Archive
Posts from 2006
Using Veritas Volume Manager with RHAS 4.0
I have used Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and Veritas File system (VxFS) for as long as I can remember. All of my VxVM and VxFS experience has been on Solaris, so I thought I would install both products on a Linux host to see if anything was different. The Linux installation turned out to be nearly identical to the Solaris installation (the Linux installer install RPMs versus SVR4 packages), and the vx* commands are located in the same place in both operating systems. Since I wanted to get my hands dirty and play with VxVM and VxFS on a Linux host, I first ran the vxdisksetup utility to initialize a few devices: Gak…
$ read more →Concert review Cinderella & Poison
I grew up listening to hard rock, and used to bang my head to the likes of Motley Crue, Cinderella, Guns N' Roses, Ratt, Warrant, Skid Row and the rest of the bands who made the 1980s special. Most of these bands are still touring in one capacity or another, and I recently had the opportunity to see two of these bands, Cinderella and Poison. Both bands were a huge success in the 1980s, and I was curious to see if they could still jam. Cinderella was the first band to take the stage, and they began their setlist with what sounded like "Fallin' Apart at the Seams." The lead singer (Tom Keifer) was having problems hitting the high notes Cinderella is known for, but the show was amazing none the less (Tom Keifer told the crowd that his voice was strained, but he chose to go on tour to make all of us Cinderella fans happy…
$ read more →Checking devices for bad sectors
I recently had a friend contact me because he was getting an error similar to the following in his Redhat Linux system log (I didn't save the error while debugging the problem, so I grabbed this one from the web): At first glance, I thought the disk drive had failed, and told him to back up all of his data to safe media. Once the data was backed up, I decided to run a full SMART self test on the disk drive to check the drives health: The SMART long test completed successfully, but dd was failing when attempting to read sector 25590410 (we weren't using the continue on error option). Since all modern disk drive controllers contain logic to remap faulty sectors when they are detected, and the number of reallocated sectors as reported by smartctl was well below the manufacturers failure threshold, I wondered if the sector was "stuck." To test my theory, I booted from a Linux CD, and ran the Linux badblocks utility on the disk partition (I didn't save the badblocks output from his drive, so the following is a sample from another machine): Badblocks completed successfully, and an fsck of the file system reported that the file system was clean (We also used the ext3 file system debugger to see if a file was using the block. It wasn't, so my theory is that the errors occurred when a new file was being created)…
$ read more →Concert review Candlebox
I grew up loving rock and roll, and spent a fair amount of time in college listening to music (especially when I was writing code for class). One band that got a fair amount of play time on my home stero was Candlebox. They had a cool relaxing sound, and could jam with the best of them. So when Ticketmaster informed me that they would be in town playing a show at a local venue, I decided to get tickets…
$ read more →Getting E-mail notifications when MD devices fail
I use the MD (multiple device) logical volume manager to mirror the boot devices on the Linux servers I support. When I first started using MD, the mdadm utility was not available to manage and monitor MD devices. Since disk failures are relatively common in large shops, I used the shell script from my SysAdmin article Monitoring and Managing Linux Software RAID to send E-mail when a device entered the failed state. While reading through the mdadm(8) manual page, I came across the "--monitor" and "--mail" options…
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