I was suffering from a hard drive I/O problem. A quick check with smartctl -A -l error revealed 38 errors on sda, so it had to be replaced.
So this morning the hard drive was swapped for a new blank one and I began the process of rebuilding the RAID.
I booted of a Gentoo Minimal Install CD. These are notable as they are the only install CDs I’ve found that contain the necessary md[0–3] devices in /dev.
I’ve been trying to set up a rsync job to my SourceForge account so that I can keep a few files up to date. I created a new ssh key and uploaded it, but I still couldn’t ssh interactively to the server.
I was banging my head against a brick wall until I found this: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1806 .
Half way down the page it says you can connect using:
ssh -o stricthostkeychecking=ask ssh-server.example.com
Something I only discovered today, but the Update Status module presents a “Settings” tab, as well as the default “List” tab.
Clicking on “Settings” will take you to a new page where you can configure your Drupal site to email you where there are module updates!
There are other general settings like: “When to check” and “New versions” vs. “Security updates”.
Now with a newly compiled Kernel with support for an initial RAM disk and an initial RAM disk both on my /boot partition I was ready to rock-and-roll.
Except that when I rebooted I got the message:
/dev/console file does not exist
After much examination of the initial RAM disk:
I had left off where I started the copying process. That finished overnight so I just tweaked the grub.conf file and shutdown the system.
I moved the new hard drive to hda and installed it’s twin as hdc. And started her up again.
The PC fell at the second hurdle (the first was: does it have a boot sector). It printed “GRUB” and then hanged 
. Armed with a Gentoo Install CD, I set about rescuing my system:
Just wanted to quickly post about some of the work going on on Listhandler.
ListHandler http://drupal.org/project/listhandler [Listhandler main page] is a Drupal module that will act as a go between between a web forum and an email mailing list.
I want to move my home mailserver from a single hard drive to a mirrored RAID LVM setup on larger hard drives. So a simple cp -a won’t quite do the job.
First off, some useful URLs:
After getting tons of errors with my Master-Master MySQL replication I had turned it off. It needed reworking and at a time that was convenient for me. This morning I set to, to fix it up and get back in working shape.
First of all, some useful links:
After noting a request to node 147 on my website (and I know I haven’t created 147 pages on it!) I decided to do some investigation.
It seems that I had left the posting of forum items open and available for anyone (and anything) to post to; without having to verify if they are human or not.
Unfortunately the version of the Captcha module I was using, had a bug that stopped me from enforcing the check; but I should have disabled access anyway.
Even though I’ve updated “The Need for Speed Carbon, Collectors Edition” to the latest 1.4 patch, I still get the odd crash.
Just half an hour ago my win of Kenji (in Downtown) was lost as Carbon crashed. No matter; I just wasted him a second time 