Adnan's personal blog - Operating Systems

Cacti & Thomson ST516

nospam@example.com (Adnan Ahmed) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:00:32 -0400

So I was curious to see how our internet usage was and so I started looking into the ability of my ADSL modem to enable SNMP and then use Cacti to log and graph the data. The modem provided by my ISP was a Thomson ST516, which as it turns out has a telnet connection that can be used to turn on the SNMP agent. Once I was able to turn that on, all I had to do was install Cacti on a computer to monitor the usage on a regular basis ... this proved to be much simpler than I had anticipated.
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Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init

nospam@example.com (Adnan Ahmed) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:11:12 -0400

So I woke up this morning, and as always booted up my laptop while i was still half-awake and willing myself back into reality. Once I was fully awake, I saw to my surprise that the laptop hadn't booted up fully and was displaying a message similar to this one, (I didn't copy my message down word for word, to replicate here, but this is a similar one from a forum posting at ubuntuforums.org)

mount: mounting /dev/disk/by-uuid/267... on /root failed Invalid argument
mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init = bootarg.

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-2ubuntu7) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)_

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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

nospam@example.com (Adnan Ahmed) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:35:25 -0400

Yes, yes .. I know, it has been out for a while, and I have been using for quite some time now, but since this site is just new, I figured I'd add my two cents about it here too.

My initial attempt to upgrade my Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10 systems to the latest release succeeded, but after a reboot it turned out that it kept kicking me out as quickly as I would log in. This become very frustrating, since the machine was pretty much a deadweight in terms of use. Not wanting to loose any of the information, or having to retrieve it from my backups, I booted into the terminal and copied over my files and then did a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 on the machine.

Lo and behold, following a reboot, I had the same problem! Knowing that a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 (from the same CD) works ok on a separate machine, I went through the process of installing the packages and add-ons that don't come with Ubuntu one by one and rebooting after each to find the culprit. Turns out it was cairo-dock that was at fault. I have since removed it, and would love to get it back (I hate that windows style tool bar at the bottom), but I haven't found one that won't lock me out again! Hehe

Other than that, I love Lucid Lynx, it has a nice user interface, nice colour schemes, it came built-in with dual monitor support which was a must! Just to give you an idea, I am currently running this on a Compaq Presario R3000 series, with a Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor with a 2.4GHz CPU, and a 40GB HDD. The graphics card in this is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP. Yeah, I know ... nowhere near the kind of laptops you see now, but this is my very first laptop from like 2003, and yup its still alive and kicking!