iNODE

What a fun Saturday. Was running a backup from home on the library’s primary webserver/MySQL machine…when I began getting things like this in my output:

Jul 30 11:16:57 infosparc       Error for Command: read(10)
Jul 30 11:16:57 infosparc scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]
Jul 30 11:16:57 infosparc scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]
Jul 30 11:16:57 infosparc scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]     

Not good. In fact, terrible. The drive died…speaking of drives, I had to drive in immediately and see what could be done. Not too much….and the bad part is that this particular drive was home to my highly configured apache and mysql installations, not to mention the library’s website, e-reserves system, campus phone book, the list goes on & on…

Had pretty decent backups of important data but not a good copy of MySQL or some of the other things that caused hours of work..

As I write this, we’re back at about 98%…I’m sure there are a few files on the server that are now having a Dylan-like experience …”ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Installed a copy of MediaWiki today (the engine that powers Wikipedia) and with Dorothea’s help, got a MARS wiki up and running. Right now we’re using it to document various sysadmin-related topics but it should also prove useful as a way to colloborate on policy and procedure development, future directions and so on.

URL to the wiki is:

http://timesync.gmu.edu/marswiki

Was stymied on the install until I discovered that SuSE Linux 9.x does not come with php’s “session” module installed…so the wiki bombed anytime it called “session_set_cookie_params()”

Thanks to Google for sweeping up and indexing millions of web pages so I could find the two that mentioned my problem and hinted at the solution. A trip to ftp.suse.com got me going…of course, there were a few false starts until I matched the version of session.so with the version of /usr/bin/php.

Working on a server today via Remote Desktop, I accidentally turned ARD services off…which left me unable to get back in to turn them back on. Found this command that enables you to log onto the box via ssh and then as root, activate ARD again. This command will restart the ARD service giving access to anyone in the admin group. Once running, you can go in again via ARD and make sure everything’s right.

./kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent -menu

Apple has a tech note on the topic:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108030

Doing an install of Solaris 9 on a new server this morning and there’s a bit of downtime while CDs load ….

Turns out corgis are quite popular in Japan (although I see they’re called Welsh Corgi Pembroke over there)…

Japanese Corgi Web Ring

Speaking of diversions this one is probably dangerous for insecure people…

AIM Fight

AIM fight gives you a score that is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. Basically you enter your screen name & the AIM screen name of the person you want to fight…and get a score back that shows you either that you’re more popular than your opponent or that you really need to stop doing things like AIM Fight and get out more…

How about this one….

Microsoft’s new mapping service (Virtual Earth) seems to have a problem finding Apple’s corporate headquarters….

That’s the view of Cupertino with Microsoft at the controls…think I’ll continue to rely on google (google maps image shown below):

Spent about 30 minutes trying to identify a replacement for Apple’s blog server…needed to move the blog off the XServe (to free up a development/test environment). Not knowing much about blogs other than how to read a few of them, I think I was fortunate to stumble onto WordPress…installed it on our Opteron-powered 64-bit SUSE Linux box (timesync) and now it seems to be working fine. Many more features than Apple’s offering (based on Blojsom).

Tied the RSS feed back to the LSO home page & tweaked MARS news to update the change as well.

The sort of thing that stymies a relatively recent “switcher”…

I installed Adobe Acrobat 7.x the other day..and it took over my default PDF reader setting. I prefer using Preview as it’s much faster to load & uses less screen real estate…couldn’t figure out how to get “preview” back as my default reader.

Here’s the answer:

choose a file you want opened with Apple Preview, control-click on it and choose “Get Info” from the pop-up menu. In the window that opens go down to the third section called “Open With”, choose “Apple Preview” and press the “Change All” button.

There is likely a .plist file or something that you can hand edit to make this kind of fix but I haven’t yet found it.

Thanks to macosx.com for that helpful tidbit…

Just a short update to let you know that Dorothea Salo has now joined our MARS project. Dorothea’s email address is dsalo *at* gmu.edu. She’s temporarily based in the Systems Office at 229D in the Johnson Center Library but will move over to Fenwick in the Fall.