Raid

Hardware raid on linux seems to have its moments. I spent 2 days fighting a raid card and eventually wrote it off. I have been running 90% of my servers on software raid1. This has proven very stable and reliable.

What I quiet enjoy is using reiserfs filesystem it seems to handle power outages as well with very little failure.

Some tips on Software raid

I always use raid 1.

I set the raid subset to boot in degraded mode (great when you can not access the console).

I set the swap and raid size exactly the same on both drives.

Weekly check the control using cat /proc/mdstat ;-)

When choosing software raid on Ubuntu use the alternative disk it is easier to configure at install level.

When you prompted for the guided partition

Setup manual partition
Follow this useful link.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID

Chat latter while I complete this server install :)

Ubuntu 10.4 and backporting

I upgraded a clients server to Ubuntu 10.4 last night. Well all was going well until I realised that the latest version of Ubuntu uses php version 5.3. Blue Box 2.0 has been developed on Php Version 5.2 and is in Beta testing on 5.3.

I was left with the desicion of either downgrading the O.S. (Operating System) or back porting the packages. I chose to back port. It is pretty straight forward process, you need to do the following.

Install Apache2

apt-get install apache2

Install PHP manually using dpkg

I downloaded php manually using the ZA servers http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/p/php5/

Remember when you start to ensure you use the same version and architecture version.

php5-cli_5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6_i386.deb

php5

version 5.2.10

Arch i386

Files required were

php5-common
php5-gd

php5-mysql
libapache2-mod-php5

php5-cli (if you require php at a command interface level)

Once downloaded you simply need to install one by one.

dpkg - i php5-cli_5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6_i386.deb

dpkg - i php5-common_5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6_i386.deb

dpkg - i php5-gd_5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6_i386.deb

dpkg - i php5-mysql_5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6_i386.deb

dpkg - i libapache2-mod-php5

Once done ensure to edit php.ini up your memory limit to at least 512M set your ioncube loaders zend_extions path and up your execution time limit to at least 300 for long script processing.

Now that this is done simply restart apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart and your system will now run php 5.2 back ported on Ubuntu 10.4

Wayne @ Blue Box

The I.T. Guy.. Listening to good music..
d-..-b