After coming accross this site, I started getting ideas (oh ohh…)
VMWare Virtual Appliances Download Directory
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For the past few weeks I’ve been getting another machine ready to replace the current file server. I’ve been setting SuSE 10.1 on a PIII 933 machine to replace the Athlon 2400+. Continue reading →

I’ve done this a few times, and each time I need to look it up. At least if I post it here, I know where to look for it.
To mount an ISO file to a folder;
#mount -o loop -t iso9660 filename.iso /mnt/iso

The results are good.
Managed to get all 4 drives mounted under a RAID 5 array, like I described earlier. Once I was done swapping out the smaller partitions for the larger drives, I was left with one large partition of 699 Gigs. At least according to Yast, as well as Webmin.
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Something to look at when I have some time:
Linux game roundup

So I have checked this Maxtor drive using all the Maxtor utilities, and the drive seems to pass every one of their tests… I still don’t trust it, mainly since the S.M.A.R.T. feature reports 3925 write errors… And the loss of data I experienced not too long ago…

Anyhoo, I however decided to use it in my RAID 5 array. If the drive does go bad, it will be an easy matter of going to the local computer store, and picking up another 250 gig drive to replace it. With that in mind, I splurged yesterday on 2 removable HD bays (at $14.99 each).

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Finally, everything is workning!

RAID array is working well, serving data through NFS and Samba, music server is putting out tunes through all the speakers, and the torrents are flowing… There’s more I want to do, but I’m happy for now.

I can rest, and get on with other things. I must admit, I’ve been a little obsessed about getting this linux server up and running. Make a backup this morning, and scheduled the system to make system backups every morning. Just in case.

This has happened every time I install SuSE… I get everything working, and the sound is still flaky. Every time.
Now it’s on the server. To get SoftSqueeze working, I need to have access to the sound card, which currently I do not. The root user seems to have control, since I can send a ‘play’ command as root, and tunes comes out, however as a regulas user. Nada.
I had already copied the asound.conf file (mentioned in an earlier post) to the /etc folder.
And I get some error message. Gonna persue the permissions…
Got it. Looked at the permissions for /dev/dsp and it belonged to user root and group audio.
Made the user (myself) part of the audio group, rebooted, and all is well.

On Friday, the Maxtor 250Gig gave up the ghost… well actually I got fed up with it. The drive still runs, but had quite a few errors on it.

After spending pretty much all weekend trying to recover the data, all I have to show for it is just a directory listing of what used to be on the drive. All the data got scrambled. ALL of it. That was about 250 gigs of mainly movies, videos, all my mp3 music and all my pictures.

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Just playing with LVM, and it looks like it’s what I’ve been looking for in order to merge lots of drives together. I especially like the fact that I can remove a drive from the equation. Anyway, here are a few good sites I’ll have to re-read on how to manage an LVM file system.
Link 1 – Shrink an LVM volume
Link 3

One other thing I found is that in order to resize a volume, I need to unmount it first. That can be done just by selecting “_blank_” from the mount point drop down menu. Hit apply, and then go about the operation. When done resizing, re-mount it.
Do everything in the LVM menu is yast. Don’t go into the Partitioner option, since I kept getting error when trying certain operations on the LVM volumes.
And it seems that if a physical volume is removed (becuase let’s say it’s corrupt) I cannot rebuild the remainig data. I only tried with 3 partitions, and removed the middle one, but with no positive results with reiserfs.

One note: XFS can be expanded (grown) but it cannot be shrunk. ReiserFS can do both.