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Hot Adding a SCSI Device

When hot adding a SCSI device, such as a hard drive, you might have noticed that it doesn’t show in /dev. You can either reboot, which defeats the purpose of hot adding the device, or notify Linux to rescan the SCSI bus.

If you know the host adapter number use this command replacing 0 with the host adapter.
echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

Otherwise rescan all the host adapters with this command.
for f in /sys/class/scsi_host/host*; do echo "- - -" > $f/scan; done

Now your SCSI device should show up in the /dev list.

Patching Postfix for mySQL and Quotas

If you are hosting email for more than one domain you might want to look into virtual hosting. With virtual hosting most choose to use database vs files to store the mailbox information. Not only does this allow a more flexible configuration, but the ability to use a web interface such as Postfix Admin. Out of the box Fedora Core 8 Postfix RPM does not support mySQL or quota support. However a simple recompile and install of the resulting package will get you up and running. Read the rest of this entry »

SMF and MediaWiki Bridge

After testing out both bridges currently available for SMF and MediaWiki I decided to write my own. Let me first go through what I liked and didn’t like about the existing bridges. Read the rest of this entry »

Patching Apache’s Suexec Module Improved

This tutorial improves on my last tutorial Patching Apache’s Suexec Module by adding in alternate docroots and a trusted uid/gid to check when the uid/gid mismatch. This is an added security measure over just ignoring the uid/gid check or using / as the docroot. If you haven’t read my previous tutorial the following quote should bring you up to speed. Read the rest of this entry »

Slow Browsing of Network Drives

One frustrating thing I noticed after using Vista was what seemed to be a compatibility issue with Windows 2003 Server 64bit Edition. Browsing network shares and folders on the server from the Vista machine was painfully slow. It would take five plus seconds to just display a directory listing or open a text file. After an hour or so of searching Google I found the answer. Read the rest of this entry »

Useful Mdadm Commands

Below is a collection of commands for mdadm that I have found useful. Use these at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »

RAID Explained

RAID, which stands for “redundant array of independent” disks provides a way to group disks into one volume and/or provide fault tolerance. There are three way to implement RAID: hardware, a combination of hardware/software, and software only. Read the rest of this entry »