[cfarm-users] cfarm{431,432}: hurd-{amd64,i386}

[Luke Yasuda]

Hi all,

The two Debian GNU/Hurd VMs, cfarm431 (hurd-amd64) and cfarm432 
(hurd-i386) are available now. But they need some "special lovin'" as 
the highest uptime record on munin is 5.61 days so far. On the spirit of 
sharing notes and experience and hoping someone on the mailing list 
might have some insights:

common issues on hurd-*:
1. ntp or chrony or any other NTP implementation (that I know of) won't 
work. If you notice that the time is skewed, email me so I can correct 
it manually.
2. we have very limited CPU and RAM resources (also see below). Large 
builds can take days. Coordination among users may be necessary. We 
should use this mailing list to coordinate when the time comes. If 
posting on this list is "too loud" etc (if anyone complains), I can 
create a mailing list under @lists.jing.rocks (mailman3 managed)
3. upgrading hurd and glibc might crash and even cause the system to be 
unbootable. So, from now on, I'll make a snapshot before upgrading them. 
Basically I check for package upgrades about once a week.
4. I absolutely cannot get IPv6 to work. I wrote a custom init script 
(/etc/init.d/networking-real) because ifupdown doesn't implement IPv6 on 
hurd yet.
5. mosh is not available. fstrim is not available. As well as so many 
other packages.
6. hurd does not support having 2 or more IPv4 addresses or configuring 
two or more netif (not including loopback "lo").
7. sshd may not be working at all when it's started on boot, needs to be 
restarted on tty by hand:

Mar 10 10:37:29 cfarm432 sshd[860]: error: ppoll: Computer bought the 
farm
Mar 10 10:38:00 cfarm432 last message repeated 350578 times
Mar 10 10:38:02 cfarm432 last message repeated 25942 times


hurd-amd64:
1. only 1 core is available. I cannot get the SMP kernel 
(gnumach-image-1-amd64-smp) to boot, it just resets itself after grub 
loads gnumach. I don't intend to debug it due to the lack of skills
2. only 6GB RAM is available. Again, it resets itself at boot time when 
there is more than about 8GB system memory
3. /home is 500GB large (not an issue per se). After a system crash, it 
may take 15 min or so for e2fsck to check and fix the file system.
4. recently, every 3~5 days or so, for some reason, /hurd/tmpfs will 
crash and also bring down the networking.

hurd-i386:
1. similar to hurd-amd64, only 1 core is available. I cannot get the SMP 
kernel (gnumach-image-1-486-smp) to boot
2. only 3GB RAM is available. I cannot get the PAE kernel 
(gnumach-image-1-486-pae) to boot
3. /home is only 128GB large. hurd-i386 cannot recognize a disk larger 
than 128GB, any disk larger than 128GB will just appear to be 128GB, 
which seems to be an ancient C/H/S addressing limitation existed in 
windows 2000 if I remember it correctly. So, the space is tight and 
remember to clean up after yourself, dear friends.



Cheers,
-- 
Luke Yasuda
GPG Fingerprint: 4E09 8D19 00AA 3F72 1899 2614 09B3 316E 13A1 1EFC
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