S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu linux environment, but you can do the SMART testing without installing linux on your hard drive.
How?
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.
So, one of the things I’ve been doing is drive imaging. I’ve got 3 systems that are to be identical (based on, of all things Freedos…) So, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to dust off cloning/imaging software. So, I’ve been using the excellent g4l (ghost4linux) which is now up to v 0.22 (I make use of this for trying to rescue failing hard drives too as it includes dd_rescue). Anyway, the new machines have 80GB drives and the lzo compressed images are running ~450MB…. but one of my questions was making sure that it was as small an image as could be. I found that there are a few ways to squish the image file more and that it mostly revolves around filling the empty drive space with zeros.
http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit… is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it’s something that would be done when you’ve had a suspected rootkit on the system and you boot to another operating system with sluethkit installed (maybe livecd/etc.) and want to try to analyze and hunt for traces of the rootkit. However you do have some similar procedures for forensic analysis that you would for the “I accidentally deleted a file” syndrome… For both situations you DON’T want to be running the live filesystem that’s affected.
A little over a year ago I was doing a web search for my email address (something that’s worth doing from time to time.) I ran across my name in a text file hosted at a domain called…..
http://www.freestuffengine.com/ There is a different site active at that domain now (although I don’t know if it’s owned by the same group, it may be….) Anyway, there were VERY large text files with (according to the file name) a million addresses. And YES… mine was in there.
my address was in a file called…. nima_1million_1of2.txt
ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.
I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.
from the command line in linux… or generating them from Wavs…. So, I’ve got this CD that I’ve made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as “chimes”. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recording to hard drive, editing and getting the wav files as good as possible and I’ve uploaded them, but I also want to make the individual songs available as mp3 downloads too. AND I want to give a preview, either a low quality mp3 of the whole, or a high quality 30 second clip…. Hmmm… how to do it.
The other day I was trying to partition a drive hooked up via usb. (So it get’s /dev/sda as it’s device in linux)… I tried a few utilities to access the partition table and all failed, finally, I resorted to fdisk /dev/sda and was told “unable to read /dev/sda” which I thought was peculiar. The drive had come back in a “warranty replacement” swap for another drive and should have been wiped clean and should have been good as well.
OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking…. “Hello where has he been?” when I’m talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but…. in spite of all I’ve done supporting desktop systems and even small business servers I’ve never had an opportunity to setup a raid array. First it was because “you don’t want to do software raid” and I didn’t have a card to support hardware raid, then when I first was seeing people raving about how good linux software raid is, I didn’t have two free drives of equal size to work with. Well, the other day in working towards a storage system for a client I’ve got an ubuntu system (dapper 6.06.1) setup with software raid and wanted to poke and prod and test some things out before it goes into a useful role.