Try New Technology

Mostly tossing this up here for my own use in referring back. Below is what needs done to ensure afacli can be ran correctly from script after a reboot. The issue is the PERC 3/Di card software for CentOS/Fedora Linux doesn’t rebuild the /dev/ files correctly and so when we run an internal raid check script it errors out with the following output:

/usr/sbin/afacli: line 13: /dev/MAKEDEV.afa: No such file or directory

The solution to this is to first run

cat /proc/devices

which will give you the Device ID for the “aac” (PERC 3/Di). Example:

Character devices:
1 mem
196 dahdi
253 aac
254 pcmcia

Next you want to add the following line(s) into /etc/rc.local (as many times as needed, so in my case with 7 errors I need to have afa0-afa6):

/bin/mknod /dev/afa0 c DEVICE_ID 0

Below is a post by Western Nebraska Libertarian Party that explains everything plus includes some good links for more information:

Last year, CISPA (then H.R. 3261 aka SOPA) sought to create powerful new protections for companies who wanted to sidestep privacy law in order to share sensitive user information with the government without judicial oversight. CISPA may also result in more sharing to the National Security Agency, which the Libertarian Party and civil liberties groups like the ACLU and EFF oppose.

Please see the following links and take time to contact your Representative in the House Senators about why we must stand together and vote AGAINST H.R. 624 (CISPA – Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act).

Below are a few links that provide some more information on this bill:

(EFF) – CISPA Goes to The Floor for a Vote, Privacy Amendments Blocked

(CNET) – Privacy protections booted from CISPA data-sharing bill

(Downsized DC) – CISPA: Would you sacrifice the rule of law for security? (link previously posted by the Libertarian Party via Google+)

Below are quick links to the contact information for our Congressman and Senators:

Congressman for the 3rd District of Nebraska:

Congressman Adrian Smith
E-mail Form
Scottsbluff Office Phone: (308) 633-6333
Washington, DC Office Phone: (202) 225-6435

Senators for Nebraska:

Senator Deb Fischer
E-mail Form
Washington, DC Office Phone: (202) 224-6551

Senator Mike Johanns
E-mail Form
Scottsbluff Office Phone: (308) 632-6032
Washington, DC Office Phone: (202) 224-4224

Together with Ben Backus I am working to form the Western Nebraska Libertarian Party. See below:

“The Western Nebraska Libertarian Party (WNLP) was created to give Libertarians in the panhandle of Nebraska a way to connect and organize. Currently WNLP serves as a way for people from the individual counties to pool their resources until they have enough members to create Libertarian Party organizations within their own counties. If you would like to become a member of WNLP or better yet start your own county party, check out the “about us” and “contact us” information above. Live and let live!”

I had to create a set of Cacti Templates for use with Redline RDL-3000 PmP radios and thought I’d upload the Exported Template for others to enjoy. I’ll add this to the official Cacti Templates sometime, but for now youw ill fine a link on this page.

This is directly from Linux Journal (Aug 21, 2008) and is posted on site blog as a point of reference for myself.

If you have ever had a hard drive fail on a remote server you may remember the feeling you had after trying to issue the following commands:

# reboot
bash: /sbin/reboot: Input/output error
# shutdown -r now
bash: /sbin/shutdown: Input/output error

Obviously, there is a problem with your drive. These commands are failing because the kernel is unable to load the /sbin/reboot and /sbin/shutdown binaries from the disk so that it can execute them.

A fsck on the next boot might be able to correct whatever is wrong with the disk, but first you need to get the system to reboot. If your machine is located at a managed hosting provider then you could submit a reboot ticket, but you’ll have to wait for someone to take responsibility.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to ask the kernel to reboot without needing to access the failing drive? Well, there is a way, and it is remarkably simple.

The “magic SysRq key” provides a way to send commands directly to the kernel through the /proc filesystem. It is enabled via a kernel compile time option, CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ, which seems to be standard on most distributions. First you must activate the magic SysRq option:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

When you are ready to reboot the machine simply run the following:

echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

This does not attempt to unmount or sync filesystems, so it should only be used when absolutely necessary, but if your drive is already failing then that may not be a concern.

In addition to rebooting the system the sysrq trick can be used to dump memory information to the console, sync all filesystems, remount all filesystems in read-only mode, send SIGTERM or SIGKILL to all processes except init, or power off the machine entirely, among other things.

Also, instead of echoing into /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq each time you can activate the magic SysRq key at system boot time using sysctl, where supported:

echo “kernel.sysrq = 1″ >> /etc/sysctl.conf

If you would like to learn more about magic SysRq you can read the sysrq.txt file in the kernel documentation.

by Cory Wright