Ours is just in the middle of mango trees’ garden and it makes the whole adventure quite more fascinating than fun, it sounds The borehole of well is more than 150 feet and seeing it from top makes your vision a bit dizzy and you can fall off right into it if you’re seeing by bending yourself. I’m afraid of heights but that doesn’t mean I may also be afraid of depths (holly shame-o, lol) but that’s exactly this level of depth does. It’s illusionary. So, I had to sit down, pull my hand above this 20′ diameter of wide-open hole and take a snap from there, lol But that’s not much scary if you go down by downstairs’ side. Pump that throws water up is a 4HP.

There’s small sort of control room out of it that’s closed most of the times unless there’s a problem. In summer it runs all day usually! Then there’s when fun begins. When you put your head under full speed blowing water, you get your ears and nose full of water. As water in reservoir was full up to my neck and above all its floor was slippery, I really cannot withstand compelling force of blazingly cold water and fell off couple of times. Hilarious but funny as hell! Check out rest of the snaps, while I try to find out a way of eating these mangoes floating on icy water in this bucket. You really don’t get mangoes if you seed papayas !!!

via off
forwarded_for off

And then the below ‘via’ entity would disappear from web header requests being sent from a web browser making recipient webservers unaware of the intermediary proxy location, you’re coming from!

I was running a script that included a few of other scripts and it was not showing unicode characters properly when it ran as in a cron. Solution is to include ‘export LANG=en_US.UTF-8′ in your shell script but the ideal way to do so I found was to pass on this environment variable directly in command parameter of a cron job.

The unicode character that was missing earlier ‘degree‘ symbol became visible as soon as I added the variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to crontab’s command.

# crontab -l
MAILTO=""
57 9 * * * LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /root/back/hdd-report/report

1. Free space should exist contiguous right after the system partition
2. That free space partition must be of ‘primary’ type and must not be a logical partition.
3. It should also be in ‘unallocated’ or deleted form without an existence of a ‘drive’ on it.

I had 10Gig C: and D: drive on a 20Gig of a disk. Added 10 more from XenCenter totalling into 30. As I needed a primary unallocated partition after C: drive so I had to use robocopy to backup the D: drive’s data into a network samba share, format and then split it into one primary and one extended partition.

Legends:

Red = Total system drive space before and after the expand
Blue = Total free space on disk before and after expand
Green = Commands issued.

]]> http://bashukhan.com/expanding-the-c-drive-system-boot-partition/feed/ 0 http://bashukhan.com/error-logging-to-console/ http://bashukhan.com/error-logging-to-console/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:09:21 +0000 Abbas http://bashukhan.com/?p=127 Sometimes when some applications start logging to console, it can really bleed your eyes when something wrong happens. Not mentioning about standard output or standard errors which are rather easily controllable but it could be anything else invoked by kernel such as iptables logging when you  would like to log any rules to a log file or default syslog. But “hideously” such applications log to system console too and can surprise you when you plug monitor and see a messy mesh of error loggings all the way back and forth, specifically when a machine is virtual – of course in that case VM would be unresponsive

I was trying to look into syslog.conf to control but found out that this is not what a syslog daemon has dominance over; in fact, needs kernel-level  logging modified. And this can be done through either of these ways.

Instruct kernel to log only “errors” instead of informational notifications.

Controlled by ‘printk’ kernel parameter. Defaults are:

# sysctl -a | grep printk
kernel.printk_ratelimit_burst = 10
kernel.printk_ratelimit = 5
kernel.printk = 6    4    1    7
# find /proc -name '*printk*' -exec cat {} \;
6    4    1    7

Just change ’6 4 1 7′ to ’3 4 1 7′.

# echo "kernel.printk = 3 4 1 7" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
# sysctl -p

Documentation goes over here, if you’re intrested /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.18/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt

printk:

The four values in printk denote:
 console_loglevel,
 default_message_loglevel,
 minimum_console_loglevel and
 default_console_loglevel respectively.

These values influence printk() behavior when printing or
 logging error messages. See 'man 2 syslog' for more info on
 the different loglevels.

- console_loglevel: messages with a higher priority than this will be printed to the console
 - default_message_level: messages without an explicit priority will be printed with this priority
 - minimum_console_loglevel: minimum (highest) value to which console_loglevel can be set
 - default_console_loglevel: default value for console_loglevel

Definitions of kernel logging numbers, from Syslog’s manual:

#define KERN_EMERG    "<0>"  /* system is unusable               */
 #define KERN_ALERT    "<1>"  /* action must be taken immediately */
 #define KERN_CRIT     "<2>"  /* critical conditions              */
 #define KERN_ERR      "<3>"  /* error conditions                 */
 #define KERN_WARNING  "<4>"  /* warning conditions               */
 #define KERN_NOTICE   "<5>"  /* normal but significant condition */
 #define KERN_INFO     "<6>"  /* informational                    */
 #define KERN_DEBUG    "<7>"  /* debug-level messages             */

Change kernel ring buffer logging level

Just keep in mind, using this approach only limits console logging and issuing dmesg would still print the over all logs.

# dmesg -n 3
or
# dmesg -n 4

Sometimes when you’re quite lazy or bored and don’t like the noticeable amount of free resources on your server, you may like to increase the raid building and resyncing process speed.

# echo 250000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
# echo 250000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min

And this would spin up the hards faster to their maximum extent saving almost half of the time!
Defaults were:

 # cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
200000
# cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
1000

And looks like my hards have 100M/s speed.

#hddtemp /dev/sda
/dev/sda: ST3750330AS: 31°C
# hdparm -t /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  280 MB in  3.01 seconds =  93.09 MB/sec
 

Checking and repairing

The larger the hard drive is the greater the probability of having its blocks corrupted. Its better to check for consistency against any bad blocks or md superblocks.

# cat /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action
idle
# echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action

And if there are any, repair them.

# echo repair > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action

Setting up RAID alerts to send emails about any errors

Red Hat family distros come with built in service daemon mdmonitor which runs ‘mdadm –monitor’ in a daemon mode.

# mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf
# echo "MAILADDR some-email-address" >> /etc/mdadm.conf
# chkconfig mdmonitor on
# service mdmonitor restart

Remember to add “DEVICE partitions” or partitions being components of an md array to top of file /etc/mdadm.conf.

Monitoring all RAID events and changing default email template

Last edited on: Tue Mar  9 11:41:38 PST 2010
Added the two new tweaks.