Saw this great cartoon today. Ah I remember my newbie Linux days well. *sigh* 
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Linux Humour
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Easy Backup Script
While waiting for a laptop to install today I thought it would be a nice idea to backup its drive if anything bad happened in the future. Instead of messing about with boot cd’s or PXE booting, I opted for the simple approach. Extract the drive, plug it in another machine and run DD and add a bit of gzip for some compression. I wrote the following script; if you find it useful let me know!
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Funky Graphs with RRDtool
Today I have been playing around with RRDtool to create some graphs with some more functionality that my current MRTG ones. Continue reading
wb
The dust and cobwebs have been brushed off homer and he has spent the last couple of days being updated and sorted out. WordPress is will now be updated yet again, and some diskspace issues are being sorted out, in readiness for my new PC which we should hopefully be purchasing tomorrow. Geekfix.net is the number 1 priority right now. I’m determined to make it work!
Todays Scooter Ride
Conky
On a lot of my screenshots you can see I like to monitor various systems, local and remote. An excellent local monitoring tool I have found is Conky. You can find my .conkyrc file here
Resizing Xen Disk Images
My Xen host was only created with a 4GB partition:
bart:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 4.0G 2.8G 1.1G 73% /
tmpfs 129M 0 129M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 24K 10M 1% /dev
With hindsight, this was far too small.
If you a using basic ‘file’ based images you can safely resize them:
First of all make sure you create a backup of your current image:
(Make sure that the image is not mounted or running.)
bart:~# cp hd.img backup.img
bart:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=hd.img bs=1M conv=notrunc count=1 seek=8000
This will resize the image to approx 8GB.
Now boot your host and expand the filesystem:
bart:~# resize2fs /dev/sda1
resize2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
Filesystem at /dev/sda1 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/sda1 to 2048256 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/sda1 is now 2048256 blocks long.
bart:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 7.7G 2.8G 4.6G 38% /
tmpfs 129M 0 129M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 24K 10M 1% /dev
Get Firefox 3 now!
Nokia Sports Tracker
A nice little app that is currently in Beta from Nokia is their Sport Tracker. Load it up on your GPS enabled phone, and then start your run, bike ride, or walk. Ive been using it today to track my scooter route to Stapleford. I’m very impressed! You can export a .KML file from the appplication which you can then use with Google Maps, Google Earth etc and create a nice map containing other information about your ‘workout’. While the 19.98 miles I did on the scoot this morning wasn’t exactly tiring, it did show some interesting data: (Not least a top speed of 53.9mph!)
More coming soon!
Xen Server Setup on Debian Etch
I have spent the morning reading up on Xen details. Im very impressed so far. It seems a great way of doing things. The only thing I am a bit worried about is that the processor in my test rig does not support hyperthreading, so I might not get any performance increase to begin with. However, the plan for the moment is to complete the Debian server and to install 3 guest OS’s: Windows 2000, Windows XP and a Debian server install. At the moment im following this giude : http://shearer.org/MinimalEtchXen It is geared to a nice minimal Etch install so should be perfect for my needs!
Wish me luck!
Dammit. Windows images will NOT run without a VT enabled processor. Anybody got a spare Dual-Core Intel Chip and board lying around spare? 