In this article, we recompiled our software and kernel so we could remove our /dev/sde drive. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure to set up a test system with the same kernel and distribution to see how this stuff works. This article was written using […]
Finish Conversion And Expansion to Two RAID1 Devices With LVM
Compiling the Linux Kernel for More than 1GB of RAM
Agatha recently purchased another stick of 512MB RAM. It turns out that by default you need to change the kernel for it to use more than 1GB of RAM. Actually, the cutoff is technically at 960MB. Here is the memory info with 1.5GB of RAM installed, but with high memory support disabled: usr-1@srv-1 proc $ […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 1 – Booting the Install CD
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 2 – Creating the Filesystems
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 3 – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 4 – Creating the Kernel
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 5 – Getting Silo Installed
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 6 – Initial Logon
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Installing Gentoo GNU/Linux 2004.3 on SPARC – Part 7 – Final Configuration
There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]
Configuring Software RAID 5 on GNU/Linux
We are running Gentoo on sparc64: srv-1 root # uname -a Linux srv-1 2.4.27-sparc #1 SMP Fri Dec 31 08:43:34 PST 2004 sparc64 sun4u TI UltraSparc II (BlackBird) GNU/Linux The first step in installing RAID 5 is to figure out what devices you have available: srv-1 root # dmesg | grep SCSI SCSI subsystem driver […]
Moving Files with Caps using Bash
We recently ran into an issue where there were legacy all-caps files in a directory, and we needed to move them. The remaining files were all lower-case. It turns out that when there are subdirectories involved, it is not as easy to move just the all-caps files, rather than the subdirectories. Here is an example […]
Installing Lilo on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
There are a lot of reasons to run GRUB. We feel there are also a lot of reasons to run LILO. If you do install LILO, the boot process will instantly become traditional. Red Hat hides much of the boot process by default, including the SELinux messages. Yes, sure, you could reconfigure it, but the […]
How to Test for a Particular User From Bash
You can test for a particular user with the id test: [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ if [ `id -u` = 0 ]; then echo root; fi [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ su Password: [root@srv-1 usr-1]# if [ `id -u` = 0 ]; then echo root; fi root [root@srv-1 usr-1]# Here, we simply test for root, userid=0, and echo root if […]
Linux Kernel Memory Management
One seemingly innocent question is, “what is the active memory statistic in top?”. That is, what does this mean: Mem: 508476k av, 456424k used, 52052k free, 0k shrd, 86780k buff 173524k active, 131488k inactive Swap: 2048276k av, 0k used, 2048276k free 218144k cached It is fine to understand why all of the memory is used […]
Writing a Bash For Loop
The power to our lab machines is controlled by a device we built in 2001. It uses the serial port to control a bank of relays. For more information on the device and how to build it, see this article. Now, it turns out that we often need to simply turn on all machines and […]
Disable Ping (ICMP) Responses With Linux
This is a kernel parameter that you can set with /etc/sysctl.conf by adding two lines: # tail -n 2 /etc/sysctl.conf net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 1 net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all = 1 Apply the changes by using the sysctl -p command: # sysctl -p . . . net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 1 net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all = 1 # There are various security reasons why you […]
Sprogram Terminated Error after Gentoo Emerge
We recently upgraded our Sparc64 Gentoo box. When we rebooted we got an error at the console when trying to boot that just said Sprogram terminated. It turns out that this was caused by an error with the SILO boot records. See this article for more information on installing SILO. To get our system to […]
Upgrading Linux Kernel on Gentoo Sparc64
We had a troublesome upgrade of our Gentoo Sparc64 box. After emerge world the system wouldn’t boot because the boot files were changed without re-running SILO. We fixed this in this article. Anyway, even though we went through this trouble, it appears that the emerge downloaded the 2.4.31 sources, messed with our boot files, but […]
JDK on GNU/Linux on Sparc64
If you need to run Java on GNU/Linux running on Sparc64 hardware, your best bet is to get the Blackdown source. This is easy with Gentoo: srv-1 opt # emerge jdk Calculating dependencies …done! >>> emerge (1 of 2) dev-java/java-config-1.2.11 to / >>> Downloading http://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/java-config-1.2.11.tar.bz2 –10:00:21– http://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/java-config-1.2.11.tar.bz2 => `/usr/portage/distfiles/java-config-1.2.11.tar.bz2′ Resolving distfiles.gentoo.org… 216.165.129.135, 64.50.236.52, 156.56.247.195 Connecting […]
Forcing Installs with Up2date
If you have trouble with dependencies running up2date, the Red Hat update system, you can force download and installs by downloading the packages regardless of dependencies and then forcing the install. Be careful when you do this, or course. The system is there to make sure you install the correct packages, so if up2date tells […]