growse's questions

I've got a small media server that sits under my TV, and it runs Ubuntu 11.04 desktop x64 with XBMC on top. I've got a problem in that unknowing users / visitors occasionally press the power button 'just to see what happens'. Ubuntu dutifully intercepts this and either sleeps or halts.

This is really annoying.

One possible option is to just disconnect the power button from the motherboard, as I've done with the reset button. However, I'd still like to be able to power it back on if I choose to halt it myself, for whatever reason, or if it completely locks up.

How can I get Ubuntu to effectively 'ignore' people randomly prodding at the power button while it's turned on?

I've just installed Xubuntu 11.04 on my netbook and I'm noticing a problem with the workspace setup. If I log in, I see there's only one workspace specified. If I load the 'Workspaces' control panel widget and alter it to 4, this works fine until I reboot and log in again, at which point the number of workspaces is reset to 1.

How do I get XFCE4 to remember my workstation number preference?

I've got an rdiff-backup setup that backs up a largeish sql dump (1.6GB) over a network. The server it's backing up to (Ubuntu 10.10 server) has a small local disk (4GB, 1GB free) but has a cifs mount to a large nas (plenty of free space). I've a softlink set up from a user account's home dir to the NAS cifs mount, and the rdiff-backup job initiated from the client is writing to that directory.

Recently, the job has been failing. The logfile says:

Sun Oct 24 21:20:14 2010 Sending back exception [Errno 28] No space left on device of type type 'exceptions.IOError'

I've run the job manually with watch df running on the server, and I can see the 1GB of free space on the local drive diminishing until it hits zero. Then the job fails. To be clear, disk space is not an issue on the NAS.

So, for some reason, rdiff-backup is using somewhere on the local disk as a temp working directory rather than the actual directory where the backups are stored, on the NAS device, as I'd expect. However, I can't find which dir it's using so I can mount that separately with its own blob of space. Doing du -sx on / while the job is running reveals the total filesize of / remaining constant at 3.0GB, even though df says / is full.

If I list the file handles open by the rdiff process, I get a few sockets and some files on NAS mount. Nothing obvious on the local disk.

What's going on? Why does df say / is full, but du -sx say there's 1GB free? Why is rdiff-backup filling up the local disk when it should be using the cifs mount? What's it actually writing to?