It's a kind of magic.

maarten's blog

Server Crash part 2

Posted Fri, 06/04/2010 - 12:32 by maarten

Some time ago I replaced my broken motherboard in my NAS server.
I had weird problems, see server-crash. I had a Asus KFN4-DRE with dual opteron socket. A high energy consumer. Now with the global warming problem and the increasing power prices. I wanted to cut back on the electricity I use.

A mini-itx motherboard was the answer. I got myself a EPIA SN 18000EG 1.8GHz C7 Mini-ITX Board. It has a 16x PCI-E slot which I need to put in my raid controller (Areca ARC-1230).
The case I own is a chenbro RM31212B which has 12 front Hot-Plug disk slots. Normally a case which is used with high power motherboards. So I wasn't sure I would be able to just plug in the mini-itx motherboard into the chenbro case.

It seems to be the case. I could fasten all screws to fix the mini-itx into the case. I must say the chenbro cases are really decent, and have different form factors available by default. Now my nas system runs on a 1.8 Ghz mini-itx board. And doesn't seem to have a problem with running 12 disks over the raid controller.

The system is running debian squeeze because I had problems with my raid controller on debian lenny. To get debian lenny working on the mini-itx you need to set a kernel boot option (pci=noacpi), but this messed with my raid-controller, and gave errors in the logs. Upgrading to debian squeeze solved the problem.

I'm again up and running!

Restore Amanda Backup

Posted Mon, 02/08/2010 - 12:35 by maarten

I'm writing this blogpost so I can quickly find the needed commands to restore a file from an amanda backup. Below is a procedure on how to extract the LocalSettings.php file. The /data/amanda/tapes is the directory where the virtual tapes are located. The host is backup, amanda org is Daily.

[root@backup backup]# amrecover Daily -s backup -t backup \
-d file:/data/amanda/tapes
AMRECOVER Version 2.5.0p2. Contacting server on backup ...
220 backup AMANDA index server (2.5.0p2) ready.
200 Access OK
Setting restore date to today (2009-12-02)
200 Working date set to 2009-12-02.
Scanning /data/amanda/holding...
200 Config set to Daily.
200 Dump host set to backup.vsco.be.
Trying disk / ...
Trying disk rootfs ...
Can't determine disk and mount point from $CWD '/backup'
amrecover>

Xen attach disk live

Posted Thu, 01/28/2010 - 17:04 by maarten

I had to resize a lvm-volume with swap on a xen domU without bringing it down. I'm just making a small how-to so I don't forget it in the future.

On the host create a swapfile big enough to get the currently used swap in it.
dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1k count=1500000
mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile
swapoff /dev/xvdb1

On the Dom0 Xen-server:
xm block-detach server01 /dev/xvdb1
lvresize /dev/vg0/server01_swap -L 2G
mkswap /dev/vg0/server01_swap
xm block-attach server01 phy:/dev/vg0/server01_swap /dev/xvdb1 w

Xen with a lot of disks

Posted Thu, 11/19/2009 - 12:33 by maarten

I got an error yesterday when trying to create a xen virtual machine with a lot of disks.
I had to add 32 disks on the machine, which would be used to backup the hard drives.
The error was Unable to find number for device (sdq1). I had devices up to sdab1, but he already stuck at the sdq1.
How to work around this problem you ask? Really easy it seems: Just use other device "types" for the disks beginning at sdq1. So sdq1 became hda1.
And all went well.
Viva Xen!!

Protect your privacy

Posted Mon, 10/26/2009 - 15:12 by maarten

They want to store 6 to 12 months of data from internet users. Which connections are made, how long, how much data ...
This is a bad day for privacy. You need to sign the petition against it!

http://bewaarjeprivacy.be

dist-upgrade broke my debian squeeze

Posted Wed, 10/21/2009 - 09:02 by maarten

As I was doing updates yesterday I ran into some serious problem. How this happened:
Well I did an apt-get upgrade which first of all broke my nvidia driver. I also had messages like: udev: missing sysfs features; please update the kernel or disable the kernel's
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option; udev may fail to work correctly.
So I did a dist-upgrade to fix the nvidia problem and the sysfs message. This upgraded to kernel 2.6.30-2-686 and broke my system.

selinux not giving errors

Posted Fri, 10/09/2009 - 10:46 by maarten

Sometime you have problems with selinux, but you don't see any error messages in the audit.log. Using the following command will give you more output in the log:

semodule -b /usr/share/selinux/targeted/enableaudit.pp

Sound problems debian squeeze

Posted Sat, 10/03/2009 - 17:26 by maarten

I upgraded to debian squeeze some time ago. In debian lenny I sometimes had problems with the sound card not being found.
On lenny I used alsaconf to rescan the cards and reload the modules needed for them.
It seems now that the alsaconf script isn't included anymore in the alsa-utils package. At first all seemed ok in squeeze, I always had sound. But today, the sound card wasn't detected.

I have an Intel onboard card:
Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller

So how do we fix this? Not that hard it seems, just force the reload of the sound modules:

Server crash

Posted Sun, 09/27/2009 - 15:18 by maarten

Well, as some of you already know I had a crash of my home server. This was providing xen machines and storage to my network.

What happened:
I upgraded to the latest kernel version and upgraded the bios from within CentOS.
I rebooted and everything seemed to be fine. The system ran for 2-3 months with no problem, until I had to do a reboot and was unable to get past the memory counter in the bios.

vsco.be drupal

Posted Sat, 09/26/2009 - 23:44 by maarten

Ok, I've set-up the basic config for my drupal site.
Im using a modified version of the the acquia_slate theme by Acquia, Inc. under GPL license from TopNotchThemes Drupal themes

But don't fall in love with the lay-out yet, it is still subject to change.