Ubuntu :: 'safe' Poweroff - Freezes On Disabling The Swap File And Doesn't Do Anything
Jan 9, 2010
Due to some reason not known to me at this moment, my regular shutdown doesn't work. It freezes on disabling the swap file and doesn't do anything. Now, until that problem is solved, I need a way to properly shutdown. I found one, which is poweroff -f, but it is hardly graceful, and would amount to 'flipping the switch' I guess. The other is hibernate, which is what I now use. This does work, but I rather completely shut down the system. For one, regular boot is quicker than resuming from hibernate.
My main question is: is there any way to make the poweroff -f command, e.g. combined with manually disabling the swap file or whatever,"safe?" as in, I can imagine a sudden power off meaning more chance of damage to the HD, which I don't want.
recently I'va bought PCI adapter for extending ATA devices [URL], connected disk (WDC WD1600JB-00REA0, ATA DISK drive). Everything is fine except switching off. Sometimes it freezes, sometimes it takes longer time (more than 30 sec). Everything goes well - except the last step (when appears "Rebooting", or "Switching off" on console). I didn't add any extra boot option into /boot/grub/menu.lst
I have a server Hp proliant DL160 G6 with CentOS 5.4 . When I do shutdown -h now it doesn't poweroff.
I try differents options for acpi in menu.lst file. acpi=force, acpi=noacpi,acpi=off,acpi=ht but there's the same problem.
This the stdout when I do shutdown: Halting system... md: stopping all md devices. Completed flushing cache on controller 0 ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:05:00.1 disabled xenbr0: port 2(peth0) entering disabled state ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:05:00.1 disabled Power down. acpi_power_off called
I show you any specific information about my server:
RAM for older machines like I use is fairly cheap these days. But flash memory is just as cheap or cheaper. So I'd like to ask about the feasibility of expanding my system's memory using flash memory. And about whether creating a partition for swap on the flash memory, or whether a swap file on the flash device, is the better way to go.
By flash memory I have in mind mainly USB sticks or what are sometimes called "pen drives." But I do also have CF and SD cards that, with the proper cheap adapter (one of which I already own for adapting CF) could be used to create extra swap space. So, what is the current consensus on the feasibility/advisability of using flash memory for swap? I've read about the limited write cycles of flash being an argument against using it for swap. But recent reading indicates to me that the limited write cycles problem applies mostly to older, smaller-capacity flash memory. Some will come out and say that, for larger-capacity flash memory, the life of the device is likely to exceed the amount of time your current computer will be useful (I think I've seen estimates in the range of 3-4 years life--minimum--for newer, higher-capacity flash memory).
A more persuasive argument I've heard against using flash memory for swap is that access times for these devices can be much slower than SATA, and maybe even IDE, hard drives. That would certainly dictate against using flash memory for swap.
So, how about some input on this issue? Anyone using flash memory for swap? If so, what kind (e.g., usb stick or SD/CF)? Are you using a swap file or a swap partition? How's system performance? Likewise, has anyone had flash-memory-used-as-swap die on them? The consequences would undoubtedly be dire. Also, has anyone measured flash memory access times to confirm or refute claims about slow access times? Are some types of flash memory better/worse than others in terms of access times?
A little while ago i bought a magazine with the openSUSE 11.1 distro on it but couldn't install it so i gave up. I am attempting to have another go. The problem is that the os will work fine when booted from CD in fail safe mode and can be installed from there but when out of fail safe mode the system begins to boot but freezes and will do nothing more.
As mentioned in the other two posts, my debian freezes when I use swap. Sometimes only the window-borders dissapear. However, this is not endurable for me. The answer "this is normal" is unfortunatly not getting censored. Even linux must be able to take heavy load without crashing.
Details here: [URL] and here: [URL]
The vlc-problem could be solved by the way: It seems my MESA-installation caused OpenGL to work. As output in vlc, everything runs as it should now.
This is the crap I get when I try to use Google Earth (see attachment please). I've tried using safe graphics mode-- it doesn't work. When I installed it it says it was not a trusted package and now that it's installed, I cant find it in Synaptic Package Manager nor Ubuntu Software Center. I originally downloaded it as a deb from google.
In our cluster, both the server and worker had been gone to swap and the performance is extremely slow. Although currently the memory is free but I don't know why the in the swap area is still being there and ubuntu doesn't move them to the memory and empty the swap.
On the other hand, when I run
Code: sudo swapoff -a on the server it says: Code: mahmood@server:~$ sudo swapoff -a
Whenever I open a folder with the default browser (Nautilus), it does a quick scan of the contents. This is not a problem for normal folders, but it becomes one when a music folder contains several thousand files (I haven't yet tried with folders containing large amounts of non-music files). In such instances Nautilus sits there scanning and I can hear the hard drive seeking for a good while before it presents me with the contents of said folder. My music folder, for instance, contains some five thousand ogg files, and I have to wait *counts* a full minute before it displays its contents. I tried telling it to never count the number of files in the options, but it didn't help. So far, the only solution I've found is to use pcmanfm instead, which apparently does no scan and displays my music folder practically as soon as I click on it. Still, I like Nautilus more for everything else, so I'd much rather use that instead.
Is there a safe way to cleanup the /lib file tree? Mines gotten too large for the filesystem it's on (/), and I've already shot myself in the foot a few times trying to delete things.
If I reboot I get the message "/dev/mapper/swap" doesn't exist. It seems, that crypsetup doesn't setting up the encrypted block device. SElinux is in permissive mode.
I bought a ssd drive for my laptop, installed it, installed Windows 7, installed Kubuntu 11.04. Till then everything worked fine, and I had following partitions on my disc:
It worked fine. While using 11.04 I encountered a serious bug in nvidia 270.41.06, and decided to switch to Kubuntu 10.10. I installed 10.10 on the very same /dev/sda5 (clicking a checkbox to format it). Everything worked fine, grub was installed and pointing to win7, and kubuntu 10.10. I disabled ext4 journaling as above, rebooted, and found, that grub now points to win7 and 11.04, and that system (which should have been removed during installation of 10.10) loads perfectly fine. I checked where 11.04 had been installed - still /dev/sda5. Win7 loads fine as well, so no linux on /dev/sda2 I checked if there was 10.10 kernel in /boot - no. File system on sda5 had no trace of 10.10.
I formatted sda5 with gparted, installed 10.10 again, disabled journaling and situation repeated, whole file system on sda5 changed. Enabling journaling did nothing, 10.10 didn't come back. I deleted sda3, sda5, sda6, made them again, installed 10.10, disabled journaling, and finally had my 10.10 on ext4 without journaling. So this is kind of solved, but I would still like to know that the hell happend? For the moment it looked like two file systems coexistened on one partition.
I'm trying to clean up an iTunes-sorted Music directory. For whatever reason, it contains a large number of folders that have album art, but no music. I'm actually more concerned about a safe way to test my removal batch, but I thought I'd paste everything I did in case it's useful to someone. Based on this thread, I came up with the following script:
Code: #!/bin/bash find ./*/* -type f -iregex ".*(mp3|m4a)" | sort | while read line ; do echo "${line%/*}" >> file1 done sort -u file1 > fileuniq
[Code]...
But I'm scared to just run this on my music folder. Is there any way to run rm in "test mode", so that I would just see verbose output, but it wouldn't actually delete anything? Failing that, does anyone see anything wrong with my plan?
I'm running fedora 13 on a Dell Latitude E6500. It's a dual 64-bit system.
It was working, but then I tried to swap caps lock and control.
I used: System->Preferences->Keyboard Layouts->USA->Options Then, under Control Key Position, I selected swap caps lock and control.
Now, my keyboard won't work in the Keyboard Preferences test area or in any other window or when the screen-lock comes on.
I tried logging out. I tried rebooting. I tried deleting my .gnome2 directory. Nothing seems to work. I can use the keyboard on other accounts, so the keyboard is not the problem.
I noticed the xsession-error file in my main user's home folder grow up to a big size, it's usually at 2-3MB sometimes up to 20MB. I use Fedora 10 64bit and KDE4.2. I got no problems at all and the xsession-error logfile is full of weird entrys, almost everything is reporting to it, mplayer, xine, opera, firefox, dolphin and many other software I use. I don't think the most of these entrys are real and critical system errors, especially all the mplayer stuff. However, I'm not worried about the file size since Fedora 10 seems to delete the file on every log in.
My problem is the disc access because all this never ending writings to hard disc kinda break things like the mount options noatime, nodiratime. I read something about you can redirect the logfile to /dev/null but that was for an ubunto distribution and I would like to get a how to for a save way to disable the xsession-error logfile, I got 8GB RAM so everything is in cache anyway after a long session, I really want to get rid of unnessesary hard disc access like that. If not recommend to disable it, can I direct it to an usb stick or ssd?
Imagine i want to power off my "Lenny" at exactly 16:00 everiday. no mather what I suppose i showld write a script with the shutdown command and add it to the /etc/init.d . but i will listen to your tips first.
Last night there was a rather large thunderstorm, and my computer was on at the time. The power went out while my computer was on, and now it won't boot up. After the GRUB screen, a white message at the bottom of the normal loading screen says somthing along the lines of "a partition listed in /etc/fstab cannot be mounted /dev/disk/by-uuid/6835blahblahblah". I chose recovery mode from the grub menu, which gave me a similar message.
Quote:
One or more mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted: (ESC for recovery shell) /home waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid/8bl I've googled around a fair bit, but people who got the same message were mainly those upgrading to Karmic, so a different problem. I think my problem was the fact that my computer was turned off possibly while writing and definitely without being unmounted.
So far I have tried changing /etc/fstab to refer to /etc/sda5 instead of UUID=68blahblah, but that came up with the same error. I have looked inside the /dev/disk/by-uuid and the disk that is trying to be mounted is there (so it's not a problem with that).
I'm having problems using a swap file to increase swap space in Linux. I followed the instructions for creating a swap file, as shown here:
[URL]
It works, and I increased my swap space. But when I reboot, I'm back to the original amount of swap space I had before. The swap file I created is still there, but it's not being used as swap space. I tried remounting the swap file but it doesn't work.
Also, it seems there isn't an fstab entry created for the swap file. Strange, huh? I don't think it made a difference but I manually copied the UUID for the swap file and made an entry in fstab.
I may be wrong, but from what I can tell the UUID of the swap file keeps changing every time I reboot.
So basically every time I reboot I have to repeat the instructions shown above to get more swap space.
I recently upgraded the hard drive on my Fujitsu N3530 notebook to WD Scorpio Blue 500 MB, and created a dual-boot configuration with WinXP, installing 32-bit Slackware 13.1 from DVD. Grub 0.97 bootloader is installed on superblock of root partition. Running KDE. Using the generic kernel with appropriate initrd for ext4 filesystem on root partition.
Everything runs fine so far, except the computer won't power off the computer. I've tried using the KDE shutdown, and shutting down from command line - same result. Also same result if I use the huge kernel or the generic kernel.
The last message I see is: Remounting root filesystem read-only. /dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (ro) Power down.
... and then the shutdown process stalls and I have to turn off the computer by pressing and holding the power button.
This is the first time I've installed any Linux OS on this notebook. I have Slackware 13.0 running fine on a Thinkpad T61 with no poweroff issue.
From reading various posts, this looks to be related to ACPI. I tried adding "acpi=force" to the kernel line in menu.lst, but it made no difference.
/var/log/messages shows "acpid exiting" and then "exiting on signal 15" as last entries during shutdown.s.
After booting up my pc, sometimes it loads, and then my mouse freezes and i am unable to do anything at all. keyboard doesnt work either. Causing me to do a restart. when starting my pc, i get the ubuntu splash screen and then it jumps to a black screen with: "desktop login" after i out in my log in it asks for the password, i put that in and get "Weclome to Ubuntu etc" (forgot all the words, but its some statement welcoming me to ubuntu. The i get "tim@tim-desktop: $" but this is all on a black screen. Only way to get past this is to reboot my pc. and then it loads properly.
I want to move my swap file onto a new extended hard drive. Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 1243 9984366 83 Linux /dev/sda2 1244 1305 498015 5 Extended /dev/sda5 1244 1305 497983+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I want to put a 2Gb swap file on sda2. > dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/2Gb.swap bs=1M count=2048 0+1 records in 0+1 records out 1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 0.000388458 s, 2.6 MB/s
Why is this only copying 1.0kB? Do I need to format the extended drive first? I have tried specifying the block size and count a number of different ways with the same results.
Currently running 10.04 and Cacti latest version and although my RAM is only just over 3/4 used my swap file is growing. If I leave the box running for about a week the swap fills and the system grinds to a halt.Is there some way of seeing what's in the swap so I can debug the problem and get my system more stable again?
a possibly preposterous question. I am aware that you can designate a swap file or swap partition on your hard drive that linux uses as "memory". Suggested sizes for the swap file that I've seen range up to about 1024MB. Is there a limit to the swap file size that you can set?Basically I am running a perl script that processes a massive B) file (DNA sequence data), etc, and requires around 48 GB of memory to run, maybe a bit less. So, would it be possible to set a swap file to a massive, ridiculous size (~60GB oratever) and successfully run such a script on a desktop?Yes, I am aware that it would massively ow down the process. The thing is, if the perl script normally completes in about half an hour, and I can get it working on a desktop, I don't mind if it takes days or weeks to complete. I really don't. That's because it takes days or weeks to get access to a computer with the required grunt to do it.So, is this a stupid idea? Is it even possible? If so, given a perl script that normally completes in a half hour on a 48G system, if you do this, would it take days? weeks? decades
I currently have Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 installed and have a great setup. However, I'm trying to install another OS on the hard drive and need to remove a partition. I've read online that I can remove the Swap partition and use a "Swap file". My question is this: Is it possible to replace the Swap partition with a "swap file" without having to re-install linux?
Dual-booting: Mac OS X 10.6.3 / Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 Macbook Pro 6,1 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 GB RAM
I am developing a program in a system where the Linux does not take care of the sync command automatically. So I have to run it from my application always I save some data in the disk, which in my case is a 2GB sdcard. It is true that I can make the operation system takes care of the syncronization, using a proper mount option, but in this case the programm's performance drops drastically. In particular I use the shelve module from Python to save data that comes from a socket/TCP connection and I have to deal with the potencial risk of the system being turned off suddenly Initially I wrote something like that to save data using shelve:
But that takes too much time to save the data. Note that I use the sync from the OS every time I close a file to prevent data corruption in the case of the "computer" being turned off with data even in the buffer. To improve the performance I made something like that:
Code:
def saveListData( list ) fd = shelve.open('file_name', 'c') for itemVo in list: fd[itemVo.key] = itemVo fd.close() os.system("sync")
Thus, first I saved an amount of objects in a list then I open the file and save the objects. In this way I have to open the file just one time to save a lot of objects.However I would like to know if adding a lot of objects before closing the file would increase the risk of data corruption.I known that turning off the system after fd.close() and before os.sync may cause problems. But what about turning off the system after
