(Re)installing GRUB to the MBR

NOTE: This post has moved to https://blog.gibson.sh/2013/12/31/reinstalling-grub-to-the-mbr/
The original article is kept here for now, but is not maintained in any way.

This is just a very short roundup of the relevant commands needed to reinstall grub, e.g. when migrating a Linux installation to a new hard drive.

• boot live Linux system (from CD/DVD or USB key, I use grml, any other live Linux should do)
• mount root-fs of your installation (e.g. /dev/sda2) to /mnt/
• if they’re in separate partitions, mount the /boot/, /usr/, … partitions of your installation to /mnt/boot, /mnt/usr/, …
• mount --bind /dev/ and /sys/ to /mnt/dev and /mnt/sys (maybe also /proc for older versions of grub?), grub will need those
• chroot /mnt
• execute grub-install $device (e.g. /dev/sda) to install grub to the MBR of $device
• update-grub to upgrade the grub menu entries
• If names of partitions changed, don’t forget to adjust /etc/fstab
• configure your BIOS to boot from that harddisk
• reboot, remove live linux you should be greeted by a fresh grub that lets you boot your Linux, BSD, Windows, .. installations

Linux (Debian Squeeze) on Thinkpad T500

NOTE: This post has moved to https://blog.gibson.sh/2011/01/05/linux-debian-squeeze-on-thinkpad-t500/
The original article is kept here for now, but is not maintained in any way.

I recently got myself a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 (2055V1X) . I chose this older model over the T510 and such, because I prefer a screen resolution of 1680×1050 over a crippled 1600×900 or worse. I write and read a lot of code so I need vertical space on the display and I’d definitely miss the 150pixels additional vertical space my old Laptop (Samsung X20 with a resolution of 1400×1050) has.

However, I shrunk the Windows 7 partition (I didn’t want to dump Windows entirely) and installed Debian Squeeze (AMD64) in the resulting free space. I’m very pleased how painless everything was, almost all hardware ran out of the box, but I’ll document some interesting stuff (how to shrink windows partition without breaking it, how to make special keys work and display information on Linux, how to make the touchpad and trackpoint behave the way I want, …) anyway.

Bug-Hunting: Browsers fail to load research.microsoft.com

NOTE: This post has moved to https://blog.gibson.sh/2010/06/30/bug-hunting-browsers-fail-to-load-research.microsoft.com/
The original article is kept here for now, but is not maintained in any way.

This is a follow-up to debian bug #541658 for Iceweasel: “cannot open research.microsoft.com”.
It turned out that this bug applies to all (tested) browsers with cookie-support (Iceweasel, Opera, Chrome, Arora, Kazehakase), but only very few people are experiencing it. If you’re one of them please get in touch via the comments :-)
First I’ll tell how to reproduce the bug, then I’ll sum up the facts I already collected in that bugreport and then I’ll document my further attempts to narrow down the problem.

UPDATE: The reason for that strange behaviour was found and I filed a new bugreport: No. #587789
UPDATE 2: Debians Kernel maintainer considers this expected behavior and told me to file a bugreport upstream and I did: Netfilter bug #622.
UPDATE 3: I think Microsoft has fixed their server. Of course the Linux kernel should be fixed anyway but there doesn’t seem to be much interest in doing so :-/