john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

Had this annoying message popping up when running a script on Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS. The message read:

shift: N: can't shift that many

On Debian it works fine. The reason for this is the use of different shells in Debian and Ubuntu. Debian is using bash and Ubuntu is using dash. Check the symlink /bin/sh on the different distributions.

To reproduce save the following to a file named test_shift.sh:

For production systems it's often best to deploy code automatically from a source code versioning system, like Subversion or CVS, using Ant, Nant or whatever. But sometimes it's handy for a group of users to be able to upload files straight to a server from their own machines. This story is about how one can setup the appropriate permissions for a team who wants to upload files to an Ubuntu/Debian server using SFTP. This is tested on Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS and using WinSCP as SFTP-client from a Windows XP.

After a long wait Debian 5.0 aka Lenny has finally been released:

http://debian.org/releases/stable/

// John

This is the case: the Ubuntu/Debian installation is made with the root folder placed on one disk together with the swap disk. Unfortunately the disk is beginning to become a bit crowded and the amount of freespace is continually diminishing. So, with a new disk plugged in the machine it's time to move the directory /var to the new disk. Assuming that the disk is in place and recognized by the OS, lets get moving:

Create a partition using fdisk on the new disk, in this case /dev/sdb. In the text below I've choose the commands

Updating BIOS and firmware on the server should be done just as the operative system is updated. Earlier most updates were installed using an ordinary floppy, but nowadays most servers are shipped without any floppy drive installed (but some of the firmware countinous to be released as floppy images). A lot of the updates are distributed as packages adapted for different operative systems, which most of the time means Windows, RedHat and Suse as they are officially supported by most vendors. IBM is no exception to this.

Most servers ship with dual network interfaces nowadays in order to have redundant net access. Of course, having two separate cards is preferable, but even if it's a dual NIC installed why not use both ports? A fail-over solution has been the primary concern for me, in other words if one NIC goes down the other NIC should automatically take over. There are quite a lot of terms describing this and some call it bonding other teaming. Whatever it is called this is how I configured fail-over for two NICS on Debian. 

Most Linux distributions are by default shipped with UTF-8 encoded locale nowadays. Unless the user makes an active choice during the installation english locale is the default choice. In Debian Etch it's american english, en_US.UTF-8. For my concern I use swedish as locale, hence I use the locale sv_SE.UTF-8. However, even if the encoding in the system is correct UTF-8-encoded files show up like gibberish in the console when trying to display "exotic" characters. What is needed is another font to display the content.

IBM ships most tools packaged just for Suse and RedHat, quite annoying when running Debian or Ubuntu isn't it? Anyway I've tried earlier to install Director on Debian, but I gave up after a while. It was an overweighty system and I just wanted to be able to monitor the server, especially the raid. After some searching I found the arcconf-tool via Adaptecs site. But after some more searching I found the IBM version.

Since the advent of the debianized version of Dell OMSA installation has been a breeze. Just add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

# OMSA
deb http://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

and then install using

Update! After the first installation according this post I could connect to the director agent but it was only a regarded as a level 0 agent from the director server. When trying the core services there was of course lots of libraries missing. I don't doubt that I could get director running but what at price? What I really wanted was a simple way to monitor the server, especially the raid, for example using SNMP. Director isn't lightweight in any respect, it eats cpu cycles and mem, so i decided to skip and pursue another path. It wasn't worth the effort.