I’ve got a number of external USB hard drives connected to my ubuntu server that need to mount to a predictable directory.
When you log into Gnome, the desktop environment does it’s nifty thing and mounts any drive you’ve got plugged in — but if the box reboots, the drives won’t be mounted until the next person logs into the computer.
I needed something that happens at boot time to do this task.
Backing up your MySQL database (if it’s a reasonable size, like < 100s of MB) can be done with a cronjob that runs mysqldump, gzip, and mpack.
Etherpad was opensourced by google, and has some generic installation instructions. Here’s the translation for Ubuntu Karmic Koala (release 9.10):
After upgrading my server (that isn’t running X) to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), I found that the console on my LCD monitor was cropping out several characters from the left and right sides. It wasn’t hard to fix, though, given the magick incantations:
Due to an unscheduled powercycle on my linux server, I got a very troubling page from mdadm, the multi-disk administrator, saying it had marked one of the disks as failed.
This, presumably, was due to a flaky SATA controller that didn’t make /dev/sda available by the time the kernel was mounting /dev/md0, so software raid turned it off.
It was easy enough to get the drive back into play:
sudo mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1
And easy enough to monitor progress:
mrm@gronk:~$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md0 : active raid5 sda1[3] dm-2[1] dm-1[0] 580074880 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [UU_] [====>................] recovery = 22.0% (63875072/290037440) finish=178.1min speed=21154K/sec