Tag Archives: sysadmin

HOWTO: Mount your USB hard drives at boot time on Ubuntu

Posted on August 14, 2010 by matthew

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Simple MySQL backup to gmail on Ubuntu/Debian

Posted on June 9, 2010 by matthew

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.

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

HOWTO install etherpad on ubuntu 9.10

Posted on March 2, 2010 by matthew

Etherpad was opensourced by google, and has some generic installation instructions. Here’s the translation for Ubuntu Karmic Koala (release 9.10):

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

How to fix your ubuntu 9.10 console

Posted on November 28, 2009 by matthew

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , | Leave a comment

DegradedArray event on /dev/md0:gronk

Posted on April 3, 2008 by matthew

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment