Category: Linux Administration

Short post: Most important command I always forget

December 30th, 2009 · The Fraser · Linux Administration, Systems Administration No comments - Tags: ,

Often times in the heat of a critical server restart the system decides to FSCK a very large filesystem. If I let it take its natural course it could be a day before its back (for 12TB file systems using ext3). So to stop it from fscking follow this procedure.

1) Restart system
2) When it begins FSCKing, it will start running a percentage counter. Crtl-C from this. It will dump you to Repair Filesystem mode
4) Once in repair after entering the root password you will need to edit fstab to comment out the partition. This fails as it is unable to edit the file as its Read-Only.
3) Run the command “mount -o remount /” or to be absolutely sure “mount -n -o remount,rw /”
4) Comment out the partition in /etc/fstab and restart the box.
5) Once the box has recovered uncomment the partition and mount it.
6) Schedule downtime for the box for fscking.

This doesn’t take into consideration the negative affects of running an ext3 filesystem without fsck for that long a period and cheating to get around it. But there are times when things just have to be fixed ASAP, this comes in handy.

Busy Life, New Project

April 6th, 2009 · The Fraser · Linux Administration, Network Administration One comment

I haven’t posted in awhile as life is pretty busy. I am almost done with the DataCenter Migration and we are greatly busy with looking for a Condo in the Bay Area (Perfect time to Buy). We found one condo that we are really interested in but it already has a few offers on it. So we can just hope and pray that they all fall through. My Wife got a new job recently too. Lawyers Assistant for a law firm, working her way to a Paralegal.

As for my new project, I am going to start working on a IT Assets Database. Mostly for the server side. This will be used to inventory all servers, predict average power consumption per server and site and hopefully find a good way to integrate it into a PXE/Kickstart setup. I have a few ideas on  the most efficient way to do this. I also partially want to the develop this as a Rails/Ruby app. I may end up developing a PHP app first as the guys here are so afraid of Ruby & Rails.

Updates will be more frequent in the future as work is slowing down a bit and the project is coming to a close.