Category Archives: Server Information

Server gets larger system drive, and the root LVM extended.

Well, as you all saw in my post on 28 Jan, the root partition only had 29G free, so I felt that an expansion was in order.  The original IDE drive was 200 GB, so only 50 GB was allocated to the root partition.  I ‘cloned’ the existing drive to a new 250GB IDE drive using clonezilla, whichScreenshot-1 was exceedingly easy.  Now, to expand the root partition.  This is blivet-gui, which is supposed to be the new partition management tool, not quite out of beta yet.  However, it refuses to do anything to a mounted partition, so it looked like command line tools were going to have to do.  The commands needed will be:  fdisk, lvs, pvcreate, vgs, vgextend, lvextend, mkfs.ext4, and resize2fs.  You can see by the screen shot, that the new drive has been installed with 46.5 GB of free ‘unallocated’ space.  It is this space that I want to use.  😉  The first step is to use the df -h and lvs commands to collect some information that you will need.  Next, break out our old friend fdisk in order to partition and prepare the free space.  #fdisk  /dev/sda in my case.  Then, create another primary partition (3 of 4 allowable).  Screenshot-4After, that is done, change the partition type from Linux to LVM (8e).   Then, we have to create an ext4 filesystem by doing: #mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3.  Now, all we need to do is to extend the volume group and capture the free space into the logical volume for root.  😉  First, initialize the partition as a physical volume by:  #pvcreate /dev/sda3.  Now, check the volume groups using the command #vgs.  Now, we can extend it.  The command I used was  #vgextend vg_cap /dev/sda3.  Just a couple more commands…. We are almost there!  Next, we extend the logical volume (lv_root) with all the free space of the volume group (vg_cap).  #lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/vg_cap/lv_root.  Now, to resize the filesystem:  #resize2fs /dev/vg_cap/lv_root.  Finally, verify everything is fine using df-h, lvs, and vgs.  As you can see, lv_root is now 95GB, with 73GB free.  Screenshot-5 Everything is fine, with the only casualty being that blivet-gui doesn’t seem to run any longer, but that’s no big problem since it didn’t really give me any advantage on a mounted filesystem.  Moral of the story:  The TRUE strength of Linux resides in the CLI (Command Line Interface), shell, terminal, or whatever you choose to call it.  Always has and always will.  As a matter of fact, I accomplished all this over SSH, using VNC just for screenshots.  😉

 

Strange server behavior

Earlier in the month, I noticed that for some reason server ‘auto backups’ were not occuring, with the last one being 20 Dec 2014.  Upon investigation, I found that not only could I not mount /dev/sdc/ , the backup drive,  but fdisk -l |grep Disk wouldn’t even list it.  So, I figured that the drive died, so I ordered another 2 TB drive.  I also ordered a spare 250GB IDE drive.

Yesterday, I was going to prep and replace /dev/sdc.  I found that after a reboot, the server not only recognized the backup drive, but its data seemed intact, with the exception of the last sys partition backup.  So, I immediately did another fresh, full sys partition backup.

Well, at least now, I have a spare 2GB data drive, as well as a spare 250GB boot drive (the current one is only 200GB) onsite.  Could have been worse, I imagine.  😉

 

New bitrate and new radio show

crab_radio_01It seems that CRAB is always about one step behind our sister station, QUACKHOUSE Radio.  I have decided to push the bitrate and sampling frequency from 32/16 to 64/22.  This is all in preparation of the Saturday night radio show resuming.  This should happen just after New Year’s day.  The format will be similar to the Saturday Night Trifectas that ended in Jan 2010.  I shall try to set up a podcast blog page to allow you to listen to the shows ‘after the fact’.

‘NEW’ page now working on CRAB

 

Got the NEW page working on the CRAB server……  It was more than likely a side effect of the Apache server upgrade somewhere around the Fedora 18 or 19 upgrade.  Here’s how I did it:

I became root user, then opened a terminal in the requests directory.

# nano .htaccess

Then, I put the following into the file:

Options +Includes
AddType text/html .html .shtml .txt
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .html .shtml .txt

Saved the file, then restarted Apache as follows:

# systemctl restart httpd

That took care of it, but I think I shall try putting that .htaccess file in CRAB’s document root, as well as the main server document root.  I think that might be a better place for that file.  😀