After seeing these symptoms and a machine that is totally unresponsive, I chose to blindly reboot the machine, as I was running the server headless.  Not something I would ever do in a production environment, but it’s my home server.  After a reboot, the server wouldn’t even respond to ping requests, and I saw in my router that it had not registered its DHCP lease upon boot.  My obvious next step was to connect a monitor to this machine and actually see what was going on.  As I moved the machine around to plug in the monitor cable, I noticed that the steel case was warm (borderline hot, in fact) to the touch.  Once the monitor was connected, I immediately saw the root of the problem.  I was staring at a BIOS screen telling me the boot drive had failed.

Knowing what the problem was made for a clear path for recovering.  I located a replacement IDE hard drive and swapped it into the case and reloaded a stock installation of Debian 6, Squeeze.  Recreating the basic installation was no problem, and I added Webmin back onto the system.  Fortunately, I had no user data on the orignal hard drive, and I had kept the data volume in its own volume group, to avoid problems like this, should they ever come up.  The only parts of the configuration that were located on the original drive were mounting, NFS, Samba, and DNS configurations.  On the other hand, I had not gotten around to backing up that configuration to another machine to avoid such a problem.  ;-)

After getting a new boot drive with an OS on it, I moved to getting the data volume up and running.  Based upon my previous post, the data lives inside of a LVM logical volume on top of a physical RAID1 array.  Since I was simply trying to locate and re-enable an existing array, I ran: “mdadm –assemble –scan” which found the two partitions in the RAID1 and activated them.  Since they had not been touched in quite some time, no resync was even necessary.

The next step was to locate and reactivate the logical volume so that I could actually mount and use the data stored on the volume.  I ran each of the LVM *scan commands, “vgscan”, “pvscan”, and “lvscan” to confirm the metadata had been preserved.  Everything looked good, so I just had to reactivate the volume with the “vgchange -y a” command, which tells LVM to activate all available volume groups and logical volumes.  I was finally able to mount the data drives and verify that all of the expected data was there.

Now that the data drives were healthy, I had to finish recreating the lost configurations.  I added a permanent entry in /etc/fstab to mount the volume at boot, along with my NFS exports.  Also, I added the local users to the system and gave Samba passwords.  My only time-consuming task was to re-enter the forward and reverse DNS entries for my internal machines and set the DNS forwarders.

Now that the configuration was back to where I wanted it, I took the extra step of using Webmin’s backup module to export all of the configuration information from the system to my laptop.

Once I really knew what was hapenning, the fix really didn’t take that long.  I spent about 4 hours between loading the OS, reactivating the data drives, and getting the local services set back up again.  With the added knowledge of RAID and LVM recovery in Linux, as well as configuration backups, it would probably only take about an hour; most of that time would be waiting on the OS to install to the drive.

For the most part, I would like to spend the time answering anyone’s Linux questions. But I thought I would include some weekly news, and I want to include two applications per week, one graphical and one text-based.

To get help with any conundrums, email len@nosbig.net. I want to hear from people before and during the podcast. I will probably post the rehearsal after I edit it down a little. There were a few spots where my ADD got the best of me and I repeated myself or I had to pause a moment to collect my thoughts. I thought I had prepared sufficiently for this episode, but clearly not.

• Obtaining and reflashing a Linksys WRT54G router, either the GL or GS.
• Playing with and/or hacking a LaFonera wireless access point
• Building my power lockout device for my ham radio
• Building a PC for my car with wireless capability for a media center
• Building a decent amateur radio station, including packet station
• Building a podcast station
• Upgrade my radio license to General Class

At some point in the future, I want to do some kind of podcast. But before I would commit to that, I need to find a topic that I can regularly update and contribute. Part of the issue of the lack of updates is the company for which I work. MCPR has me doing some very interesting things, but they are marketable ideas that I have to keep quiet. The only project that I can talk about is our Asterisk dabblings. We are offering the ability to connect analog or IP phones to the system and connect to about any outbound media out there, including SIP trunks.

But much beyond that, I don’t have the ability to talk about the details of what I do at work with the world at large, between protecting our clients’ privacy and not wanting to give any competitors any ideas about our strategy.

My next challenge was to get the network card working. Keep in mind that this laptop does not have working PCMCIA sockets because it fell off the table…. Since this had been a laptop I had been previously using, I had already found a suitable USB network adapter, the D-Link. I first tried to install the drivers for the network card, but I could not get the provided 2.4.18 kernel source from the Debian CD’s to match the pre-compiled kernel. Since I had to compile a kernel from scratch, anyway, I went ahead and used my USB Zip drive to copy over the 2.4.24 kernel source code. Then, I extracted, configured, and compiled my kernel.

Next, I compiled and installed the drivers for the network interface, available from The Linux-WLAN Project. After installation of the drivers, the log file said that the device had no driver claiming it. So, I actually found the source code that links the product/vendor code to a driver and edited the prism2sta.c file to add the cod
es in. I recompiled the modules and reinstalled. At this point, the interface was recognized.

The next step was to get the kernel to set up the network interface automatically. On my home network, I have a DHCP server set up, but there are two commands that are needed to turn on the radio and associate with the Access Point. To get these to be executed automatically when you plug in the card, place the following two commands in /etc/network/interfaces:
pre-up wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
pre-up wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=”” authtype=opensystem

Once the network is configured, the next step is to install the streaming software. At slimdevices.com, I downloaded the tarball, rather than the RPM. After extracting the code, I
copied it into place and ran the software. It defaults to using port 9000, but that can be changed in the server interface. I changed it to port 80, for ease of access. At the same time, I changed the directory of the music library to point to my collection, once I got it copied to the server.

After getting the software laid out in the right locations, I decided I wanted to add it into the init system, so I needed to have a daemon startup and shutdown script. It turns out that the one for the sympa mailing list manager worked well for me, after some slight modifications. After creating the script for the init.d directory, I created the appropriate symbolic links in the rcX.d directories.

There are some last minute details that I am still working out, such as using NFS for native Linux mounting from other machines and Samba for Windows file sharing. The only other large project yet to conquer is a firewall. Of course, the Shorewall package will dramatically simplify that project.

In a matter of a couple of days of experimentation, I have set up my old laptop to stream and share my entire music collection to any machine that is on my network, giving me the freedom to listen to my music anywhere in the house or out in the yard, when it finally warms up in Ohio.

And I could continue to repeat the same sort of reporting that many Linux news organizations would give you, but I won’t… What I will say is that I am really pleased with the driver changes for the ESS Solo1 sound chip. The driver actually plays audio right out of the box. There are still problems with it, however. The playback is a bit spotty. Every once in a while, I will get distortion and other problems. Usually unloading and reloading the drivers helps, but I hate to have to reboot for that! So, I went back and re-installed the ALSA drivers. Of course, the driver fixes in 2.4.21 could be entirely in vain, seeing as 2.6 is expected to use the ALSA drivers, anyway….

Now, everything is a bit quicker; there is a bit of improved performance overall.

Fortunately for me, the internal Winmodem is a Lucent Technologies chipset that just happens to have a Linux driver, available at http://www.physcip.uni-stuttgart.de/heby/ltmodem/ The package was simple to install, and it works quite well, although I should try to figure out why the driver told me that it is a v.92 modem, or if this is normal with a controllerless modem.

Specs:

• Pentium II – 333MHz
• 128 MB SDRAM
• 6.4 GB hard drive
• Neomagic video chipset
• 14.1″ LCD screen
• Built-in 56k modem (Winmodem )
• Included Xircom 10/100 PCCard NIC

All this for only $350. I knew I would be able to install Linux on it, it was just a matter of how completely. Once again, Mandrake comes through. 8.0 installed flawlessly except for the modem. It even detected the modem; they just didn’t include drivers for it. A quick download from a link from www.linmodems.org solved that problem. The only other things I have done to it are changing the sound system from ALSA (which I despise with a passion) to OSS and to update GAIM from the 0.11pre1 version included with 8.0 to the newest version, 0.59.1. Neither sound driver works terribly well (especially for MP3 playback, but well enough for alert sounds and audio CD’s. Besides, this is a laptop, and I don’t want to kill the battery playing MP3′s or DVD’s (if that were available on this laptop).

The major problem was that the two clients I was running could ping each other, but not the server. I suspected a cable or simple configuration problem, but I tried to ping from the server to the clients, and that worked. I knew it wasn’t the cable.

Next, I tried examining the IP configuration of the clients. All looked normal.

Finally, it dawned on me that I had set up a firewall at one point through the Mandrake Control Cent
er. I took down the ethernet interface and flushed the chains from iptables. That wasn’t successful, so I took eth0 down again and removed the iptables kernel modules entirely. A quick ping later, and I was in business.

Now, the connectivity is restored; Samba actually logged me onto multiple machines and allowed me to connect to the server with the shares that I had set up.