Author: Paul Tomblin

Senator Leahy, you’re my favourite US politician

Listen here

It is beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured.

and

Attorney General Ashcroft said we got assurances. Assurances? From a country that we also say now “oh, we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything”.

Man, it’s great to listen to a Senator who remembers that there are three equal branches of government, not just one and two rubber stamps.

What is Hitachi thinking?

For years now, whenever I’ve had drive or controller problems, I’ve hauled out IBM’s DFT (Drive Fitness Test), even if the drive isn’t a DeathstarDeskstar. Now IBM’s drive division belongs to Hitachi, but DFT lives on. I used it last week to make sure my new colo box could handle the sorts of loads I wanted to put on it. But now that I have my old colo box back, I want to test it to see if the problems I was having might be fixed with a new drive cable before I sell it on eBay.

But this box doesn’t have a floppy. No problem, I thought, the Hitachi site has a bootable CD version. So I downloaded it and burned it and booted with it. But the first thing it does it scan the IDE controllers, and when it’s scanning “Secondary Slave”, it suddenly starts spewing errors about being unable to read A:\COMMAND.COM. Evidently DFT needs to read its own disk just at the moment that the drive was disconnected for scanning. So when they made the CD ISO, they didn’t actually test it, or didn’t think about how it works, and instead of using the “Linux Live CD” model where they make a ramdisk and load themselves into it, they just made a DOS boot partition on the CD and expect it to be there all the time.

I guess it’s off to my junk shelf to see if I have a floppy drive and cable.

That was easy

I needed to re-arrange some disk space. I explained the situation in Rants and Revelations » Why didn’t I use LVM on everything? with a table showing the current layout and everything. At the time, my plan was:

  1. Migrate the content of /dev/hdc3 off using “pvmove” and “vgreduce”.
  2. Delete all three partitions on /dev/hdc3 and add it back to the vg using “pvcreate /dev/hdc; vgextend xen-space /dev/hdc”.
  3. Migrate the content of /dev/hde2 off using “pvmove” and “vgreduce”.
  4. Delete the /dev/hde2 partition and increase the disk of /dev/hde1 to fill up the drive, and use resize2fs to make /dev/hde1 use the whole partition.

I did steps 1-3, and it all worked perfectly. I didn’t have to shut down anything, and it didn’t interrupt the normal operation of either the dom0 or the domUs. But when I’d done that, I realized I actually had enough free space on the lv that I could do an even better plan:

  1. Set up a 250Gb lv.
  2. Use rsync to copy everything from /dev/hde1 to the lv.
  3. Once that was done, shut down domU 1.
  4. Make /dev/hde1 part of the lv.
  5. Make the 250Gb lv bigger using lvextend– I chose to add 100Gb to it, and I have space to add more if I need it.
  6. “e2fsck -f” and “resize2fs” the lv.
  7. Restart the domU 1, using the lv instead of /dev/hde1.

This worked perfectly. The domU was down about 10-15 minutes tops. /dev/hde is still partitioned into two partitions, even though both partitions are part of the same vg. But other than that, it’s exactly what I’d have done if I were setting it up from scratch now.