Well, I’ve rolled another box from RedHat to Gentoo: a squid proxy box that handles kiosk machines in Housing.
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Yearly Archives: 2003
SQL 6.5 Migration Failure
I’m trying to migrate an NT4 SQL 6.5 server to Windows 2000 and SQL 2000 using the SQL Server Upgrade wizard. We’ve got lots of data on the old server and some tables structures that I’d really rather not have to recreate by hand. Below is the horror story that was the attempted upgrade.
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Hyperthreading and the kernel
Well, getting hyperthreading going on a stock kernel seems to be a bit tricky, but here are the options I used to get it going.
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Christmas, snow and stuff
Well, I’m having a tough time finding gifts for relatives and friends. Most will be getting cash or gift certificates, most likely cash.
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tar pipe
No, not tar from a cigarette! tar as in the *nix Tape ARchive.
I needed to back up my test gentoo box at home so I could install RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 AS. Since I needed to repartition, the best way was to haul a tar file off to another computer, using ssh and a tar pipe, like so:
tar cf - * | ssh hostname "cat > /my/tar/directory/tarfile.tar"
About 20 minutes later, and I’ve got a 1.4 Gb tarball on my other linux box. Not quite sure how I’m going to get it BACK to the test box, but I’m sure I’ll find something.
Or even better:
tar cvf - /mnt/gentoo/* |ssh root@target 'cd /; tar -xpf -'
Uptime, sniff
Sniff sniff:
[xxxx@xxx kernel]# uptime
12:01am up 258 days, 12:48, 2 users, load average: 0.43, 0.44, 0.26
So much for a 1+ year target.
New Hardware
So, my dad needed a faster computer to be able to do his part time winter job at home again this year (the software requires Windows XP and his 3 year old PIII 666 was getting tired).
So, I headed over to Dell Factory Outlet and for just over $1300 he gets a P4-2.6Ghz, 512MB RAM, CDRW, a DAMN NICE NVIDIA video card and a 17″ flat panel.
Nicer than what I’ve got on my desk at work. Well, except for the monitor.
This should last him longer than the last one.
Old Data be gone!
So, we are getting ready to forklift a file server from old hardware to new.
Trying to reduce the amount of data we need to haul over, I went through and looked at what’s there. There were several database apps that hadn’t been used in years, for several gigabytes of data. And all this gets dumped to tape once a week.
Joy.
Local Kernel ‘sploit
Nasty local linux kernel exploit based on some bad bounds checking in the kernel.
*UPDATE*: just emerge -uvp world, new gentoo-sources has been released.
To fix a gentoo box already running the latest kernel, you need to unmerge and re-emerge gentoo-sources:
mv /usr/src/linux/.config /usr/src
emerge --unmerge gentoo-sources
rm -r /usr/src/linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r8
rm /usr/src/linux
emerge gentoo-sources
mv /usr/src/.config /usr/src/linux/
cd /usr/src/linux
make dep && make clean && make bzImage
mount /boot
mv /usr/src/linux/arc/i368/boot/bzImage /boot
umount /boot
(Stolen from a forum post)
tar anyone?
I’ve got 2 nearly identical dell poweredge 2200 servers, both of which I’m getting up and going with gentoo.
One, I got up and going last week. The other, I started on today. After reading some forum posts, I decided to try tar‘ing up the existing one and moving it over to the new machine.
About an hour (and 750 MBs) later, I ran grub, installed on the boot sector and rebooted. Working, optimized, up to date install in record time.
On source:
tar --exclude='/proc/*' --exclude='/dev/*' -cvf /tmp/image.tar /
On target:
scp user@source:/tmp/image.tar /tmp/
cd /
tar -xvpf /tmp/image.tar
So nifty.