January 2010 Archives

For months, I’ve been plagued by intermittent mouse freezes on one of my boxes.

It started after a regular Xorg upgrade. According to various mailing lists, that particular upgrade caused similar problems to a lot of people, so I tried different suggested fixes. No luck.

A bit later, Xorg on FreeBSD was modified to fix the reported problems. But the upgrade did not fix my problem.

Eventually I came to a realization that it is likely that the problem is not with the mouse driver or with any other part of Xorg. Rather, it was a problem with synergy client interaction with the new xcb. I even found a problem report with a supposed fix to the problem. By the time I’ve found it, the fix was committed to the synergy port, and was subsequently rolled back because it lead to other problems. I tried the patch in the PR anyway. Still did not help me.

Not wanting to spend too much time on this, I was coping with the delays and only occasionally, when annoyed more than usual, was trying to find another fix. Unsuccessfully, I must add, until this morning, when I discovered synergy+, a maintenance fork of the original synergy. I was not aware that synergy+ is basically a drop-in replacement to synergy, the binaries having the same names as in the original. Better still, synergy+ client works just fine with the original synergy server. So I’ve decided to give it a shot, removed the synergy package, and installed the synergy+ port. Voila, the freezes are gone. I am a happy camper now.

With the recent (2009-12-23) update to FreeBSD’s sysutils/smartmontools port smartctl stopped working if run as non-root. I did not investigate whether it is because of the change in the way smartctl operates, or whether it just stopped to be setuid root.

Normally I don’t mind going root to run smartctl by hand, but it presents a bit of a problem for the hddtemp_smartctl Munin plugin.

One possible solution is to add the munin user to the operator group, add the following two lines to /etc/devfs.conf:

perm ata 0660
perm xpt0 0660

And finally, run sh /etc/rc.d/devfs restart.

Being the dummy that I am, I only thought about a simpler solution when composing this post: just add user root into the [hddtemp_smartctl] section of your munin/plugin-conf.d/plugins.conf file. Besides being simpler, this method has an added advantage: an updated version of the sysutils/munin-node port can easily incorporate this change. Dag-Erling: hint, hint. :-)