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Ubuntu Snippets

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:41:43 +0200

This is my little Ubuntu recipe cookbook! Changing the timezone sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata Create and mount xfs filesystem $ sudo apt-get install xfsprogs $ sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/sdf Add to fstab: /dev/sdf /my/location xfs defaults,nobootwait,noatime 0 0 This was tested on Amazon EC2 with EBS volumes.

Migrating greek table from mysql < 4.1

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:38:11 +0200

I do not remember how the tables were transferred from the old DB to the new (more likely through a mysqldump). The end effect was that the tables in the 4.1 MySql Db had a collation of latin1_swedish_ci. After backing up the affected tables, do:

Mount Windows folder in VMware server - created

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:33:37 +0200

Ubuntu packages needed: smbfs, samba On the windows machine the folder must be shared. Let's assume the windows share name is sharedfolder On the ubuntu side the mount command should be: sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=WinDomain\\WinUsername //ip.add.re.ss/folder /mnt/mounthere Obviously WinDomain, with the double slash that follows, would be used in case you are authenticating against a domain server

RAID/LVM2 Summary - created

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:30:55 +0200

So to sum up all the Raid and LVM2 operation that we did: Create sandbox cd ~ cd sandbox/ dd if=/dev/zero of=raid1 bs=10240 count=10240 cp raid1 raid2 cp raid1 raid3 sudo losetup /dev/loop1 raid1 sudo losetup /dev/loop2 raid2 sudo losetup /dev/loop3 raid3

RAID Setup

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:25:28 +0200

Creating the RAID sandbox The sandbox will consist of some loopback files that will simulate disk partitions. We will use these “fake” partitions to create our array. That way there will be no harm on your actual disks. Let's imitate the creation of the RAID5 partition. First we will create three loopback files of 100MB each:

LVM2 Setup

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:25:01 +0200

At this point we could format the /dev/md3 partition with some filesystem and start using it. But that's the old way of doing it. What we want to do is run LVM2 on top of the RAID5 partition so we can better utilize the space provided by the /dev/md3 partition, allowing us to dynamically create, resize and remove volumes in the space provided.

RAID Manipulation

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:24:46 +0200

Playing with LVM2 is nice because you can manipulate and assign the available space you have any way you want. The actual unseen hero is the RAID5 volume that we have created because it provides a guarantee that even if one disk fails we will not lose our data. Let's play with the RAID disks now.

Creating and Maintaining a RAID/LVM2 array - created

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:54:32 +0200

I've been using a software created RAID in Ubuntu for a couple of years now, and I am very happy with it. The system has gone through many iterations of system updates (and even a complete OS reinstall) and it keeps working fine. Recently, I was not happy with the way I had partitioned the array and I wanted to re-arrange it, so I thought it would be a nice idea to document the process I went through. At the same I took the opportunity to also document the initial array creation (in case I'll h…

Installing Virtualbox on Ubuntu Server 10.04 - created

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:52:36 +0200

Wanna install Virtualbox on a headless Ubuntu server? First do a: sudo aptitude install libcurl3 libgl1-mesa-glx libqt4-network / libqt4-opengl libxcursor1 libxinerama1 libxmu6 libsdl1.2debian Then download the appropriate .deb for your architecture from

Convert an A4 sized .pdf file to A5 size

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:49:09 +0200

I was working on a LyX document based on the Tufte layout and unfortunately the page layout was available at A4 page sizes only (ok, US letter, too, but that doesn't count :) I could try and learn Latex and create my own page size but the task looked monumental. I am sure the solution might be easy enough, but I just couldn't do it myself. Googling for A5 sized tufte layouts didn't help either.

Change codepage on Windows console

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:34:47 +0200

If find this essential when administrating ORACLE databases from the command line and the locale of the database is set to Greek. I prefer to read the output in Greek rather in gibberish: chcp 1253

Change codepage on Windows console - created

stratos — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:58:15 +0200

Change codepage on Windows console - created

stratos — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:40:07 +0200