When re-using a disk with a GPT label (GUID Partition Table) it’s important to wipe the label stored on both the first and last blocks of the device. With an MBR Partition Table it was easy enough to just nuke the beginning of the drive (adapt sdz for your drive), ala: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdz bs=1M [...]
Read more →Solaris variants (i.e. Nexenta) seem to lack the ‘watch’ program that’s so useful on Linux/BSD. There are several people asking for this on various forums. There might be a port available, but not stock on machines, and if your machine is inside a restrictive firewall, it might be hard to get. In a pinch, the [...]
Read more →I run my backups on a stack that consists of: md-raid mirror LUKS encryption ZFS zvol This works nicely as it’s easy to split off an encrypted backup disk to take offsite, but since ZFS encryption hasn’t come to Linux yet, it’s still a stack of technologies to manage. My backup set gets ever larger, [...]
Read more →I’ve been working for a couple days to get a usable Fedora 15 instance on the AMD A6-3650 APU. I’m using MSI’s motherboard. The biggest challenge is the integrated ATI HD 6550D graphics. Download the latest .fc16 build of Linux 3.0 from koji for proper KMS (kernel mode setting) support. Then download the latest ATI [...]
Read more →The need came up to create a ZFS filesystem, shared over NFS, to Linux clients, with no permissions enforced. Much of the documentation out there is sparse, dated, confusing, or wrong. This post at least aims not to be wrong. On the Nexenta/Solaris machine, for zpool ‘storage’: zfs set aclinherit=passthrough storage/shared zfs set sharenfs=on storage/shared [...]
Read more →Make sure you have xargs, head, and mplayer installed (via your package manager) and run: /usr/bin/curl http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram | /usr/bin/head -1 | /usr/bin/xargs mplayer If the URL above changes, look for the ‘RealPlayer’ option at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv for a new .ram file.
Read more →Good news from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals: At issue in Warshak’s e-mail flap was a 1986 law that allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an internet service provider or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The appeals court said Tuesday [...]
Read more →A note I wrote when asked about the future of ZFS and current best-practices for storage: “My current line of thinking is that ZFS has the required reliability, OpenSolaris is where it actually works now. FreeBSD 9 should have a good version of it (they can’t get the zpool up to v23 in FreeBSD 8 [...]
Read more →Just a quick note for the search engines to find – peth0 can go missing from ifconfig if there is a GATEWAY= entry in ifcfg-eth0 (anaconda puts it here) and presumably -eth1, etc.. Put the default gateway in /etc/syconfig/network instead and use route-eth1 files instead to specify gateways. Reboot for xend to do its setup [...]
Read more →If you’re seeing this, this article isn’t quite done yet. Still setting things up right. Fedora client, Nexenta Server. On the linux side, start rpcidmapd and set it to start on boot. service rpcidmapd start chkconfig –levels 345 rpcidmapd on Wherever your DNS is, make sure your forward and reverse are set up correctly. No, [...]
Read more →I’ve got Jolicloud on the wife’s netbook, and it’s a nice easy-to-use distro. Trouble is, it’s based on Jaunty, which has old mythtv packages. These won’t connect to our MythTV 0.23 backend in the TV room. There is hope, though, the Avendard repo has newer packages compiled for Jaunty, but they’re a bit tricky to [...]
Read more →Could IBM be looking to lighten their workload and workforce by re-basing all of their OS offerings on top of Linux? A few weeks ago, IBM threatened patent infringement against Hercules, an S/390 emulator. This was very odd, both because IBM was breaking its patent pledge it made for Linux and because IBM itself recommended [...]
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