Category Archives: Computer geek stuff

Redundant backups are important?

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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LVM stuff

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.

Setting up Suse for the… I’ve lost track now…

On the weekend I decided to remove the WinServer 2003 from the equation (acting as a file server on a 400Mhz P3), and move the drives to the SuSE server, as well as use a bigger case to hold everything.
So I move all the bits to the other bigger case, add the DMA100/133 IDE controller with the two 250Gig drives, and boot it up. All works well, expect that I keep noticing that after a few reboots, I get a lot of file system rebuilds on the root partition. After a few more reboots, the Reiserfs has taken enough of a beating that it stops half way through tie startup phase.
So I do a repair off the SuSE setup disks, and try again (hoping that it was just a software problem). Nope. Still does it.
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Things I’ve changed on the Server

You know how once you solve a computer (or any other type of) problem, you tell yourself that you’ll never forget how to solve it if it happens again, since you just wasted 27 hours of your life figuring out the solution?
And what happend next month after you’ve had to deal with a dozen other issues, and same problem comes up again? Yes, you end up spending 22 hours (because you remembered 5% of the original solution)…
Anyhoo, I’m vowing not to make that mistake again. And since I’ve had to re-install SuSE several times since I started donw this linux road, I’m going to try to make this blog a record of the issues I’ve come across, and how I resolved them. Because _I’m 100% SURE_ it will come in handy again.
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Stupid XP!

After I shuffled a bit of hardware between my computers, I ended up the Asus A7N8X Sempron 2400 as the server with a 120 gig drive and the ECS K7S5A Athlon 2000 with the 160 gig drive (which used to be in the old workstation PC) will now be the current workstation. Continue reading

It has begun…

My linux network shuffling has began…

Yesterday I brought up the HTPC (Athlon 2000) and after a few HDs got shuffled, (put the 160 gig into the Athlon 2000 machine which will be the workstation, and put the 120 gig from the HTPC into the new server machine Sempron 2400) I blew away everything ion the 120 gig drive, and proceded to install SuSE SLICK 10.0. Continue reading