This weekend has been a weekend from hell with servers not coming up after reboot. This is all related to the somewhat recent udev update (udev-151-r4). During the emerge it will warn you if you have some incompatible config options:

I'm writing this in case this happens to me again. Today, I was having issues remoting into a Windows Server 2003 server. It was complaining about lack of rights, and that I should be a member of the Remote Desktop Users group to have those rights. Sounds great, but my user was already a member of that group. Doing some Googling I came across this process.

Start -> Run -> Secpol.msc
Click user rights assignments
Right click allow logon through terminal services and click 'properties'

Sure enough, my user was not in this group. Adding the user, and everything is working. Odd thing, it just stopped working all of a sudden.

So, I noticed that dirvish was blowing up on a Windows Server 2003 backup. Looking at the logs, I noticed it was in reference to a file that was named with a large file name. I have no idea how Windows allows this, yet complains about it.

Hopping on to that box, I was having trouble immediately with this file. Could not move it, rename it, delete it, etc. I even tried to delete the folder it was in, etc. Tried all the various renames with * and quotes, etc. No dice. I finally found out it was an issue relating to file name length AND directory path. Okay, now we're getting somewhere.

I opened a command prompt and navigated to that directory. From there, I created a temporary mapped drive:

Then I went there:

After I'm in the mapped drive, I tried the rename:

On one of my older boxes.. actually a old P2 used as a firewall, I was upgrading libpng to libpng-1.2.43-r2. I received an interesting error:

I'm a big fan of the Dell switches and various other SOHO (Small Office Home Office) type of switches. I have a few clients that need something a little beefier than a linksys 4 port, but something a less than cisco stuff.

SOHOSwitches.com has a good selection of switches (Fast Ethernet, Ethernet and Gigabit) switches.

So I was thinking I needed another box for backups here at the office, so I checked out Dell. Often they have good deals on servers without operating systems. Sure enough, they have an awesome deal on Dell servers! I was able to pick up a Dell PowerEdge T105 for $269.. yeah, you read that right. That included 1GB of RAM and 2 160GB drives with Dual Core AMD Athlon 2.3GHz processor in there!

Here are some of the servers on sale:
PowerEdge T105 = $269 ($387 Instant Savings)
PowerEdge T100 = $299 ($437 Instant Savings)
PowerEdge T110 = $429 ($239 Instant Savings)

I have various PowerEdge towers here at the office and they work great for loading up Gentoo (or whatever flavor of Linux you want) and using them as file servers, etc.

After the udev/lvm2 upgrade, my VM box was completely hosed. This was due to the fact that I had a older kernel and udevd was having problems with signalfd. If you found this post because of that, simply upgrade to a new kernel, and you should be good again.

I'm writing this post as more of a reference for me. My VM box uses RAID0 software raid and has LVM on top of that. When my box failed to boot (not seeing root filesystem in md) and was dead in the water. I rebooted with the LiveCD but I couldn't remember to a) get the RAID going again and b) how to get LVM up. So after some length forum post searches, calling friends, I was able to finally chroot into the server and update the kernal. I wanted to post my procedure on how I did this.

After booting into LiveCD

I just wanted to post this, in case anyone else was interested. Right now at Crucial.com, they have a exclusive promotion where they're offering 5% off on memory. This seems like a really good to me and good opportunity to boost up some memory in those tired servers!

To learn more about the promotion, click here.

Today, I upgraded fail2ban from 0.8.0-r1 to 0.8.3 and started seeing "Unexpected communication error" in the logs like what I have listed below.

I recently upgraded kernel on one of my servers from hardened-sources-2.6.28-r7 to hardened-sources-2.6.28-r9 and immediately had problems after reboot. Rebooting that server, I was greeted with the following message:

I went ahead and posted this issue to the Gentoo forum and worked on a few ideas how to remedy this. You can follow that thread here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-5762324.html

I noticed that the hardened-source ChangeLog mentioned the following: