Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.
Category: Linux Tech Support
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Home Asterisk system VOIP adding phone lines
I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.
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Clonezilla
For quite a while I’ve used ghost4linux (g4l) for my disc cloning needs. What I REALLY like are the ability to do a network copy of the image to an ftp server and the built in dd_rescue to rescue data from a failing hard drive. Unfrotunately g4l does a bit by bit copy of a drive which means it can take a while and it copies the full drive capacity (say for instance 80GB) even if you only have 5GB worth of information. Now, it can be compressed and if you massage the drive by defraging/filling empty space with ones before you start you can squeeze the image down pretty small, but… sometimes that’s a big task (I remember leaving one box writing zeros to the drive overnight to prepare the empty space for a g4l cloning.) Anyway…. I’ve run across clonezilla recently and am VERY impressed – it’s basically a wrapper around partimage – it will only copy the data component of a disc’s contents if it recognizes the filesystem (most linux filesystem types ext2/3/reiser plus ntfs and fat… it seems like a couple others too.) If it doesn’t recognize the filesystem it drops back to bit by bit mode which is nice. The only other thing I would want from it is better documentation and dd_rescue capabilities. (And maybe a fuse module to be able to image to/from ftp servers.) It supports several network approaches (samba/ssh) for writing/reading images over a network.
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Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon coming
The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I’ve installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what’s what and so far haven’t had much time to play around. I seem to recall the localization question being new in the installer, but then it’s been a while since I used the ubiquity installer (used the alternative install to setup software raid based systems.) But… other than that I haven’t poked around with it much. However, I have read that the 8.04 (April 2008) release will be codenamed Hardy Heron and will be a long term service (LTS) version. I’m MORE interested in that given that I have one server running the previous LTS release 6.06 dapper drake. I’ll be interested in upgrading it to a newer LTS EVENTUALLY, but I don’t know if I’ll jump for the upcoming April release or wait… but I did find some promising instructions for upgrading to Fiesty (7.04). It’s good to see that kind of detailed how-to as opposed to just an upgrade option on the cd so you can do it from within the OS.
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Graphviz and dot
I’ve been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps – it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn’t know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image viewers I used seemed to like it, so I researched graphviz (as that is what is used to make the dot file…) and found that there are ways to get an image out of a dot file… (the easiest is a command-line $dot -Tsvg strangedotfile.dot>strangedotfile.svg ) which should give you a scalable vector image with the same information as the .dot output (of course you can use -Tpng to specify png as well.) (BTW, the default settings with gramps give you a single page maximum so things may be VERY scrunched to fit in.)
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Smartmontools on Windows – emailing warnings
For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.
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Instlux – install linux without rebooting to a cd
A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it’s a windows installer style download that can bootstrap and install a linux distribution (looks like Linkat, OpenSuse and Ubuntu are currently supported.) I’m curious to actually try this out in the near future as it looks inteesting (you can choose either cd or network based installs).
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Opengroupware install on Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake
One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu does not have apache in the enabled repositories. (Apache2)… following the intsructions given I first added opengroupware’s (debian sarge) repository (more…)
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Vmware server install on Ubuntu Dapper
I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….