Random Notes on Linux configuration at LabROSA

This is a page of notes on things to do with how the LabROSA Linux machines are configured to help having to figure them out all over again each time.

nmh won't send: "post: problem initializing server; [BHST] "

Check the owner/group/mode of sendmail. It should be:

-rwxr-sr-x    1 root     smmsp      663232 Sep 17  2003 /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail

Sometimes you need to "groupadd -g 51 smmsp" too.

Replacing a raid disk

Disk errors; smartctl -a /dev/hdX reports reallocated sectors, logged errors; maybe only on one partition, but you have to replace the whole disk, so...

• Knock off the partitions on the bad disk from other raid devices with "raidsetfaulty /dev/md1 /dev/hde4"
• Check that the /boot/grub.conf will try to boot from the remaining good disk (may need to fiddle with BIOS disk order in BIOS Setup)
• Power down; replace disk
• Power up; may need to use Grub floppy to make sure you boot from the right disk, not the new disk (which may, by accident, have a bootable system on it!)
• Use fdisk to duplicate the partitioning of the existing RAID disk on the new disk. Worst case, you'll have to resize the final partition smaller. If you don't mind losing data, you can raidstop it, then mkraid it again with the new smaller partition from the 2nd disk.
• just "raidhotadd /dev/md1 /dev/hde4" to join the new partitions to the existing raid devices. Data is copied across in background.

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Dan Ellis <[email protected]>
2005-04-23