Well Fedora 11 was released to the European mirrors yesterday and I had DVD+R in hand ready to upgrade my backup machine.

I had to reinstall soon afterwards as the Nvidia drivers and/or compiz-fusion borked my display, so for now I’m sticking to the slow Nouveau drivers and no desktop effects, although Plymouth works. I might ghost boot the drive and then try the beta Nvidia drivers.

My JFS partitions (drives) had some weird issue after the reinstall, I couldn’t mount them anymore until I ran fsck on them, I guess I had rebooted without unmounting them, or they hadn’t written their journal or something. Mind you, the ext4 boot drive says “Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.” so could be filesystem issues with F11, glad this is only a backup machine at the moment!

I found that you can no longer blacklist the ipv6 module as some part of NFSv4 depends on it – and you get some silly “cannot allocate memory” error if you try to mount a v4 server (not v3). This is new from F10.

F11 does seem to have solved the NFS+Nautilus problems I was having, although that could be due to using the onboard e1000 NIC instead of the PCI r8169. Also the e1000 doesn’t hard lock the machine under heavy load anymore, guess that was a Fedora7 bug.

My existing fileserver is acting up – wonder if its boot drive is dying, as even root doesn’t seem able to write to /media anymore – so I can’t create the NFS mount points, again some silly “No such file or directory error”. There’s nothing on the boot drive that I need, and I’m rsync’ing the data to the backup machine now.

Update: it seems that the e1000 is crashing when transferring large files, so I’ve had to replace it with a PCI r8169, which is running slower but stable. I hope its just an issue with the motherboard, and not an e1000 issue in general, as the new fileserver has an e1000 onboard, although Marvell PCI-e gigabit NICs can be had for under a tenner, then again the fileserver will be getting Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS Desktop anyway, not Fedora/CentOS.

I’ve finished rsync’ing my virtual machines, documents, software etc; and have two of the 250Gb drives free, so room for backing up some of the other stuff on the fileserver.

Turns out no Acronis product supports ghosting ext4 drives (other than DD-esque, sector-by-sector).

The problem with not being able to write to /media was due to autofs being enabled, so disable that and you can create NFS mounts as required. Dunno what turned that back on though…..