cyborgworkshop.org » argh

Ubuntu unstable on ESXi

jason — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:18:12 +0000

I’m having some serious stability issues with all of my ubuntu VMs on ESXi. After a period of several days, they have all locked up with a message about the mtp driver having read errors, or something along those lines. The short summary is that it looks like the scsi disk (emulated by ESXi, actually an iscsi LUN) becomes unavailable and lots of sense key errors are generated. The VM goes to 100% CPU and I have to reboot the entire ESXi server to recover. In the meantime, my SAN, Fedora, Solaris and Windows VMs never skip a beat. I’ve rebuilt the VM several times with different version of ubuntu in the 8.x line and different patch revisions, but have finally gave up. I’m back on Fedora and we’ll see if it remains stable.

Upgrading Ubuntu to 8.10 on a laptop that has SDHC problems

jason — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:31:14 +0000

My laptop locks up tight as a drum as soon as the SDHC driver (for my built in card reader) loads. Ubuntu 8.04 seemed to have taken care of that issue and had the SDHC module blacklisted for me so I had no issues at all. 8.10 is not so nice. You have two options.
If you are upgrading with a dist-upgrade and have NOT rebooted yet, edit your /etc/modules.d/blacklist file and add

sdhc blacklist

to the end of the file. If you have already rebooted, and hence are hung, pop an ubuntu 8.10 CD into the drive, boot to “repair a broken system” and then edit that file.

Undelete a deleted zfs pool

jason — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:03:19 +0000

How many of you saw this one coming? In my haste, I accidentally did a zpool destroy -r on the wrong pool this morning and offlined my SAN. Not good. I walked around the entire rest of the day bumming over all of the stuff I’d lost since my last backup to tape because now all of my snapshots were gone. I spent my lunch hour browsing some docs over on sun admin and came across what ended up being my salvation. How to undestroy a destroyed pool. To save you the time, you need to know two commands

zpool import -D

That will show you what pools you have that are still around, but have been deleted.

zpool import -Df tank

That command does the leg work and brings the good old tank pool back online. Hopefully you didn’t lose any drives during this process, but in theory you should be able to recover a degraded pool. Best bet though, don’t try to clean up the SAN at 5:30am before you go to work.

W3 b33n 0wn3d

jason — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:31:10 +0000

damn. I got lazy and wouldn’t you know it, I got hacked. A guy calling himself KiLLer HaCk repainted all of my websites for me this morning around 7am. It was totally my fault, I had some boneheaded permissions on some files and he found them. He did have the kindness to spare the files and just
thrashed my index pages, so many thanks for that. I have a backup that is a couple of weeks old that I’m bringing back online and I’ll try to get most of the updates current as soon as I can.
You may notice that I’m not mad or anything like that, and for good reason. This person did very little damage (though I wish he had made backups) and he exposed a problem that could have been exploited by someone much more malicious. In the end, he did me a service and it only cost me a couple of
hours of my time. So, hang out. I’ll get everything back up and running and we’ll continue down this lovely yellow brick road shortly.

Update

I was able to talk to the guy that hit the website. Turns out it wasn’t me but someone else on my shared host that he was able to break in through. Then my shared host provider evidentlly didn’t have the tightest security in the world, so he hit everyone on the server. I feel a little better now