Ubuntu VZ container and lo interface

If you look at VZ image of Ubuntu 11.04 , you'll see that udev is excluded from startup. It seems to be incorrect, because without udev "net-device-added INTERFACE=lo" event is not emitted and loopback interface remains unconfigured... At least, this behavior appeared after updating this image to 11.10. I don't remember if lo interface was present in original 11.04 image.

How can you use PocketBook?

I received a PocketBook 612 reader as New Year present... I haven't seen slower device. It seems that my phone is faster and even my 13-year old computer was faster... I just want to read books. However, when I navigate through pages in a PDF file, this thing starts thinking,,, I can't even scroll through several pages per minute. The screen sometimes shows artifacts (is not cleared completely). The book has 44 dictionaries... It's good. It has even Ukrainian-Russian dictionary and French-English one but not French-Russian... And this device is supposed to be sold in Russia... Cool.
I didn't manage to connect it to my home Wi-Fi WPA2/PSK network with hidden AP.
However, it can pronounce words and read text aloud. But I don't need this, all I need is a reader and a vocabulary. I thought I could get it for about 250$. I was wrong... I wouldn't count this amount of money if the thing worked... But it lags worse than 10-year's old PC.
Possibly I should read books from my phone and don't use such incomprehensible device... It seems the best solution is to return this device to a seller and to buy some cheap netbook or tablet pc...

One thing I hate in FreeBSD...

One thing I hate in FreeBSD - is the speed of maintainence operations.
To install (or upgrade) one port you have to wait half an hour...
To update system with custom kernel/userland parameters, you should wait several hours... Then you call mergemaster, which asks you a dozen questions about config files (and most of changes doesn't impact on the current system, but just in case there is something important, you have to review them).
Comparing to "do-release-upgrade" on ubuntu, the speed of operation is unberable. And binary updates just don't do everithing you need (e.g. dtrace world, necessary ports options...)

VSS strange error on Windows 2008 x64

Today I spent 2 hours trying to make bacula fd work on Win2008 Server.
I got permanent error in event viewer:

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: A critical component required by 
the Volume Shadow Copy service is not registered. This might 
happened if an error occurred during Windows setup or during installation 
of a Shadow Copy provider. The error returned from CoCreateInstance on 
class with CLSID {e579ab5f-1cc4-44b4-bed9-de0991ff0623} and Name 
IVssCoordinatorEx2 is [0x80040154, Class not registered]. 

Operation:
   Instantiating VSS server

After googling for some time I found an answer: I had installed 32-bit bacula version by mistake... After installing 64-bit version, everything started working...

Yandex Server: Start indexing... Aborted

I know, that unix style is to avoid writing anything unnecessary.
Issue "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda2 bs=32M" and wait for 40 minutes without any diagnostics. In FreeBSD it is sometimes better - at least, you can hit Ctr^T.
But Yandex server is awsome:

# yandex-server --indexer -r /usr/local/etc/yandex/yandex.cfg
Yandex.DsIndexer
This program is a part of Yandex.Software 2010.9.0
Copyright (c) 1996-2009 OOO "Yandex". All rights reserved.
Call software@yandex-team.ru for support.
Product ID: ENT-030-2010.9.0
Config file '/usr/local/etc/yandex/yandex.cfg' was parsed with the message(s):
Processing of '/usr/local/etc/yandex/yandex.cfg':
Warning at line 5, col 2: section 'Server' not allowed here and will be ignored.

Start indexing...

Start indexing...
Aborted

WTF? Logs contain:

Working with "webds" data source...
Mon Oct 31 16:56:33 2011 [Webds] [INFO] - Indexing: datasource webds opened successfully
Indexing was finished at Mon Oct 31 16:56:33 2011
It has been indexed 0 documents.
Index contains 0 documents.
Error: std::bad_alloc
Indexing was started at Mon Oct 31 16:57:08 2011

It turned out that container with Yandex Server just had not enough allocated memory... After increasing it from 128 to 512 MB the server started creating indexes...

PostgreSQL: server closed connection

Today I got a ton of messages

DBI connect('dbname=xxx;host=yyy','username',...) failed: server closed the connection unexpectedly
 This probably means the server terminated abnormally
 before or while processing the request. at....

from our network statistic collector.
I spent some time trying to understand what had happened (besides yesterdays power fail). I looked at PostgreSQL server debug log (it honestly told that client just closed connection). There were no traces of dying postgres backend. I rolled back some minor configuration changes which I made yesterday... And later it downed upon me: it was just one old server which was supposed to have its network interface shut down waked after power failure... It was seen in dmesg:

arp: x.y.z.w moved from AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA to BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB on em0
arp: x.y.z.w moved from BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB to AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA on em0

Really, power cycling is neccessary sometimes to ascertain that all your services are configured properly :)

OpenVZ and Java

Today we encountered interesting bug in Proxmox 1.9. Java works in container very slow and randomly fails. There are two possible workarounds: provide at least two CPUs to container or downgrade kernel to 2.6.32-4-pve. I've opted for the first way.