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: * Found sources for kernel version: * 2.6.28-hardened-r9 * Checking for suitable kernel configuration options…… Continue reading Nightmares with udev updates

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… Continue reading Unable to remote into windows server 2003

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… Continue reading Renaming long file names in Windows

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… Continue reading Dell PowerEdge T105 Server on Sale

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… Continue reading Using LiveCD to chroot and repair software RAID and LVM

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… Continue reading Crucial is offering a 5% discount promotion on memory

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: Booting 'Gentoo (bzImage-2.6.28-hardened-r9)' root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 kernel (hd0,0)/boot/bzImage-2.6.28-hardened-r9 root=/dev/sda4 [Linux-bzImaeg, setup=0x2a00, size=0x165990] Decompressing Linux… Parsing ELF… done. Booting the kernel.… Continue reading Issues with hardened-sources-2.6.28-r9