Linux Furs

ducktapeddonkey @ 06:36 am: Question about remote backup
Yesterday I was tasked with coming up with some remote backup solutions for the office.

The boss wants a PC in his home that backs up from several machines at the office.

The caveat is that he wants zero to minimum setup time and zero maintenance. I've already suggested that he probably wants something hosted by someone else in that situation.....but he doesn't want to spend any money either.

I've been looking into Rsync. But without a really strong Linux background, I doubt I could have this up and running in just an hour or so. So that puts it out of the running.

Anyone on here know of any decent solutions for this kind of scenario?

shiver_raccoon @ 10:37 pm: Experienced PHP programmers needed for on-going part-time job
The profile page for this group didn't say whether Linux-related job postings are okay, so I'll keep it brief...

My employer has a job opening for an experienced PHP programmer, in a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment. It's part-time (15-25 hours per week), flexible schedule, work from home. Payment is monthly; rates vary by experience, but $25/hour might be typical for starting out. I've been with the company for almost 2 years now.

We're looking for someone who has lots of prior experience in designing PHP-based websites, not a beginner! Please IM me for full details.

dennisthetiger @ 02:18 pm: Installing DSL on a HP 2133 netbook, buuuutttt......
So Right now, ksharra has a HP 2133 hat somebody gave her, and is currently running Jolicloud. She's wipng that to get Damn Small Linux on there. Just one problem:

* As near as I can tell, it seems to think that her USB flash drive is /dev/sda, which fdisk won't even think of touching
* I can't actually see any internal disk

I'm pretty much as stuck as she is - where should I be looking to figure out just where the heck that internal disk is?

dennisthetiger @ 04:00 pm: Setting up a windows partition for vmware?
I currently have a Windows XP partition sitting on /dev/hdc1, and have recently installed vmware player on my Debian stable box. Unfortunately, the setup for vmware player for getting this in there, on an initial google search, seems a bit arcane. Does anyone have a good, quick-and-dirty method for this by any chance?

tigerknight @ 02:07 pm: Help with multipathing
Hey everyone, I need a bit of guidance on this - I'm pretty new at multi-pathing.

What's happened is that on a SuSE box with multi-pathing got updated from SLES10 sp1 to SLES10 sp3. After the update, the multi-pathing has gone wonky and is causing performance issues. I'm not sure how to get it back to proper layout.

Here's the pre-update/correct output:

multipath.conf:
        device {
                vendor "IBM"
                product "1726-4xx  FAStT"
                path_grouping_policy "group_by_prio"
                path_checker "rdac"
                features "1 queue_if_no_path"
                prio_callout "mpath_prio_tpc /dev/%n"
                failback "immediate"
        }
 

paptl01:~ # multipath -ll
3600a0b80003742630000045647b1a9cfdm-6 IBM,1726-4xx  FAStT
[size=80G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][enabled]
 \_ 0:0:1:1 sdc 8:32  [active][ghost]
 \_ 1:0:1:1 sdg 8:96  [active][ghost]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=6][active]
 \_ 0:0:0:1 sda 8:0   [active][ready]
 \_ 1:0:0:1 sde 8:64  [active][ready]
3600a0b80003742630000045847b1aa27dm-7 IBM,1726-4xx  FAStT
[size=150G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=2][enabled]
 \_ 0:0:1:2 sdd 8:48  [active][ready]
 \_ 1:0:1:2 sdh 8:112 [active][ready]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][enabled]
 \_ 0:0:0:2 sdb 8:16  [active][ghost]
 \_ 1:0:0:2 sdf 8:80  [active][ghost]

Here's the post-update/incorrect output (on a non-primary machine in a set of hosts):

multipath.conf:

        device {
                vendor "IBM"
                product "1726-4xx  FAStT"
                path_grouping_policy "group_by_prio"
                path_checker "rdac"
                features "1 queue_if_no_path"
                prio tpc
                failback "immediate"
        }

mpaptl02:~ # multipath -ll
3600a0b80003696c00000041f47b1a932 dm-7 IBM,1726-4xx  FAStT
[size=80G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=4][active]
 \_ 1:0:1:1 sdg 8:96  [failed][ghost]
 \_ 0:0:1:1 sdd 8:48  [active][ghost]
 \_ 1:0:0:1 sdb 8:16  [active][ready]
 \_ 0:0:0:1 sda 8:0   [active][ready]
3600a0b80003742630000045847b1aa27 dm-6 IBM,1726-4xx  FAStT
[size=150G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=4][active]
 \_ 1:0:1:2 sdh 8:112 [active][ready]
 \_ 1:0:0:2 sdf 8:80  [active][ghost]
 \_ 0:0:1:2 sde 8:64  [active][ready]
 \_ 0:0:0:2 sdc 8:32  [active][ghost]

As you can see all the paths are lumped together and it's generating a LOT of timeouts and lag on data. I need to get them back to the original. The minor difference of 'prio tpc' was a change made because the syntax of the first one was deprecated and replaced with the short config line in the updated version.

I'm not sure what else to look at or change.

dennisthetiger @ 09:17 pm: min12xxw on Lenny - print jobs sit on couch and drink all my beer
(note: crossposting to and .

Running current stable, just did update/upgrade. Running linux-image 2.6.26-2-686; debating the 2-6-32 bpo package. Running cups 1.3.8-1+lenny8 with foomatic

I recently obtained a Minolta 1250W laser printer, and hooked it up. Put the min12xxw package in place, no problem. Restarted cups, no problem. Except for one thing - jobs depart the spool to the printer if printed through Gnome, and I'm watching the printer happily chew on the print jobs. (The one symptom I have is that the printer's power light blinks on or off every second - but before this, it will blink at about the rate of a busy signal, as if processing the job. At the former point, if I print a test page, the printer will return error code 1027.)

All this in mind, anyone have suggestions?

The interesting thing is that I can go to the cups interface at http://localhost:631 and generate a perfectly good printer test page from that location. They don't printat all, though, if printing a test page through the printer interface available to me in Gnome.

To note, I have not rebooted the system since this installation, nor have I restarted the X server.

Any ideas?

1 comment | Leave a comment

dennisthetiger @ 11:56 pm: OK, here's the story.

Friend of mine is running Ubuntu Jaunty, and I'm stumped about an issue that update-manager is having. After locating instructions for clearing a proxy over here (http_proxy was setting itself to localhost:8080 JUST for the update manager), I was able to unset http_proxy and do 'apt-get update && aptitude safe-upgrade' to get the latest updates to Jaunty.

Just one problem. Or a few.

Karmic is out. Normally I can put the repos into /etc/apt/sources.list, but I don't have those at this moment. But, that's not what I'm worried about. We're trying to do it through update-manager.

So I go back into update-manager and it's still burping, complaining that the connection is refused when tunnelling through localhost:8080.

Previously, I located in /etc/apt/apt.conf where this value was located, and found that this was the only place it is doing it. Removed, unset the variable.

I have also done 'export http_proxy' to no avail.

It should be noted that a reboot scared this value up again.

In order to get update-manager working, I ran it from the user's regular account in a terminal window, after doing 'unset http_proxy', but that eliminates the symptom. What I want to do is figure out where this is being set in the first place. Any takers?

sdelaforge @ 04:01 pm: How to back up a / partition with DD?
Hey folks: looks like I got to reinstall linux, so I thought I'd take the time to work out how to back it up.

My system specs are:

Drive #1 80g Windows XP

Drive #2 200g HD
    Partition #1 Grub, ubuntu 9.10 my / in ResiserFS
   Partition #2 /Home ReiserFS
    Partition #3 /Storage ResiderFS

Drive #3: 320g harddrive
    1 partition, /Archive ResiderFS

What I'd want to do, is

a) image the / partition to any other partition for safe keeping,
b) boot with SystemresscueCD
c) Us a command to restore the image to / partition, make it bootable, then also restore grub.

Does DD do this? If so what is the command(s) to back and restore so I could do this exact thing I outlined above? the other partitions arn't a problem, since I back them up to an external HD.

jenna_vixen @ 12:10 pm: Really confused...
Okay, so I installed Gentoo on one of my computers the other day. The installation went fine, and I decided to just compile a kernel using genkernel so I wouldn't have to spend a lot of time configuring.

I've started up the system several times since then, and it's always worked fine. This morning, though I started it up and the booting process halted at the stage where it performs fsck on the file systems.

It throws this error:

fsck.ext4: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda3

The superblock could not be read or does not describe an correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

(/dev/hda3 is my / filesystem, has an ext4 filesystem and is correctly described as such in /etc/fstab)

Then puts me into a maintenance shell. Running fsck manually throws the same error.

I put the Gentoo LiveCD into my CD drive and rebooted from it to see if I could rescue the filesystem. (I don't have anything important on it, but I spent a bit of time configuring it the way I like it, so I'd prefer to not have to start over.)

First, I tried mounting the partition to see what would happen. It mounted fine and all the files seemed to be there. I unmounted it and ran fsck from the CD and it said it was clean.

I set up a chroot environment (like in the installation) and re-ran grub-install, just in case something went screwy.

I rebooted (without the CD) and it threw up the same error as before. This time, I noticed that (strangely) the / and /boot partitions seemed to have been mounted just fine for the maintenance shell.

I went into /dev and did an ls-l and there wasn't nearly enough device files, and there were no hd* files at all.

I booted off the LiveCD again and downloaded the stage3 file that I used in installation. I extracted the files that go into /dev thinking that would solve the problem.

I just got the same error again, and the same strange lack of device files in /dev.

Any ideas?

dennisthetiger @ 10:27 am: How to edit multiple HTML files in one fell swoop?
Hey, gang.

Here's the background. I have literally hundreds of HTML files, all named index.html, that I am about to transition from one server to another. The syntax in the files are all pretty much identical, but the catch is that they are all in a rather large directory tree. The site, for point of reference, is here, and I'm transitioning the files to here. All files are on two different Linux boxes - chez-vrolet.net is on Debian, and northarc.com is on some sort of Red Hat derivative.

The ultimate goal, eventually, is to implement CSS in all the pages, but for the time being, the job here is to edit the stuff on Northarc so it coincides with the tree on Chez Vrolet.

Note, my desktop at home is running Debian Lenny.

There are two ways I can do this. One is, of course, to edit each HTML file individually - which, with around 500 files on the source server, is going to take a LOOOOOOOOONG time. The other way, of course, is using sed or perl or something. The problem is that I'm not very well versed in sed, and I don't know perl. Yet. In this context, I'm looking for a means to do this on the command line - neither of the servers have X enabled.

The quick way I have is something like this:

$ for foo in `find . -name '*.html'
> do
> #(something that alters all these files)
> done

...I'm just missing what goes on that commented line in the for loop.

So this said, does anyone have a good way to do this from the terminal?