Snortblog

2 reports of livestock this evening, I do hope it’s not a coup.

Overheard this evening during the traffic report on KUT, a radio station in Austin, Texas.

I’ve got a dual boot system that I’m moving from being a workstation to more of a server. I purchased a new SATA hard drive to supplement the two PATA (?) IDE hard drives already installed.

1. I used dd to copy hard drive 1 (old) to hard drive 2 (new), e.g. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc. Using dd to copy things takes a long time, but it’s a no brainer way to make sure I have an exact copy, without too much fuss and bother.
2. I wanted to shrink my Windows partition. To do that, first I removed the Windows swap file equivalent and the file to allow hibernation. Then I defragged it multiple times. This compacts the disk, putting all the files at the beginning, so that the partition can be resized. I finally ended up using UltraDefrag, which seemed faster and more full featured then Window XP Home’s native file defragmentation utility. Bonus: it’s open source.
3. Reorganized partions. I used both Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD and Knoppix 5.1 to boot to, and then Gparted and/or QTParted to delete, move, and resize partitions. I prefered QTParted, because it only gets device information so it starts up quicker, but was only able to get one of the extended partitions to resize using Gparted from the Knoppix LiveCD.
4. Grub problems. Root parameter wouldn’t change properly, I would boot, get a “Error 15: File not found” from grub. Using the grub menu, I could temporarily change the root parameter to the correct partition, it would boot, but then I was unable to save to /boot/grub/menu.lst. So, I booted from the ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD, mounted the /boot/grub/menu.lst file from the hard drive (i.e. /dev/hda6), and made the changes to the root parameter. Rebooted, there was a file system check, I got some errors about a bad superblock, so I had to edit /etc/fstab to change how files were mounted. I needed the uuids, which I got using /sbin/blkid. Since I used dd to copy the drive, I duplicated the UUIDs. Apparently, the UUID can be reset after doing partition duplication using dd. An example command tune2fs -U random /dev/sdc1. However, since I was just doing it for backup and reformatted the second hard drive, I didn’t bother.
5. I added software RAID, using raid-1 for redundancy. Although I had hardware that supported raid, I wanted to just do a partition, instead of having to do an entire drive. I can maximize reliability for files I care about. In the worst case drive failure scenario, I may have to do another OS install if the drive with the OSes fails. Initially, I tried using the alternate ubuntu installer, a text based installer with extra options, but the filesystem wasn’t mounted upon boot. I later realized it may not have shown the filesystem because the drives hadn’t synched. Just to be safe I stopped mdadm: mdadm --stop /dev/md0. Starting from existing partitions I made using the alternate ubuntu CD, I recreated the RAID array

   sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda7 /dev/sdc1

   . I confirmed that it was running by checking with sudo cat /proc/mdstat.

To get a list of partitions, use sudo fdisk -l.

Another reason to take really good care of the oceans: dolphins live there.

I had some trouble setting up Samba under Ubuntu. I followed these instructions and got it running. It turns out I’d run the command sudo smbpasswd -L -a , but didn’t specify the user name.

While traveling in southern Mexico, I noticed overgrown hills in otherwise flat terrain and realized that there are probably a lot of overgrown Mayan cities. So many, apparently, that archeologists are “discovering” new sites using Google Earth.