Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 09:23:51 -0500 From: "John G. Heim" <jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Maybe we should change the discussion toward trouble shooting techniques. Suppose you are the one and only linux systems admin where you work. You come in one morning and there are 8 people at your office door saying they can't get to their email. You ping the email server and get nothing. What do you do next? Hello. I've been a Unix sysadmin for over 20 years and I've never worked with servers where I require Speakup in the kernel. In addition, I've been confronted with John's dilemma many times. Here are some of the ways I've tackled the problem, with various kinds of Unix and a wide variety of machines: 1. If the server has a serial port, even if it's not used as the console, I keep a special version of bootable media around that will let me boot the OS in an accessible form, using the serial port as console, thus giving me the ability to look at the crashed system and find out what happened and why it won't just reboot and run again. 2. If the serial console is not an option, I can usually get the system to come up by simply rebooting it. (most often, if it's not completely crashed, logging in on the console without speech and shutting down manually works while, if it is crashed, a power cycle will often do the trick.) Failing that, I usually can employ a modification to option1 whereby I boot from alternate media which I know will get the network up and running enough for me to get in and diagnos the issue that started this chain of events. 3. If those two options don't work, grabbing one of the 8 people banging on the door saying their mail isn't working for 5 minutes and having them serve as a 5 minute reader will usually tell me what's wrong and how to go about fixing it. Sometimes it's a quick command that getts things going and sometimes its more involved, but most of the time, if it is more involved, I can do something quick to get me going independently, with the reader's help, and take it from there. When faced with this situation where a large number of people are affected, I've rarely heard people complain that I had to borrow their eyes for 5 minutes or that they wished they could find someone who could fix things without their help. The most important thing I do, however, is try to plan for the eventuality that John describes. One of the ways I do that is to perform system reboots when ever changes are made to the server that could affect its ability to boot. These reboots are performed under controlled conditions and when I know I can get to the machine and get to it via one of the methods described above. This technique, combined with a very conservative upgrade process, gives me a high degree of confidence when I reboot a server that it will make it up enough to let me in via the network and thus be able to fix any issues that might crop up. I am a big fan of IPMI enabled servers and so, when possible, when replacing a server, I'll advocate getting one that has IPMI capabilities. this gives me access to almost all aspects of the server and, in fact, lets me build it from many miles away in most cases. However, John's point about not having IPMI available everywhere is well taken and most of my experience is with environments where IPMI was not available. Now that it is more readily available, I embrace it fully and without reservation. IPMI has a learning curve, but it's well worth climbing and I recommend it highly. There are those who will disagree with my choices and will have their own way of doing things; that's ok. What I wil say, however, is that a screen reader that works entirely in user space is a nice thing to have, and, given the number of people we have working on and using Speakup versus the number of people orking on and using more main stream portions of the kernel, including the console driver, I think it's reasonable for folks to be nervous about including Speakup in their production kernels. Having a user-space screen reader that's just as capable, or even more capable in many cases than Speakup, would go a long way toward making folks feel comfortable including it in their distros. Many many machines today, including small embedded machines, don't hav consoles available, even for sighted folks. In most cases, the sighted folks use tricks similar to mine to get access to crashed machines witout consoles. My point here is that the console, as we know it, is going away and we, along with everyone else, need to learn how to deal with that new reality. One way is a user-space screen reader. I use Yasr all day every day, and hav done so for 7 years. I like it and it works well for me. There are folks here who don't like Yasr; that's ok too. Having another user-space screen reader available won't offend me and, in fact, I think it would be a good thing to pursue. -thanks -Brian _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
