Tag: Systems 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.

Cisco Console Server

May 24th, 2009 · The Fraser · Network Administration No comments - Tags: , , ,

In an effort to provide a more secure way to access our network equipment in the event of an outage we setup a console server. We didnt purchase anything from a vendor but built a Cisco Console server. There is little documentation for creating this online so I am going to go through the steps of creating one.

Equipment used: below is the list of equipment needed to get started with the project

  1. Cisco 2621xm router
  2. NM-32a Async network module
  3. cab-octal-sync Async octal set of cables (68pin connector terminated with 8 RJ45 async console ports)
  4. cat5 cables of appropriate length and color (In my environment, color signifies function. This may not apply in your setup)

Connectivity Setup:

To start we are going to setup the devices, power it and assume the switches have been setup appropriately.

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MSExchangeIS #8217

December 17th, 2008 · The Fraser · Windows Administration No comments - Tags: , ,

Recently our Sr. Director of IT sent out a Calendar invite to the team for meetings to plan our major project. He sent this meeting to a few select developers and the Operations group. But when he sent to the Operations group, he didn’t expand the group and add each user. He added the Security Group. This caused a serious of errors in Exchange that didn’t permit any user on the Ops group to add the event to their calendars. After being asked to fix this when the person in charge of Exchange was less than adequate for the task, I went searching through the Event Viewer. Found many errors and reduced it to a few that stood out, Error #8217, #8260 & #3005.

#8217 pointed to the particular Calendar event and creator of the event. #8260 logged the inability to access this event using anything other than MS Outlook (OWA and Non-MAPI clients).