One of those said things is doing a distribution upgrade on-the-fly of the OS.  Since the installation of my server some three and a half years ago, Debian has had two major releases.  My server started with sarge, upgraded to etch, then upgraded again to lenny.  Unfortunately this time after 1210 days without rebooting my server I was forced to reboot. That is to say, since I installed my server where it lives it had never been rebooted.

The reboot occurred because the new libc required kernel 2.6. I was still cooking with an old 2.4 kernel.  After a pile of apt-get trickery, I got the necessary packages installed and had to reboot.  Once the 2.6 kernel was up and running everything else installed without a hitch.  I had to track down a few configuration changes with a couple of things, but overall I think the upgrade went smooth and with only a few minutes of downtime.  Not bad, I say, not bad.

This is not a tutorial. This is a step by step account of a process I took to replace my disks; This is to be taken only as a suggestion as your configuration and mileage may vary. There may also be a better way of doing this.

So, lo and behold, I plugged them in to my eSATA ports and started rolling over!  For the sake of this exercise the original drives will be sda, sdb. The new drives will be sdc and sdd. The raid device is md0.

1. BACKUP YOUR DATA
2. Partition the new drives using your favorite partition manager, create a matching partition on both sdc and sdd to be near the maximum.
3. Force a failure and remove the first drive:
   mdadm -f /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
   mdadm -r /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
4. Add the first of the new drives:
   mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdc1
   wait for it to rebuild/resync.  You can check the status by typing ‘cat /proc/mdstat’ from a command line.  This took about 45 minutes for me.
5. Force a failure and remove the second drive:
   mdadm -f /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1
   mdadm -r /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1
6. Add the second of the new drives:
   mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdd1
   and wait for it to rebuild/resync. In my case the two new drives are considerably faster so this sync only took about 25 minutes.
7. Your system is now running on your brand new mirror, but the mirror is still only as large as the original disks.  So, you need to resize the md0 device:
   mdadm –grow /dev/md0 –size=max
   Then wait for it to rebuild/resync to the new size.  This part took 2 hours.
8. After that is done you need to grow your filesystem.  Depending on which filesystem you’re using, there are tools for it.  I’m using ext4; so I used the standard ext resize utility:
   resize2fs /dev/md0
   And it went into an online resize mode and worked fine.  Other utilities are: xfs_growfs and resize_reiserfs – if you’re using another filesystem or an LVM you may want to read the friendly manual.
9. And it’s done!

If you’re using a production server and need to upgrade disks this is a pretty smooth method of doing it. While everything remains online for the long portions of the process things are a bit slower but not painfully slow.  The resync processes play nice and only take available power.  Idle servers rebuild faster and your times may vary on the steps.

After doing this, you may also want to make sure GRUB or your boot loader is in properly configured on the new drives.

And then, enjoy your new faster and bigger disks!

I’ve watched Ubuntu grow over the years and I’ve used it on many machines.  The trickiest has always been cheap laptops.

The specs on this machine are fairly simplistic:

• Intel Pentium M 1.6Ghz
• 1255MB of ram (strange, eh?)
• 40 GB hard disk
• cheap-o-dell-branded cd-rw/dvd-rom (modular, though)
• broadcom gigabit ethernet
• intel wireless
• bluetooth (dell branded, onboard usb device)
• standard ac’97 modem, ac’97 audio
• and a bunch of other fluff.

I’m just really impressed that everything works.  I didn’t have to find any windows drivers, or do anything goofy to get things rolling.  All the function keys (standby, hybernate, wireless, battery status…) work as expected.

Kudos to Ubuntu.

Get your copy via the always legal BitTorrent here.

Happy Ubuntu Day!

The fun started when I logged in. What appeared to be a fully working install – wasn’t.  The touchpad was slow and almost non responsive. I boosted the acceleration and  other settings, but to no avail.  It was unusable.

Audio worked, but not the audio out on the side. It didn’t switch over to optical output like it does with Leopard installed.

Dual monitors would only go into mirror mode. Even after I fiddled around with the settings I couldn’t get my desktop spanned across the second display.

It’s sad, but I had to go back to Leopard on the same night because I just don’t have the time to fool around with Ubuntu on my Mac to make it work the way I want it to.

Given that this is still only an Alpha release of Ubuntu I won’t count it out yet for being on my Mac.  Once the proper release comes out, I’ll give it another try.  But until then, Fail.

Then I realized what I’d forgotten to do on this fresh install.  I forgot to simply ’sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun’ and voila, it works like a charm.

Eclipse doesn’t work well with the gjc java (the ‘free’ and default) Hopefully this little thing won’t be an issue in the future when sun java 7 (open java) is ready to rock the free world.

First, make sure all php packages are updated — if you update PHP after installing this, it will likely segfault.

For the purpose of this, I’m using Ubuntu 7.10, and Java 6 (sun-java6)


First, get the build essential, as well as php5-dev, sun java and automake

# apt-get install build-essential php5-dev sun-java6-jre \
    sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-source automake

Second, get the PHP/Java bridge source.

# cd /usr/src
# wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/php-java-bridge/php-java-bridge_5.2.0.tar.gz
# tar xzfv php-java-bridge_5.2.0.tar.gz

And, install.

# cd /usr/src/php-java-bridge-5.2.0
# phpize
# ./configure --with-java=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03,/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03
# make
# chmod +x install.sh
# ./install.sh

Answering the questions for the install script is fairly simple. It looks for some tomcat stuff for the servlet portion of the Java Bridge, but we won’t be using it.

Copy *.inc to someplace it can be found.

# mkdir /usr/share/php/java
# cp *.inc /usr/share/php/java

Testing,

# php test.php

By default, java is only enabled in the command line php; to enable it in the global instances of php, edit the php.ini file and add the extension.

;; java.ini: Activate the PHP/Java extension

;; zend_extension = "/path/to/java.so"
extension = java.so

;; If you have installed the java-servlet.ini leave this file alone,
;; edit the servlet or standalone ini file.  Otherwise uncomment the
;; following java section and one of the following options:
[java]

There are no other options required. Make sure the java.hosts and java.servlet are disabled. If logging is desired, that’s another story.