findmnt

One of my customers uses cPanel to administer their internet facing servers.

It has an interesting virtual filesystem setup for sandboxing user accounts: cPanel creates, per user, a new root filesystem for that user, and then chroot into that before running user code (shells, php, ...).

To create that file system, cPanel uses bind mounts to make the root-jail file system look very much like the real root file system.

bind mounts are a thing that appeared after the 1997-era of me spending a lot of time learning Linux. (if it was invented post 2000, lol I've never heard of it)

In the intervening years, isolation techniques like this have been becoming more mainstream - for example, my main use of docker (via my tool cue) has been to prepare and use different root file systems.

Anyway, back to cPanel. I was trying to figure out how this virtual filesystem was constructed. Bind mounts don't appear in the output of mount or df or /proc/mounts with all the information I wanted: the mount just shows are being from the same device that its target is, without saying where that target is.

For example, I can see that /home/virtfs/x/usr/sbin goes to somewhere in the filesystem on s_os-lv_root but not where. (I can guess it's /usr/sbin in this case).

/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_root   50G   21G   30G  41% /home/virtfs/x/usr/sbin
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_root   50G   21G   30G  41% /home/virtfs/x/var/spool
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_root   50G   21G   30G  41% /home/virtfs/x/etc/apache2
/dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_root   50G   21G   30G  41% /home/virtfs/y/usr/sbin

Anyway, surely this can't be the way things are??

So along comes findmnt, which gives me this info:

...
│ │ ├─/home/virtfs/x/usr/sbin     /dev/mapper/vg_os-lv_root[/usr/sbin]
      xfs         ro,relatime,seclabel,attr2,inode64,sunit=512,swidth=512,usrquota
...

... which tells me that yes that really is mounted from /usr/sbin.

Anyway, a nice new command to discover, around since only util-linux v2.18 in mid 2010.

cd

# cd
bash: cd: write error: Success

first impressions of raspberry pi

I just got my Raspberry Pi, left on doorstep from Farnell in a package labelled "tshirt"; indeed inside the package was a (free) element14/pi tshirt, and wrapped inside that was my actual raspberry pi. Its taken a while to arrive (like most people's) - it was ordered on the 9th of May.

The first afternoon I spent playing with it came with an excited nostalgic feeling to my teenage years, scrabbling to put random pieces of hardware together scrounged around the house in order to get a working system: a keyboard off one host, a usb hub stolen from someone, a long ethernet wire borrowed from someone because the TV is in one room and the ethernet ports are in another. It was made more nostalgic because my best friend from secondary school who used to be my main partner in this kind of activity turned up to have a play too.

I fairly easily got the example debian distribution downloaded (my first linux distro downloaded by bittorrent) and running on a 4gb SD card; and once that was in place, it was easily to get a browser up and watch the bunnycam.

After giving up on getting flash running in order to get BBC iPlayer, I discovered get-iplayer (on the way getting annoyed by this blog post by a BBC dude about how people shouldn't use 3rd party clients). I can just about play BBC radio audio at the same time as the bunny webcam is streaming video. But it didn't seem to have enough power to decode an iplayer video stream instead of the bunny webcam, which was a bit disappointing.

There seem to be a few funny presumably hardware related problems: the device doesn't reboot at all, and sometimes when I boot, sound does not work at all. I haven't had time or inclination to track these down at all. Most concerning for me is that the experience of different devices seems slightly different - for example, other people seem to be able to reboot just fine.

After downloading the recommended Debian distro, I discovered that there was a beta release of a much more recent version, wheezy. This was a lot smoother experience than the recommended distro - it resized the image automatically to fill the whole 4g disk space, and just seemed more polished. Either way, those distributions are debian based, so the amazingness (if you're being nostalgic about 80s/90s era hacking) of apt comes into play to get a big range of software installed.

It was cool that the wheezy distribution came with Scratch - a visual programming language that is sort of a year-2012 version of Logo. (That's cool - one of the first things I thought about when I heard of the goals of the raspberry pi was to think: why don't you get people programming scratch instead?)

Something interesting I discovered was that the ARM architecture does floating point emulations completely differently to intel: there are different calling conventions for software floating point and hardware floating point, and it seems that all the packages in your distro need recompiling to make use of hardware floating point, if they were originally built for software floating point. I'll have a play with that later.

The GPIO port had pins soldered on, which i wasn't expecting. I'm not sure what to use those for. I've had a user port on a computer before, but never used them much - just for flashing LEDs and making model trains drive around. maybe some geeky weather station thing?

So what do you need to get started, in addition to the pi? Well a keyboard and video (composite or HDMI) and a power supply - I'm using the USB-based power supply I stole from my mifi. Probably you'd like a mouse and an ethernet connection.

If I get up to anything cool, I'll write about it on this blog, no doubt.