Recently in Whole Site Development Category

In the background on my others servers I'm working on a completely new look for the site with a new CMS\Blog platform! Seems that my current platform has been somewhat bogged down in the development area and the others are taking nice stride forward and will give me the functionality to really craft my site it seems more to my liking. I think that the pieces and parts will be more but the customization that I'm running into is great but I just need to get up to speed on it!

I will be able to have more forms more interaction and that should make it more user friendly with more to do and integrate with other sites you may use.

Stay tuned!

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.

Who is making the decisions about what to include in the Fedora distributions? I have noticed Ever since at least Fedora 10 and maybe sooner you have had to jump through various hoops to get SCSI and RAID controllers to operate properly.

 Does the Fedora project have a lot of people unaware of the enterprise part of computing as far as the hardware layer is concerned?  I'm trying to do a simple base installation on an HP DL580 with a smart array and I have tried the suggestions on Fedora's kernel issue page @ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_kernel_problems but still I'm unable to get Fedora 16 to recognize the RADI/SCSI controller on my DL580. Every other Distribution I have tried without any alterations to the boot parameters recognize the devices without fail and also pick up on the current  custom  LVM partitioning I have setup so I can preserve the data on those partitions to save me having to restore after boot!

I really have been a Fedora fan since its inception and Red Hat going back to the really early versions in early to mid '90's but I really don't want to have to insert or exclude certain kernel drivers or parameters for fresh install all of the time when other distributions of Linux like Ubuntu & Centos, see the devices in question right away without any further action from myself! I have other things to worry about like rebuilding my web sites, studying up on new software/hardware, fishing, etc.., don't make me have to jump through hoops just to see standard hardware other Linux distro plans for!

Time to expand my horizons and check out the other Linux distributions to save my precious time which is the reason I  have always used  Fedora it used to save me time hunting down drivers/software etc..!

*****************************UPDATE***************************************

Okay after blowing off some steam I did finally get the Fedora 16 install to recognize my Smart Array on my DL580 by sspeciffying the following as boot options during the install: "linux noprobe acpi=noirq askmethod". I then selected SmartArray2 and presto I can see my drives!

Credit due to old post on Linux forums though I do recall doing this before I had not recalled it until seeing this post: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/cannot-install-scsi-driver-for-compaq-smart-array-in-fedora-core-v-438887/

I did this after installing Centos and looking around it for a while. I just really like the glob of software that I get with Fedora. I have discovered so many helpful programs with Fedora its addictive and hard to give up even with some of the install issues I have had to work around with what seems to be a devalued view of some SCSI/RAID/SAS controller cards or maybe I'm missing the maintainers vision. I will still be playing with Centos since it mirrors so enterprise Red Hat so closely which I see in the work place so much but without the cost. I will also play further with Ubuntu & OpenSUSE to get familiar with those distributions software they package with.

I am replacing one of my main routers to the internet so there will be some brief interruptions as I place my newly configured router in place.

There appears to have been a power failure causing a brief outage of the dhoytt.com site. This power outage affected the entire area. I didn't have my UPS engaged due to replacing the batteries and I haven't had time to finish that project yet.

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:

I was logging into my blog trying to see what's going on and make a post into the "Snakeice Radio House of Beats Blog" here on my site and was able to login but then kicked out as if mu session had expired.

Had a power outage today and I was away from the office but everything came back online by itself except the music didn't begin streaming. The cause of the power outage I am guessing is the street construction about a block away. I have not been told that the construction is officially the cause of the power outage so I will have to check sources later but its my guess.

I will have to design a batch script for the various components of the music to come up in proper order once the system is rebooted for my music server since this is the only system that didn't restart the software I use properly. When I get a chance I will test it on my backup music server. The challenge will be automating the music stream start and encoders.

My Linux boxes that host my web servers & game servers appear to have come back and executed the start-up scripts just fine, the server that streams the music is on Windows.

I am posting this message on my all of my blogs:

Home: http://www.dhoytt.com/

Darryl Hoytt's Personal Blog:

http://www.dhoytt.com/mainblog/

Snakeice's "House of Beats" Radio Blog:

http://www.dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/

Da' Hoytt's Online Games Blog:

http://www.dhoytt.com/da_hoytt_games_blog/

Darryl's Sales Items:

http://www.dhoytt.com/forsale/