Technical musings of an entrepreneur.

Posts in category Computers

Resizing mounted EXT3 filesystems

Aug06
2007 4 Comments Written by Brian

In case you were not aware, RedHat (and I’m assuming most other Linuxes) can resize and extend EXT3 filesystems while they’re mounted and being used. You need to be using LVM to do this (and if you aren’t, why not?)

Behold:
[root@tlfvm ~]# lvextend -L8G /dev/vg00/lvusr
Extending logical volume lvusr to 8.00 GB
Logical volume lvusr successfully resized

[root@tlfvm ~]# resize2fs -p /dev/vg00/lvusr
resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem at /dev/vg00/lvusr is mounted on /usr; on-line resizing required
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/vg00/lvusr to 2097152 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/vg00/lvusr is now 2097152 blocks long.

Try that on your NTFS partition, Windows fanboy!

Posted in Linux

ssh-copy-id

Aug03
2007 1 Comment Written by Brian

Linux/Unix is great. You learn something new just about every day.

I found a script called ssh-copy-id that when run with the format of:

ssh-copy-id remotelogin@remotehost.com

will take the RSA public key (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) of the ID on the current host, and set it up under authorized_keys for “remotelogin@remotehost.com”. This allows for passwordless, key-based authentication–all set up in one command!

It’s normally a pretty trivial task anyway, but using SCP to ship it over and moving or concatenating the file in place gets old after a few dozen times.

Small and useful utilities like these make my day easier!

Posted in Linux

I can’t write

Aug01
2007 3 Comments Written by Brian

Last night Phaedrah and I were just messing around, and we started trying to write in cursive/longhand on a pad of paper.

After scratching my head a bit–I came to a quick realization that I cannot even use it now.   Other than simply signing my name, it’s completely awkward and cumbersome.  Even trying to write out a simple sentence took me a minute or so.  Phaedrah’s, on the on the other hand; looks perfect.

Which got me to thinking–even my “normal” handwriting (comprised of mostly slop capital block letters) is pretty illegible.  I  find myself hurrying trying to finish a word, and I’ve come to the conclusion  it’s because I can type it far faster and just print it.    Writing gets annoying because it’s too slow.   When I do have to write something, it gets me annoyed and I try to do it as fast as I can.

Am I the only one who uses a computer so much that simple handwriting is becoming troublesome?

Posted in Miscellaneous

Dell OMSA 5.2 and /opt

Jul18
2007 Leave a Comment Written by Brian

Ran into somewhat of a bug, more of an oversight on Dell’s part today.

I’m loading up a PowerEdge 860 running CentOS5 with Dell’s OpenManage Server Agents (OMSA). On reboot, I receive a udev error about ‘dataeng.hotplug’ not being able to exec early in the system init.

After scratching my head for a few–it hit me: it’s because I have /opt on a separate filesystem as root (/), which isn’t available while udev is initializing. Sure enough, in /etc/udev/rules.d, there’s an entry for Dell’s openmange stuff pointing to a shell script in /opt/dell.

Anyway, if you run into that just place the OMSA install on the root filesystem versus a submounted one and your problem wil disappear. You could also just copy that script out and place it somewhere more appropriate–like /sbin–and modify that udev rules entry.

With great flexibility comes weirdness at times! Dell probably shouldn’t have a sysinit level script running from a filesystem that is probably submounted by sysadmins 50% of the time.

Posted in Dell, Linux, Tlf

iPhone bug

Jul17
2007 10 Comments Written by Brian

Found the first reason to throw the iPhone at the wall.

There is a bug in the email setup screen on the iPhone. If you have an outgoing SMTP server that requires authentication, the iPhone will not save your SMTP password no matter how many times you enter it in on the setup screen. It will always revert back to “Optional”.

Well, isn’t that a pisser! Can receive, but not send.

So, after fiddling with it for about 30 minutes and almost tossing it at the nearest piece of sheet rock, I found if you delete all the other SMTP settings (server, username) enter the password first then backfill the user and server name, the password will stick and the SMTP gods will smile down on you.

Posted in The Interweb
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