I found a list that introduced me to a bunch of different tools. Two of my favorites are bmon and bwm-ng. Both of these command line tools can be installed in Ubuntu by using apt-get. technical

The guide found at ubuntu-tutorials.com was very helpful. In short, simply use “apt-get install tor” to install the software and then edit /etc/tor/torc to change all the settings. It is required to give your endpoint a unique nickname. Read the config file and you’ll be fine. You can then use “sudo /etc/init.d/tor start” to start Tor and “tail -f /var/log/tor/log” to check the status.

If Apache is giving you trouble, or you should screw up the config files beyond recognition, it is possible to wipe Apache out completely and then re-install it. If you’re just playing around with the server this can save you a lot of time. The command to remove apache2 completely is “apt-get remove –purge apache2 apache2-common apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils ssl-cert” You can then reinstall apache using the default values with “apt-get install apache2″ It’s very simple once you know what some of the tricks are

The command I used is very simple:

# tune2fs -m 0 /dev/md0

Where /dev/md0 is the partition you are configuring. For more help check out the manual page for tune2fs  (# man tune2fs  )

I waited a few minutes but the system never came back online (not even enough for me to ping it). I waited untill about 10 minutes after I gave the shutdown command and then forcefully turned it off. I brought it into my room to work on it and plugged it into a monitor to see where the problem was (I usually run my servers headless). I turned on the power and… nothing. The fans spun and it started drawing power from the wall, but nothing was displayed on the monitor. The system was completely dead.

“Fine. I’ll grab one of my spare computers, install Ubuntu Server, restore the backups, and that will be that” I thought to myself. The first computer I grabbed did not turn on at all. The green light on the motherboard would glow, but it would not power on. I even tried manually jumpping the power connection on the motherboard just in case the power switch was bad. After that attempt failed I put it back on the shelf and moved on to the next spare computer.

“Irregular fan speed. Press F2 to continue.” That was not going to cut it to run as my webserver. At this point the only spare computer I have left is an older laptop with a broken screen. I used to use this laptop as a live spare webserver, so it already had everything installed. I stopped using it simply because it was so old and underpowered. It got to the GRUB boot loader and froze. Again, that’s not going to cut it for use as the primary webserver. <sigh>

With four computers that would not work the way they were suposed to I decided to just use my personal fileserver “Ducktape” to act as the webserver as well. I forwarded port 80 to it’s IP address instead of the old webserver and threw up a quick error message and then went out for dinner in order to relax. After I got home it was a simple matter to restore all of my backed up mysql databases, web directories, and apache2 config files. It took about 45 minutes to get everything working correctly, and now I’m back online. I also learned that I didn’t backup the actual web folders correctly. The stored perrmisions for the files were lost, so I had to fix that (although that’s probably because it was on a new linux box, which had different user IDs).

Aside from the multiple simultanious physical failures, this is how system failures and recoveries are supposed to go. No data was lost.

This is an awesome conversion program that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux that was originality designed to rip DVDs to your hard drive. This open source gem also has a knack for transcoding h.264 video files. Even beter it does so using multiple threads, unlike the script that I was using before. If you have a need to convert AVCHD (or .MTS) files, I seriously recommend it.

“The kernel was unable to re-read the partition table on /dev/md0 (Invalid argument). This means Linux won’t know anything about the modifications you made until you reboot. You should reboot your computer before doing anything with /dev/md0.”

This was followed by an identical error for /dev/md1. I’m still not sure of exactly what caused the error, but the quick fix I used was to hit the ESC key after the errors take place, wait for the menu to show up (the computer wants to install the base system first), then without changing anything else, set up the RAID partition that you are installing the OS, and don’t modify the swap partition or anything else like that. When I did this I still got the error for /dev/md1, but I did not get one for /dev/md0, which is what I am installing the OS to.

What really prompted moving the hard drives over to the other computer was the fact that due to a hard reboot I lost all data contained on my RAID5 array. Apparently RAID5 is awsome at protecting data from hard drive failure but it absolutely sucks at dealing with power outages and the like. Luckily as a good sysadmin I keep regualr backups. After 17 hours of transfering 1.5TB of data onto a new RAID0 array on DuckTape, I was back in bussiness. The only thing that got lost from the failure was a small portion of an Ubuntu 8.10  Beta .ISO file that was only partaily done downlading when the backup was run. THIS is how easy it is to restore data when you KEEP UP TO DATE BACKUPS.

I started running the beta in a virtual machine. If you’re intrested in this sort of thing I would reccomend doing the same. As of writing there are 14 days left until the new version is released.

$apt-get install cpuburn lm-sensors

$sudo sensors-detect

$sudo modprobe [modules that the previous command identified at the end]

$sensors

At this point you can now see the temperatures, voltage regulations, fan speeds, and other such information. Now you need to open new terminal window for each CPU core you have (or create them using Screen) and run the following command in each one:

$burnP6

Let this run for at least 15 minutes and then check the temperatures by running “sensors”. You can also set up sensors to automatically update by using the “watch” command.

$watch sensors

The first step is to backup the existing file, just in case you screw something up by accident, or something otherwise doesn’t work as it should.
#cd /etc/network
#cp interfaces interfaces.backup

Next, edit the file as root with your favorite text editing program. I personally like Vim.
#sudo vim interfaces

add the # symbol beside what is already there for the interface you want to configure. The # makes whatever comes after it in the line a comment, and the computer doesn’t read it.

Next copy the following text and edit to fit your needs:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.3
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1

Save the file and quit. The next time you restart your computer it should automatically setup your network interface as you programed it to.