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Looks like "systemd/systemctl" are taking over from System V service controls in Linux. Fedora 16 this is the default manager for controlling the services on Linux. I was attempting to use "chkconfig" and it kept forwarding the request to "systemctl" so I was finally forced to look at the man pages and the Fedora page and so far I like what I see except the assigning of start levels takes too many keystrokes and too long to check status.

Not completely sold on "systemd" but I will work with it and see how it does for now it seems to be working just fine.

Here are some helpful links:

Fedora SysVinit to Systemd Cheatsheet
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet

Fedora Systemd Page
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd

I performed a fresh install on my boot disk of Fedora 16 moving from Fedora 13 after using the "linux noprobe" to see my devices on the HP DL580 smart array as mentioned in my previous post. Once I had Fedora 16 properly installed and updated now was the time to bring in the other drives I didn't want the installation to touch into use.

I didn't have to perform  "vgimport". When I ran the "vgdisplay -v" command to find what the current state of LVM and names the volume groups and logical volumes were already imported so all I had to do was enter them into "/etc/fstab/" and mount the directories.

After mounting "/home" and the other directories in "init level 3"  I entered "init level 5" to start the desktop and after trying to login into my users I created on the system I get the error "call to lnusertemp failed (temporary directories full ?).Check your installation".


I restarted the system in "single-user mode" and well "/tmp" or the mountpoint it was connected to "/" wasn't full and the permissions were wide open. I looked at a few more items and checked log files then decided to  copy the files from the "/home" created by the system which I had renamed to "/home.orig" before mounting my old logical volume to the newly created "/home" and still couldn't login.

After rebooting again into single-user-mode, I then looked at the permissions of the user directories in /home and noticed that the numeric values were being used and not the user names. I then looked in "/etc/passwd" (#cat /etc/passwd |grep <username>) and of course the numeric values in the new "/etc/passwd" didn't match the numeric values from my previous install.

to correct the issue I performed the chown command for each user's directory:
#chown  -R <username>:<username> /home/<user-directory>/

Now "ls -al /home/<user-directory>/" shows the  user name instead of the numeric value and I can login just fine into each user on the system.

I used the "-r" option to resize the underlying filesystem with the "lvextend" command for the first time. The "-r" option allowed the logical volume & filesystem to be extended with just one command. I saw the "-r" switch there on the man page and decided to try it!

To top it off the partition I extended was my root "/" partition. The man page says that the "-r" option calls the "fsadm" command to extend or resize the filesystem.

What caused me to use this option was that I just did a fresh install of one of my Fedora Linux systems that has served alternately as a game server, web server, backup server. Currently in this iteration it will take over as my new game server. I have all of my files in two logical volumes on a separate physical drive from my OS drive so that I will not have to worry about data files I don't wish overwritten during OS installs or I can just take that drive to the next server I build and manually mount it on that new server.

The drive of course is using LVM and is its own volume group so that information is on the drive is imported easily into LVM. I have two logical volumes on this physical drive within the volume group..

One logical volume I mount to /home and the other to /usr/local/games. These logical volumes have files I have downloaded to various home directories and working files & binaries for the games I host on my servers.

I didn't include this extra physical drive that I store my data on as a target during the fresh Fedora 14 install, so I needed to unmount the /home that was created with the install and then mount my logical volume that holds data for my home directories I mount on "/home/" and game data which I mount on "/usr/local/games/".

The reason I ended up extending my "/" partition was that I didn't pay attention to how much space the installation of Fedora 14 was giving "/home" or "/". I didn't even intend for the install to make the "/home" a separate partition but oh well it did and I needed the space the install allocated for "/home" to move to "/".

I won't speak about partition sizing and the reasoning's for that since I started getting really liberal with that with the partitions I used to be strict on since drives are so large now.

Anyway not a big deal to those of you who may have used this "-r" feature before but I never have, even with HP-UX. I truthfully don't know if HP-UX has the "-r" switch for the lvextend command something I'll research and find out later since the person who was bringing by my HP-UX box hasn't brought it by yet.

Normally you would do the "lvextend" and then use the "resize2" command which doesn't take long but its always nice to use the least amount of commands.

Anyway this is what I did:

1. Logged in as root in "gdm" (Gnome Xwindows) after commenting out the "root" user lines in /etc/pamd.d/gdm & etc/pamd.d/gdm-password. I know, not what you are supposed to do but I didn't feel like rebooting and wanted multiple windows up.

2. Killed the processes that were still running on /home

   1. fuser -ku /home (didn't work)

   2. lsof /home (showed pid)

   3. kill -9 "pid"

3. unmout /home

4. vgdisplay -v|more (showed my vg that was on my physical drive)

5. vi /etc/ fstab

   1. /dev/mapper/home_vg-lvol1 /home ext4 defaults 1 2

   2. /dev/mapper/home_vg-lvol2 /usr/local/games ext4 defaults 1 2

6. mount -a

7. df -kh

8. lvchange -a n /dev/vg_system-name/lv_home

9. lvdisplay /dev/vg_system-name/lv_home

10. lvremove /dev/vg_system-name/lv_home

11. llvextend -l <PE -total size> /dev/vg_system-name/lv_root -r

    1. Since its "/" it will not unmout but perform an online filesystem extension even if you answer "no'.

That was it in a nutshell, took much longer to write this post! This is just my story of a new switch I found and decided to play with if you decide to try this please if your system or data is valuable back it up and do your research for your environment! Make sure you have the online LVM packages etc. if you want to do an online filesystem extension. As they say mileage will vary!

LVM is different for HP-UX than with Linux and a bit different on other UNIX systems as well so I couldn't find the command to see if the physical extents were concurrent but I suspect they are not. Just an FYI. You know please post, I ran out of time tonight and didn't look much further.

This isn't meant to be a tutorial but if you have any question please ask! Maybe I'll clean this up at a later time and present it in more of a tutorial fashion with better explanations but its time for me to go to bed!

Man how verbose no wonder I don't post as much as I should!

Dude I even have charts from Wikipedia:

We had a power outage in North Sacramento and the servers for dhoytt.com were affected we are back up now with the power restored!

Installed Fedora 11 tonight on laptop I got as a shell last week got parts from Ebay and other spots. Added mp3 licensing from repository along with flash and its humming along nicely wired & wireless.

Had to install with CD's though, for some reason couldn't boot DVD from Fedora 11 but could boot other previous versions of Fedora DVD's on this laptop. DVD's boot fine on other systems didn't want to update bios.

I got great help on installing & getting flash working in Fedora at this web site:

http://www.fedorafaq.org/#flash

For mp3 support the commands at this site worked perfectly:

http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/25/add-mp3-support-in-fedora-10/

Well I must say that for the updates Packagekit seems an improvement so far. Packagekit seems like is silent as it’s supposed to and so far handles dependencies very well even though I have only had my first initial couple of updates.

 

When updating the Fedora 9 OS Packagekit has multiple updates selected for several software packages at one time I and would like to know how I can select multiple software packages when selecting new software .in “Add/Remove Software”.

 

I’m anxious to see this full package in place they are speaking of in such glowing turns all over the internet. I hope this isn’t premature hype like I’m starting to see too much of in this industry lately.

 

I thought I saw where the full package will be pushed out hopefully in a couple of weeks through the normal update path, I am anxious to see how it works fully!

 

I still feel they could have helped bridge the old with the new better until the new was ready to fully roll as the primary with both Pirut still as the primary with Packagekit available to get acquainted with in the wings.

Ok I love gadgets & technology so is it a big deal that I finally got me a PDA/phone? Well let me answer that for you the answer is yes to me it’s a big deal because for me to get some of this technology it has to have a practical application almost right away. The other criteria is it must be affordable

So what was my latest portable pickup? Actually in the last two weeks there have been two additions. About a week and a half back I took advantage of a sale and bought a “Creative Labs” “Nomad Zen Xtra” “40gb” mp3 player. Last week I purchased online an HP Ipaq HW6515 pocket PC which arrived today. Along with my HP R717 Digital camera and my CompaqNW800 laptop I appear to have all of my various portable electronic and computing needs covered.

For the NW8000 laptop I have my hard core computing or multi-media I may need taken care of and with the various peripherals I have for the NW8000 I can do quite a bit. Actually thinking about it I probably should include the laptop as items that make my portable electronics a complete package. I have the “Hercules DJ Console” which allows me to treat mp3’s as vinyl records. I also have an HP external DVD640 Lightscribe DVDRW and an 80 GB Western Digital USB drive. I can put together some serious music without lugging around a bunch of CD’s or records and still have the same affects and more!

Now it may seem like a duplication to have all of these devices but it really depends on what needs to be done and how long you may be on the road and for what purpose.

The digital camera just gives me the ability to have good resolution on picture I really care about and helps me since I’m not a very good photographer.

The laptop and all of those peripherals I have mainly for the musical purposes but also for those long trips when I may to do some PowerPoint or heavy computing at a hotel or resort.

The Zen mp3 player I couldn’t pass up since the price was so good at less than ½ price. With the mp3 player I can plug into my car stereo and not worry about switching from music to phone to handle a phone call. Plus at a small get together or in a resort I can easily setup a nice little mood and not have it interrupted by calls.

The HP IPAQ is first of all a phone and organizer always at hand but can also perform some very general low horse power computing chores. This will be very nice when I’m out looking at auctions liquidations etc where a laptop will be a hindrance. I can also use this as the one device I will not leave behind if I can only take one it can do everything in a limited way. Also the price was less than 1/3 of the normal cost with warranty still.

Anyway all these electronic items I have purchased help me expand the things I like to do already and enhance the experiences. I have been actually looking at these various devices over the past years as they developed and waited for my needs and cost to come together before purchasing them.

Now I have to look at a few accessories!! Well come on I have to have 1gb of flash RAM in my IPAQ if that’s what’s in my camera sine they are interchangeable! Plus I need a car kit and an underwater case for the camera.

I have been having issues of the Windows registry becoming corrupt with a friends system. I had isolated it down to all of the various components and then decided it’s either the motherboard or memory.

Well with the help of the "Memtest86" I isolated it down to memory errors that showed themselves right away.

I had already turned down the memory voltage from 3.4v to 3.3v suspecting that but still kept corrupting the registry.

Now I did not have another set of pc133 memory to test if it was the memory stick or the memory settings. I actually had to go and purchase another stick of pc133 memory to test if the memory module or the settings were the issue.

Well I ran the same "Memtest86” test with the new memory stick and presto memory issues show right away!

Well this is now obviously memory settings. I built this system a few years ago and it was hard jumpered. I'm thinking that maybe someone else poked their heads in there and replaced the memory or adjusted something.

Well I took the jumpered settings off and set the motherboard (ASUS a7v133-c) up for jumperless settings and set the memory and CPU in the bios. I then ran the “Memtest86 for several passes and it found no errors. I then reloaded the OS and some other software on the system without issue.

I then set the “Memtest86" to run and test the memory overnight. This morning I looked and after several hours of running test there are no more memory errors

I am now running a memory test I downloaded from Microsoft's site to see if it finds any errors and so far after 8 passes no issues!

Both memory tests run off of bootable CDROM or floppy without taking you into the OS of course.

Here are the URL's to the memory tests:

http://www.memtest.org/

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Rechargeable Batteries

I’m going to take this necessary plunge into getting rechargeable batteries for all of these wireless devices I have that require batteries.

I have nine wireless keyboards and mice that I use all of the time to cut down on all of the wires I need in my computer room. You may say hey why not use a KVM but a KVM still requires wires from the system to the KVM.

I actually do use a KVM but strictly for the monitor out puts, plus if people want to come over and play multiplayer games using my systems or do something else that would require me to unhook them from the KVM if I wanted to access another system on the KVM switch without using remote desktop network access of some type.

Back to the rechargeable batteries I also will slowly work them into the mix for my remote control devices as well.

Supposedly with these NiMH (Nickel-Metal Hydride) batteries have 50% more power than NiCad batteries and do not suffer from memory effects. Also, Unlike NiCad batteries, NiMH batteries do not use heavy metals that may have toxic effects. (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/NiMH_battery_pack.html)

More information on rechargeable batteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_metal_hydride

My system I built with the new AMD 64 bit 3200 processor is now my primary system after transferring all of the relevant gigs of data from my 3.2 Intel system. As I said before not only is the CPU fast but the 39160 Adaptec card with the 5 10k rpm SCSI drives this system really cooks! I also have over .5tb’s of capacity on this system, so that will hold for a bit.

Once again after a cold spell with my work outs I am trying to get back into it with the 100 degree weather we have been having this has not been great timing. I normally love the hot temperatures but when you are a bit out of shape and have to get some long runs in that means getting up in time and not going to bed late so you can get up and beat the heat.
I know I can get in shape really quickly which is probably a bad thing since I tend to let it go sometimes knowing I can take the slight pain and discomfort when I do my burn work outs for a few weeks. I never let myself get so far out of shape that I don’t know what it takes to get back on track but man when you are in the middle of only your second 6 mile run back to back days in months it still hurts!!
I have to qualify what I consider being in shape. Having the energy to get up do a minimum of stretching after work and hitting a six mile run at a pace where you are almost skipping is my version of being in shape! I’m far from that now, hell I can make six miles or even more but not with the pace I want. Being able to do it easily every day of the week easily is also a key.
On top endurance and stamina, flexibility and strength are the other keys to what I call being in shape. I rarely weigh myself but I know my body well enough to approximate my weight pretty well. The important thing about being in shape is the energy that’s how you should measure progress, everything else (weight loss, tone etc...) will fall in place. You will always have a fast weight loss when you start any regiment in the first week or two, that’s the easy part. What you do after that is where you earn it which is why weight loss is not the most important thing to gauge progress.
Time for me to start getting ready for bed after staying up so late the past few nights working on different items.