cp -r hangs. use cp -R.

My primary purpose for this blog, is to make small little nuggets that a search engine will find, when you have a problem, and you haven't slept for three days, and you type in the first thing that comes to you.

I could do this with keywords: cp, cp -r, cp -R, hangs, takes forever, special devices, licq_fifo, linux, unix, large copy, massive copy, etc.

But that's not the way you think when you haven't slept. If you're a human, you ask questions "why is my cp hanging?" or "my copy is hanging, but why?" or just statements "my cp hangs" or "my copy hangs." Very commonly, you think in terms of time-based sequences of statements, as if you were talking to a doctor ... something like "I'm on Linux. I had to copy a lot of data from one disk to another. One disk is remote, using NFS. I used cp -r. It took forever, so I did df, and found that the new disk size wasn't increasing. Then I killed it with control-c. And ran it cp -r -v, to see what was going on. It got hung up on a file licq_fifo. I googled licq_fifo, and found out it was a special device. cp -r doesn't follow symbolic links, why would it not recognize special devices? Oh, wait, I remember this, it's a normal problem. I typed "man cp", and then the more recent "info cp". And, right, cp -R will ignore special device files. I should go to sleep."

This is of course the simplest problem, quite quick to resolve. But look at the volume of problem-solving information in the above paragraph. What can we do to make search engines more like expert systems, so that we can preserve more of the world's problem-solving-sequence information? Not just with IT, but with everything involving such traversals of ordered fuzzy graphs?

Discovering a legacy purpose for LDAP / slapd

If you're on a legacy Linux/Unix system, and you notice slapd running a directory service, you might wonder: what is this directory service for? What is slapd doing? Why is ldap here? Why do I have slpad running? What data is slapd serving? [I'm playing with search engines here -- I typed these questions into google and found nothing quickly.]

A search of the data will answer most of your questions.

ldapsearch

.. is a common LDAP client command on Linux/Unix. It will tell you if no ldap is available ("Can't contact LDAP server").

But, even with a slapd daemon running, you won't find any data by typing this command with no arguments. You need to tell it where to start looking: the base of the ordered data on the local server.

So, find the config file -- usually somewhere like /etc/ldap/slapd.conf. If it isn't there, use "locate slapd" or "locate ldap" to find it.

In the file, you'll see something vaguely like this:

# The base of your directory
suffix "dc=onething,dc=something,dc=else"

Use the string in quotes to search your directory:

ldapsearch -b "dc=onething,dc=something,dc=else"

You'll see the data, and then the purpose of LDAP on your server should be quite clear.

BIOS disappears

I'm putting an EIDE drive in a 7-year-old server, which has SCSI disks from that time -- still working, but they're very small.

There's only one startup setting I need to change:

I hit "delete" to enter the "CMOS Setup Utility".

I go to "BIOS Features Setup".

The setting I need to change is "HDD Sequence SCSI/IDE First".

I need to set it to SCSI, which is still the boot drive. The default is IDE ... the shop that made the server didn't need to change this, because there were no IDE drives ... they should have, but oh well.

But, inexplicably, sometimes, the system doesn't boot up properly. What's up?

Oh. 7-year-old server. The little CMOS backup battery is dead. I've been turning the machine off at the power strip, and it doesn't get the 3 volts it needs to keep my one change to the BIOS ...