Home
Rebuild Netgear ReadyNAS RAID
Having manually created a secondary array using my spare 500G disks, I found that the Xraid2 setup that my NAS had selected wouldn't expand them with the pair of 1TB already in the array. You can read more here: Creating Additional Volumes on ReadyNAS
One of the 500's decided to give up the good fight, and I purchased a pair of new 1TB to expand the array (I keep taking pictures, and 500G didnt seem enough space!) Adding the first disk into the array and joining it to my manual one wasnt too hard, a quick fdisk to create a compatible partition, then mdadmin --add to include it to the array. My problem came when I thought I'd be clever, and split my disk batches, so both arrays have a new and an older disk in them.
I pulled the last 500G from one partition, and 1 of the 1TB in the other, and put the new disk into slot 1 to rebuild the 1TB partition again.
However the readynas just wouldnt rebuild, and no amount of powercycling to try and force a rebuild were helping! It would detect the disk, and the LCD displayed testing disk, and from /var/log/messages I could see various partitionings going on, but no re-sync.
Here's what I did to solve it:
How I broke ls and rm
This update is a bit of a question too, so answers on the back of a postcard....
earlier today, I was reviewing the output of a script at work that checks database backups, and warns if the md5sum of the database doesn't differ from the previous days backup. I'd got a warning that it basically hadnt found any new backups from last nights backup which worried me some what. In the directory holding the md5sums, I ran ls. Sure enough, a list of md5sums for today, yesterday and historically were listed. I decided to try and select just todays files
>ls *.today
ls: invalid option -- .
Try `ls --help' for more information.
Strange... all I'm doing is a wild card search. Changing to its parent directory, running a search worked fine with the wildcard. Sure enough, results returned. It was then that I noticed an interesting file name. rather than showing the name of a database, it was showing as "-.today"
It would appear that somehow ls was interpreting that file name as a parameter to ls, rather than a file, and because it wasn't a valid parameter, it was erroring. Similar problems happened when trying to remove the file from within its directory, but if specifying a relative or absolute path, rm behaved.
So my question is, why doe linux commands treat filies with a name starting "-." as a paramater?
Multiple CPUs not being used in virtual server
Had quite an interesting problem with this one.
One of the windows 2003 based shared hosting servers is being migrated from physical hardware to a virtual server running on xen hyperviser. All looked to be good, with the snapshot running reasonably well, and having the option of moving the physical box that it runs on, should hardware problems happen.
However, after migrating a couple of sites onto it, the server seemed to be running slower and slower, which seemed strange, as it was assigned 4 cores, like the original box. Once I managed to log in, and pull up task manager, it only showed 1 single core, and the poor thing was running flat out, as it tried to serve the various webservers and database service with processing time.
Creating Pidgin MSI
The main office IM tool is currently msn messenger. With its shutdown forthcoming, alternatives were needed. A jabber service has been set up, but a client still needed to be deployed to all the end users. We already deploy updates for flash, adobe reader, java etc via msi files. Currently, there are no official pidgin msi files, but it is my preferred client.