Mindless Techie - Latest Comments

Re: Checking file permissions with Ruby

John Doe — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:56:14 -0000

That is awesome.

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

Keith — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 01:19:34 -0000

Just wanted to say that I find mhddfs to be great. I've been using mdadm/lvm setups for a few years now, and while they've been nearly painless for me - my current SATA/RAID cards in a home server are dying and I keep putting off replacement in order to do new drives/new array with new cards in order to get it all done at once. As such I've gone to individually lvm'd drives, then linked into an mhddfs pool. It's the perfect holdover for 6 months until I can see myself replacing the whole array in equal or greater size, in order to migrate what data I've been able to retain from previous failures.

Re: Installing RubyGems on Centos 5

John Alberts — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:14:38 -0000

You forgot to change RUBY_SOURCE_URL in the script. There is a comment in the script that mentions you need to change it.

Re: Installing RubyGems on Centos 5

John McLear — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:04:30 -0000

Connecting to helpdesk.hosted.exlibrisgro...|199.117.46.144|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

mau king — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 11:33:05 -0000

This is wonderful!!!
I was looking for something like this for a very long time.
I am continuously testing it on different configurations of HDD, partitions and filesystems; it works flawlessly!
There is hardly any change in speed. The data is stored on HDDs/partitions in a distributed manner. For end user there is one large drive. Lets say, If you have 4 drives and data is spread across all of them and if a hard disk crashes, all the data on three HDD will remain intact and can be retrieved.

Re: Fixing pianobar libao.so.2 error on Ubuntu Maverick

John Alberts — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:11:20 -0000

That was actually the first thing I tried, but recompiling didn't work.
(.text+0x283f): undefined reference to `dlsym' /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.4.5/../../../../lib/libao.a(audio_out.o):(.text+0x2875): more undefined references to `dlsym' follow collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [pianobar] Error 1

Re: Fixing pianobar libao.so.2 error on Ubuntu Maverick

andrew — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:04:00 -0000

Blinding linking .so files isn't really the best idea; the version got bumped for a reason. The solution is to recompile :-)

Re: Installing RubyGems on Centos 5

Alexander Fairley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:57:19 -0000

The folks at
endpoint.com provide packages not just of gems, but of a full REE/Passenger stack.
https://packages.endpoint.c...
It still requires some TLC to get up and running as you want it, but it's a good starting point.

Re: Installing RubyGems on Centos 5

Razmal — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:06:07 -0000

Nice, works like a charm.. thx

Re: Conky now supports MOC player

John Alberts — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:20:12 -0000

Sure. What you're looking for is the 'if_running' variable, so you want something like the following:
$if_running mocp do something $end

Re: Conky now supports MOC player

analog — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:28:52 -0000

Hi, is there a way to tell conky that if the moc isn't running doesn't show anything?

Re: Installing RubyGems on Centos 5

John Alberts — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:53:33 -0000

I usually prefer an existing repository as well. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to add any non-official Red Hat repositories to the production servers at work. The method I presented uses the official Ruby packages from Red Hat and just downloads the Ruby Gem sources.

Re: Installing RubyGems on Centos 5

Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:01:34 -0000

I prefer to use the EPEL repository (https://fedoraproject.org/w.... It contains a lot of useful software, including RubyGems.

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

Dirk Gently — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:28:35 -0000

Good tip, I thought that I'd need to do this as one of my partitions grows too large. Thanks.

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

John Alberts — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:02:17 -0000

I actually haven't used the filesystem yet, but in reading the documentation, it looks like you will only lose the data on the drive that failed. There is no striping of data across drives and no parity, so the only data affected should be on the failed drive.
Which drive is chosen seems to depend on the configuration of parameters such as mlimit.

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

docatomic — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:26:08 -0000

How is it for recovery? Say you have four drives and you want to combine them into one big happy storage space - and then a year later, one drive fails. Let's be generous, and say it's the last of the four that died; let's be even more generous, and assume a filesystem capacity usage of only 50% just prior to the failure. Finally; let's be realistic, and further assume that since they're all 1TB drives backups have not been made because DVD-R discs are too small and Blu-Ray discs or large SCSI tapedrives are both too expensive.

How much will be lost, and would anything be directly recoverable? Is this method striped, like the 'JBOD' pseudo-RAID method used in FreeNAS, or is it strictly a linear concatenation?

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

Steve Dibb — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:58:18 -0000

Yah, I'm actually using LVM right now, but I don't wanna stick more drives into my case to make the thing overheat. So I'm gonna move to external drives (probably USB), and I can't use LVM with those. So this should really come in handy. :)

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

John Alberts — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:30:16 -0000

Sure thing. I know I've needed something like this in the past myself. If you have the luck of some forethought, of course, LVM would likely be a better choice, otherwise, this seems like a nice alternative.

Re: Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

Steve Dibb — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:21:24 -0000

Oh wow, man, this is exactly what I've been looking for! Awesome, thanks. :)

Re: Huge List of Tips and Tricks

Wulf — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:08:02 -0000

Nice; great list!

Re: Quick and Dirty Linux Load Testing

John Alberts — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:54:06 -0000

Thanks. I didn't see that one and it looks like it would have been even easier to use and more powerful.
To tell you the truth, I was on an old RHEL4 machine that no longer had a valid RH license, so the only software I could install was what I could easily google and find. I found cpuburn-in fairly quickly and it seemed well suited for what I needed.

Re: Quick and Dirty Linux Load Testing

tulcod — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:56:56 -0000

also a nice tool is stress; see app-benchmark/stress

Re: Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes

John Alberts — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 01:27:43 -0000

I tried to find what you were referring to about it degrading performance, and the only thing I could find is this:

> > Just as a side note but do you really want to reserve 5%
> > of your 2TB partition for root?

The filesystem performance will degrade if you eat into the last 5%,
but as long as you're willing to live with this tradeoff, and assuming
you don't need to reserve space for things like log files, then sure,
you can always drop the percentage.

So, this seems to indicated that performance will only be degraded if you start using that final 5%. It's good to know, but for me, in some situations, the performance trade off is worth it.

Re: Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes

Carlos — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 23:03:20 -0000

Unfortunately this is a not so great tip. It could degrade perfomarce of your hard disk a lot. I know it because I tried for a while and the hdd was very slow. Theodore Ts'o, the mantainer of ext{3,4} advices to let this percentage as it is. If you don't believe me, you can google for it.

Re: Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes

John Alberts — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:37:15 -0000

Actually, it does this for any ext3 file system, regardless of the mount point. So, if you create seperate ext3 partitions for /, /usr, /home, /var, /boot, you've lost 5% of the blocks for each of those partitions. I'm not sure if it's possible to disable this completely or not, but I see no reason not to reduce it to 1% instead of 5%. I haven't had a chance to try something like 'tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1' on an unimportant partition.
Let me know if completely disabling it works for you.