Wayne D's Blog

Recently I was working with a machine that had a cloned hard drive with lvm's and xfs partitions. When I tried to use the volume group I got errors like

pvs
WARNING: Not using device /dev/sdc2 for PV wES5Fr-7wxw-PYKb-0o0T-5IP4-oZdl-CwQOa7.
WARNING: PV wES5Fr-7wxw-PYKb-0o0T-5IP4-oZdl-CwQOa7 prefers device /dev/sda2 because device is used by LV.
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 centos lvm2 a-- <1.82t 4.00m

blkid showed that the Volume groups had duplicate UUID's
/dev/sda1: UUID="2d7614b5-d3a9-4b04-800b-852117d77cf4" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="xfs" PARTUUID="00018e4d-01"
/dev/sda2: UUID="wES5Fr-7wxw-PYKb-0o0T-5IP4-oZdl-CwQOa7" TYPE="LVM2_member" PARTUUID="00018e4d-02"
/dev/mapper/centos-root: UUID="425c049b-f8ad-4584-a5ba-e3ecef9006b0" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="xfs"
/dev/mapper/centos-swap: UUID="c876eab0-5170-411d-b3bf-f771c5c349ba" TYPE="swap"
/dev/mapper/centos-home: UUID="3903ea6c-3835-4c39-b7a3-32f57e1d1bcd" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="xfs"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="CENTOS-STRE" UUID="1E19-1347" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="002bdd6e-01"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="2d7614b5-d3a9-4b04-800b-852117d77cf4" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="xfs" PARTUUID="00018e4d-01"
/dev/sdc2: UUID="wES5Fr-7wxw-PYKb-0o0T-5IP4-oZdl-CwQOa7" TYPE="LVM2_member" PARTUUID="00018e4d-02"

After some Googling I found that all I had to do was run
vgimportclone /dev/sdc2
then
vgscan showed both the volume groups
Found volume group "centos1" using metadata type lvm2
Found volume group "centos" using metadata type lvm2

and I could use vgchange -ay centos1 to activate the volume group

but when I tried to mount the filesystem and got this error
XFS (dm-3): Filesystem has duplicate UUID 3903ea6c-3835-4c39-b7a3-32f57e1d1bcd - can't mount

more Googling pointed me to xfs_admin to generate new UUID's for the xfs partitions

xfs_admin -U generate /dev/mapper/centos1-home

after all that was done everything worked fine.

It's been a while. I wanted to refer to my docker cheat sheet and found that my website was broken. I have no idea how long it's been down but I spent the time to get it reconfigured and working again.

The West Wing reunion stage presentation of "Hartsfield's Landing" is now available in Canada on Crave.ca. Not to be missed by any dedicated West Wing fan. https://www.crave.ca/en?ua=eyJtIjoiYSIsInAiOlsiYyIsImNwIl0sImwiOiJlbiJ9#/special/48345

The creative team and cast organized this historic production in order to raise awareness for and support of When We All Vote, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization co-chaired by Michelle Obama.

Microsoft has done a good job of keeping Skype for Linux up to date with one glaring exception. When you install Skype for Linux from the rpm it won't start. If you dig down into the Skype log which is found in ~/.config/skypeforlinux/logs/skype-startup.log on Centos no matter what you might see on the internet You will find the following message

FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(157)] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found,
but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now.
You need to make sure that /usr/share/skypeforlinux/chrome-sandbox is owned by root
and has mode 4755

running chmod 4755 /usr/share/skypeforlinux/chrome-sandbox as root fixes the problem. Unfortunately every time you update Skype you have to do this again! Since you have to install the rpm as root it should be a simple task to fix this but this problem as existed for quite a while. Come on Microsoft don't be so passive aggressive and fix this up!

Wondering why my Centos 8 system was behaving so badly tonight, being unresponsive to clicks and acting like it was swapping I fired up top. Top showed me that gnome-shell was quite frequently using 100% cpu. The bad behavior of gnome 3 on this machine has become more of an issue as it's the machine I took home from work to use during the Coronavirus lockdown.

I've was never a fan of gnome 3 and the Classic mode just hides all the ugliness behind an old user interface. I have searched Google on and off over the months, waiting for a prebuilt, rpm based Mate to to be available for Centos 8. The first result Google returns is a page that walks you through compiling mate from source. I might have resorted to that but why reinvent the wheely when someone else might have the done the work already. Luckily reddit user https://www.reddit.com/user/stenstorp/ came to the rescue of frustrated Centos 8 by putting up a repo where you can get the rpm's to install Mate on Centos 8.

I followed his instruction at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/stenstorp/MATE/ , rebooted the my machine and in 10 minutes I was using Mate.

Thanks again stenstorp.

If mate isn't your thing he has also ported the minecraft launcher, the budgie desktop and lightdm to Centos. Check out his repo at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/stenstorp/MATE/