Admin

Disks from zfs pool not letting system boot

I had put some disks in a zfs pool on another system. When that went away, I eventually added the disks to my son’s old system. And it would not boot.

I had issues with the system back when it was running OpenSolaris circa build 42, so rather than suspecting the system, I was wondered whether it might be an issue with the disk format.

So I pulled the drives and Windows 7 did not recognize them (and by the way, I evidently still have several disks from a zfs pool on my desktop, because they were not recognized either). I initialized them and then put them back into the machine now running Fedora Core 14. And boot!

Now I need to figure out how to make them work as a filesystem. I’m thinking btrfs, but I want to keep the root as is and use the three new drives as a different filesystem.

December 25, 2010 by Admin 0

Finally doing some mail filtering

Okay, started off with some simple procmail filtering on my main account. It has been a while since I’ve used it. But I got tired of my desktop being off while I was traveling and not having Thuderbird do the filtering for me.

The one incompatibility I have is that I want to keep unfiltered email in ‘/var/spool/mail/<username>’ such that it then shows up in my Inbox for both Thunderbird and the iPhone.

I guess I’ll add a dummy account and see if I can get it to do that with procmail.

August 24, 2010 by Admin 0

Server reinstall

I tried to update my Shuttle XPC from Fedora 11 to 13 via yum. I’m pretty sure my system got horked with respect to yum right before this effort when I did my last yum update. It stopped being able to connect to the servers.

Once I determined it was in a bad state, I went ahead and copied off most of the data I knew was important. Yes, I missed something. :->

The data I tend to copy off is:

  1. Home directories
  2. /etc
  3. /usr/local
  4. /var/<domainname> – web site(s)
  5. /var/named

What I failed to get this time was /var/spool/mail. I guess I either thought /var was too big or too deeply nested. This is despite the fact I had over 100G more free space on my backup drive than the server’s hard drive.

So I lost a couple thousand email messages that remained in inboxes rather than being saved. Since I tend to hoard the stuff, no biggie.

The install over didn’t work as well as I would have liked, so I did a fresh install. I wasn’t that impressed with the installer – it seemed to take too long discovering the disk and skipped over some of the screens (e.g., it would consistently skip over the installation method {cd} and try to find the image on a drive slice).

After the install was done, I had to configure the following services from my backup:

  1. /etc/passwd
  2. DNS
  3. mail
  4. ssh
  5. sudo
  6. dovecot
    1. Don’t forget to generate your own certificate to enable SSL
  7. httpd
  8. noip

I hate that it makes you create an user before you can do anything and it goes ahead to create a group at the same time.

The other complication here is that since this is my only DNS server, I have to do tricks on my other machines to get outside to documentation. (Hence my desire to have a backup server ready to go on a moment’s notice).

August 22, 2010 by Admin 2