It's a kind of magic.

open-future

open-future

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!!

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: