Recently I’ve had to do extensive work with Dell PowerEdge servers, and specifically Dell’s that use the LSI MegaRAID controllers. Anyone who has ever had to work with the LSI RAID controllers knows that the MegaCLI provided by LSI is the most cryptic command line utility in existence. MegaCli is available for Linux, DOS, Windows, […]
Read MoreMike: Hello, I’m a Sprint order specialist. I specialize in setting up new wireless accounts. Are there any questions I may help answer for you today? You: will my phone be activated when i get it Mike: I would be glad to assist you about your new phone details. Mike: Let’s move this chat and […]
Read MoreA server’s primary hard drive crashed hard one fine day. Yes, a non-RAIDed “server” (*sigh*). The last thing heard from it was screams of read-only, and it was gone. We got the drive mounted via a SATA dock to a new machine. At this point, all attempts at mounting and fscking failed, and dmesg was […]
Read MoreIf rpm / yum command hangs incessantly during operations or you see error messages, it likely means your RPM database has become corrupted. /var/lib/rpm/ stores the RPM database information, so to resolve you can just delete and rebuild the database using one of the two methods below like so: Method # 1 rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db* […]
Read MoreWhen setting up Maildir in Debian 5.0 or Ubuntu 10.x, getting the generic mail applications working correctly can be extremely tricky. When you type “mail” in a default/stock installation, it is attempting to read mbox data and will not read your “Maildir”. Annoying, since the stock configuration for mail delivery in most mail servers is […]
Read MoreSo you have a drive that’s gone bad, and you cannot mount it. How can you recover a bad superblock from a corrupted ext3 partition to get back your data? Linux ext2/3 filesystem stores superblocks at different locations so it is possible to recover data from a corrupted partition. Your error will likely look similar […]
Read MoreUbuntu 10.10, aka Maverick Meerkat, has been officially released and while we pause for a moment to think of the poor servers and mirrors getting hammered – as a if a million Ubuntu users cried out (in tears of joy) before being silenced (to the humdrum of download waiting) – you might be wondering what’s […]
Read MoreSo you’ve got a process that is taking forever to complete, and is killing your server. Make it play nice. What is nice? You can run a program with modified scheduling priority using nice command (19 = least favorable): # nice -n19 /path/to/your/script.sh This will execute the script.sh with the lowest priority, meaning the system […]
Read MoreThis article applies only to PERC 2/SC, 2/DC, 3/SC, 3/DCL, 3/DC, 3/QC, 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, and CERC ATA100/4ch controllers, and specifically for Dell PowerEdge servers. Be VERY careful when making any modifications to any disk array, as data loss is always possible. After some planning and preparation, it is possible to migrate array and […]
Read MoreAs a system administrator, I’m always looking for new tools to make my job easier. I’ve been using ‘dstat’ now for about 3 months, and it’s something I don’t know how I lived so long without. This tool is quite versatile and informative, and interacts directly with the kernel to give you a nice colorful […]
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Erik
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
linux administration - tips, notes and projects
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