Beagle/Mono on Mint and Linux 64 bit NFS client updates

I used to be at NASA. What can I say?

Beagle: You had me at "upgrade"

Joe Shaw over at Novell posted a comment on my last post about Beagle and MS Exchange. Working offline with him, he sent me a link to a more updated version of Beagle (going from .2.9 to .2.16). I could not directly put on the packages without updating Mono (to 2.0) as well. I found a procedure at the page Joe indicated and updated the /etc/apt/sources.list with:

 deb http://beagle-project.org/files/ubuntu/edgy/ ./

Synaptic then updated all the pre and co reqs in one fell click.

I admit that I have been paying scant attention to the Mono project or anything they have been up to. I have just not needed to know anything about it. Till now. I do not know how often Beagle gets  updated, but clearly the Ubuntu / Mint code base it fairly far behind where the project is at, at least currently.

Tracing the problem with the commands Joe sent me would not work under the Mint 2.2 version of Beagle / Mono. That was this:

 beagled --fg --debug --mono-debug 2>&1 | tee beagle-out.txt

It did not like the '--mono-debug' parameter. The command worked fine under the new updated version or Beagle / Mono once Synaptic was done.

Of course, now it won't fail. Looks like a good fix, at least so far. I did have one thing crash after the update, and that was a process called 'ssindex'. This turns out to be a Beagle indexing tool provided by Gnumeric to index the content of spreadsheets. It does not affect the mainline Beagle indexing process.

I have been running without Beagle or Mono crashes for 24 hours now, so I am ready to move on. Thanks to Joe for taking the time to help me out with this! I am sorry I was not able to give him diagnostics that were useful. The good news is, I can trace things now. The bad news is: I don't need to anymore. Not in one day anyway.

One other thing of note: The Beagle-Evolution package does not index email up on the MS Exchange server. Only things in local folders. I watched the traces run, and it never went there. Never touched the MS Exchange server folder one bit. That means that when I was getting the call from my MS Exchange admin about the beatdown I was putting on the server, It was never Beagle doing it. It might have been Evolution proper (I have seen that before) or it might have been Google Desktop running in the MS Windows guest. But it was not Beagle.

Since it was Joe Shaw at Novell helping me, I was curious what version of Beagle OpenSUSE 10.2 runs, since it is older the Mint 2.2 by several months. FWIW: my T41 running OpenSUSE 10.2 has Beagle .2.12: at least three revs newer than Ubuntu, and three behind current. And I just did an update to OpenSUSE today, so that is current. Joe had said there had been a number of issues at the Beagle .2.9 level. I have never seen any problems on OpenSUSE, so that would appear to be somewhat confirmed by my two data points.

New kernel version of the Linux 64 bit NFS client

A few posts back I noted a problem one of my senior team members had found when using Fedora Core 6's recently updated kernel against an NFS file server. At the time we thought the problem might in Linux, because a change in Linux kernel levels made the problem appear, and we could change the Linux NFS client to make it go away.

Just because we can reverse a behavior to a previous one, and make a problem go away does not get us to root cause. Only to 'Work Around'.

The file server in question is the Tru64 TruCluster I have written about many times before. We are going to retire this one soon. It's the NFS server is where the real problem is, and it goes to the things I have talked about here before about the maturity and growing pains of 64 bit-ness.

Bottom line: The NFS client in Linux with the newest kernel sourced by Fedora is behaving 100% correctly according to protocol. And we'll have to work around the problem till we get the server replaced.