner does the job. Remember to replace YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY with the MAC address of your laptop

After that, I restarted NetworkManager, and it was nicely connecting to the available Wifi.

TL;DR

  • NetworkManager Wifi-Connections are MAC-Sensitive
  • To bring your connections to a new Wifi adapter you need to change the mac-address line of every connection with the following script

Island - CampingCard Locations 2019

Download: CampingCard-Locations-2019.gpx

Two years ago I wrote a simple python script in order to extract the locations of CampingCard.is and create a handy GPX file for my navi and mobile phone. I'm kind of surprised, that the same script still runs.

Here are the locations for this year. Enjoy! 🙂

Just for completeness, here are also the links to the files of the previous years

Spack and CCfits

My Pull-Request for including the CCfits package in Spack has just been merged into the development version. Very nice!

I use spack extensively on our scientific clusters in order to provide environment modules with various software packages (and versions) to our users. And because we need the CCfits package, I've created this package for spack. Now it's upstream and I hope that it makes the work of many other system administrators easier.

Now back to work 🙂

Pure rye bread

Another rainy Sunday, another bread recipe.

Today I was gonna try to make a full-rye bread. I used my own sourdough starter, and let the dough ripe overnight. Stirring and firmly mixing the dough of a pure rye dough turns out to be fairly exhausting. The consistency is super gluey and it's more like fresh concrete or grout.

Anyways, after mixing I gave it a third rise by using some fresh yeast (10g yeast per kg dough) and let it rise for another hour before baking. So in total, there were 3 rises (sourdough, mixed ingredients, and with yeast), the first one being overnight, the other once roughly an hour.

Ingredients for this bread are: rye flour, water, salt, sourdough starter (from my own culture) and a little bit of fresh yeast.

  • Fine result for the first try
  • Cut in half
  • With a little bit of butter
  • Final result

The taste is very good: It has it's own aroma, coming from the sourdough and the rye and does not necessary need additional spices. It tasted very nice on it's own and with butter and does not become boring like this. I can see this bread to be very nice together with some blue-cheese and honey.

Summary: I'm satisfied with the result for a new recipe and the first try of it. Looking forward to tomorrow's breakfast!

Iceland - Best Pictures

When going through my picture collections, I've compiled the latest Best-of-iceland picture collection. Most of them are also on Unsplash and in my picture album, but some of them are only here. Enjoy!

  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Landmannalaugar
  • Gullfoss
  • Gullfoss
  • Öxarárfoss
  • Vik - Black Sand Beaches
  • Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon
  • Puffin
  • Puffin
  • Goðafoss
  • Goðafoss

Rye-wheat bread

Another new bread recipe, that I'm right now working on. From the same book as the last experiments, and because of copyright reasons, I won't put the recipe here (Get the book!)

I am very happy that the bread didn't glued too much. In the meantime the kitchen smells amazing, and I can't wait for tomorrow morning to try out this beauty.

For now, good night.

Ginger Sirup

Refreshingly simple recipe with a strong taste. Consider adding fresh peppermint and a lime

Recipe

  • 200g Ginger
  • 2 Lemons
  • 250g Sugar
  • 750ml Water

Peel and cut the Ginger into stripes. Put the Ginger into the water, add the juice of the lemons and cook for 5 minutes. Still in the hot pan, blend it using a hand blender. Then add the sugar and cook it for another 5 minutes.
Put into bottles. Recommended to use within half of a year.

Getting kodi to run nicely on Raspbian

This blog post is about getting Kodi up and running with Netflix on Raspbian. This is not a tutorial, more a collection of notes for myself in order to reproduce the setup.

Basic install

Get a recent version of Raspbian from the Raspberry Pi website. (Or my ftp mirror). Extract it to a fresh micro-SD card and get the system ready. Follow this guide, if you need help. Boot into the system and run a update and install some handy tools

Next, we are gonna harden the system. For that do the following

  • Set root password
  • Rename user pi to something else
  • Remove the NOPASSWD for user pi
  • Permit root-ssh login only via public key

Install Kodi

First add the following repository

Now install kodi

Autostart Kodi

Ok, kodi is installed, now we need to start kodi. For that we create a systemd service by putting the following to /etc/systemd/system/kodi.service

Install the Netflix Plugin

The Netflix Plugin is hosted on GitHub. Download the plugin and install the zip-file. Best option seems to be to put it on a USB-Stick and install it from there. This plugin needs parted or fdisk, you install them on your kodi and then let the plugin install the widevine library, necessary for the DRM. The DRM is by the way also the thing, that was in the way of getting Netflix work in the first place. And it's still a bit of a mess, since we are using here a extraction of the libwidevine from the chromecast.

Well, as long as it works, but it's not nice and probably creating causing one or two times headache until it finally works.

Allow Kodi to reboot and shutdown

This is now more a quick fix, based on the suggestion from here. The original clue was posted long time ago on the kodi forums, but those posts were only of limited help. So, create the following file

Finetuning

I encountered the problem, that if Kodi runs for too long (multiple days), the Netflix plugin stopped working. No errors given, it just won't play a movie again. A quick fix is to schedule a reboot every night using a cronjob

Further work

This is of course just the basic installation. You will need to configure Kodi to your needs (Skins, Addons, Timezone, connect your NAS, ...)

Also, I might create an ansible-playbook to setup this procedure. This looks like a fun project to do on a rainy Sunday.

For now, I'm off, watching some Netflix 🙂

btrfs being notable slow in HDD RAID6

Disclaimer: I don't want to blame anyone. I love btrfs and would very much like to get it running in a good manner. This is a documentation about a use case, where I have some issues

I am setting up a new server for our Telescope systems. The server acts as supervisor for a handful of virtual machines, that control the telescope, instruments and provide some small services such as a file server. More or less just very basic services, nothing fancy, nothing exotic.

The server has in total 8 HDD, configured as RAID6 connected via a Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS-3 and I would like to setup btrfs on the disks, which turns out to be horribly slow. The decision for btrfs came from resilience considerations, especially regarding the possibility of creating snapshots and conveniently transferring them to another storage system. I am using OpenSuSE 15.0 LEAP, because I wanted a not too old Kernel and because OpenSuSE and btrfs should work nicely together (A small sidekick in the direction of RedHat to rethink their strategy of abandoning btrfs in the first place)

The whole project runs now into problems, because in comparison to xfs or ext4, btrfs performs horribly in this environment. And with horribly I mean a factor of 10 and more!

The problem

The results as text are listed below. Scroll to the end of the section

I use the tool dbench to measure IO throughput on the RAID. When comparing btrfs to ext4 or xfs I notice, the overall throughput is about a factor of 10 (!!) lower, as can be seen in the following figure:

Throughput measurement using dbench - xfs's throughput is 11.60 times as high as btrfs !!!

sda1 and sda2 are obviosly the same disk and created with default parameters, as the following figure demonstrates

My first suspicion was, that maybe cow (copy-on-write) could be the reason for the performance issue. So I tried to disable cow by setting chattr +C and by remounting the filesystem with nodatacow. Both without any noticeable differences as shown in the next two figures

Same dbench run as before, with with chattr +C. No notice-worthy difference
Same dbench run as in the beginning, but with nodatacow mount option. Still, negligible difference

Hmmmm, looks like something's fishy with the filesystem. For completion I also wanted to swap /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 (in case something is wrong with the partition alignment) and for comparison also include ext4. So I reformatted /dev/sda1 with the btrfs system (was previously the xfs filesystem) and /dev/sda2 with ext4 (was previously the btrfs partition). The results stayed the same, although there are some minor differences between ext4 and xfs (not discussed here). The order of magnitude difference between btrfs and ext4/xfs remained

Swapping /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 and testing dbench on ext4 yields the same results: btrfs performs badly on this configuration

So, here are the results from the figures.

/dev/sda1 - xfsThroughput 7235.15 MB/sec 10 procs
/dev/sda2 - btrfsThroughput 623.654 MB/sec 10 procs
/dev/sda2 - btrfs (chattr +C)Throughput 609.842 MB/sec 10 procs
/dev/sda2 - btrfs (nodatacow)Throughput 606.169 MB/sec 10 procs
/dev/sda1 - btrfsThroughput 636.441 MB/sec 10 procs
/dev/sda2 - ext4Throughput 7130.93 MB/sec 10 procs

And here is the also the text file of the detailed initial test series. In the beginning I said something like a factor of 10 and more. This relates to the results in the text field. When setting dbench to use synchronous IO operations, btrfs gets even worse.

Other benchmarks

Phoronix did a comparison between btrfs, ext4, f2fs and xfs on Linux 4.12, Linux 4.13 and Linux 4.14 that also revealed differences between the filesystems of varying magnitude.

As far as I can interpret their results, they stay rather inconclusive. Sequential reads perform fastest on btrfs, while sequential writes apperently are horrible (Factor 4.3 difference).