Urbana used to work with a guy who routinely shut down GNU/Linux by typing: sync sync halt That just sounded plain crazy. Why not use shutdown? Well, we just figured he was just a little old-school. The command appeared to work (manpage for sync, manpage for halt). Now, our robocoop is running a giagd system, […]

In this article, we showed how to build a serial port multiplexer that allows up to 16 different servers to be controlled from one serial port. We needed to upgrade our servers to 8.0, and, of course, we wanted to use the serial port to do it rather than lug a monitor and keyboard over. […]

We knew the answer to this question once, back when the world was young and full of truth. Without hesitation, we’d have spouted “Just take the output of lsof | wc -l!” And it’s true enough, in a general sort of way. But if you asked me the same question now, my answer would be: […]

In this article I struggled with a Barracuda ST15150N drive that had problems with Tagged Command Queueing. Well, it is nice to have an install diskette that works with a serial console and works with the ST15150N. This article will guide you through the modification of a stock RedHat install boot disk. I will start […]

Red Hat’s maintenance policy is nasty. On the one hand, they need to make money, and maintaining distributions is expensive. On the other hand, for those of us who use Red Hat in budget environments, we can’t really afford their advanced server product, and can’t afford to change to a new version every year. One […]

It is daylight savings time again. For those systems that don’t automatically sync their time, you may have to set this manually. If you are in the U.S, you can find the correct time here. Let’s set the system time: root@srv-1 u-1 # date Mon Apr 5 03:45:59 PDT 2004 root@srv-1 u-1 # date 040504142004 […]

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows you to combine disks and create a single volume that can be mounted like a regular partition. It also allows you to add and remove storage. Make sure that you have the support for LVM compiled into your kernel. We set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LVM=y on ours, and that worked well. [Note: Before […]

In this article, we set up Logical Volume Manager for GNU/Linux. We created a 12 GB device from 3 4 Gig drives, but only assigned 5 GB for our logical volume. Now, we are going to extend that volume. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure […]

In this article, and in this article, we showed how to install and extend logical volumes with LVM. Now, we want to shrink the filesystem we created and the logical volume, so we can remove the drive. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure to set […]

In this article, we freed up a disk from our volume so that we could reconfigure our system. In this article we will create and add a RAID1 device to our volume group. We removed /dev/sdg from our volume group, and /dev/sdh was unused, so let’s create a RAID1 device to add to our volume […]

So far, we have been using a generic 2.4.24 Linux kernel with LVM enabled. We had to compile this ourselves because the stock Red Hat / Fedora kernels don’t support our hard disks. See this article for more details. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure […]

In this article, we recompiled our software and kernel so we could remove our /dev/sde drive. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure to set up a test system with the same kernel and distribution to see how this stuff works. This article was written using […]

Agatha recently purchased another stick of 512MB RAM. It turns out that by default you need to change the kernel for it to use more than 1GB of RAM. Actually, the cutoff is technically at 960MB. Here is the memory info with 1.5GB of RAM installed, but with high memory support disabled: usr-1@srv-1 proc $ […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]