Andreas Aronsson

For about a year now I have had a very annoying problem with my file server. One of the two Seagate drives simply disappeared from time to time. It was never the same one and I couldn't tell what pattern the disappearances followed. The system log looked something like:

Jul 11 18:55:02 hostname ata5.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x190002 action 0xe frozen

Sometime when I was updating drupal from 6.10 to 6.11 I thought I was going to be clever and
update as soon at the core module was available upstream. Not to wait until it reached portage. I

As I am nowadays using the keyworded gentoo-sources, I am already using the 2.6.29 kernel with promised updated ext4 stuff and some more goodies. However, after doing my normal upgrading routine with make oldconfig and sifting through all the new options, running my 'build kernel and drivers'-script, my system wouldn't boot =|. Unable to remount read-write dmesg said. A wee bit stumped, I went back to 2.6.28 for a few days but now I had a go again and took a look at my fstab. In the mount options, I had put "extents, barriers=0".

Finally I made the leap.
Used the stopwatch to get the boot time from BIOS POST to login screen: 1:02.4
Added

sys-apps/openrc ~amd64
sys-apps/baselayout ~amd64

to /etc/portage/package.keywords
Emerged them and followed the guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openrc-migration.xml

No problemo. New boot time:
00:48.4
Sweet. Thx Roy!

First post after upgrade =)
Just upgraded from 5.12 to 6.6
In short (NOTE! not a proper instruction just a debrief);
* put in offline mode
* backup database and htdocs
* emerge new version
* use 'updated' module to find the correct modules version for the new major version
* uninstall as many contributed modules as possible
* run webapp-config
* copy back sites directory (.htaccess and robots.txt too if modified)
* unpack the modules you want in the modules dir
* run the www.yoursite.com/update.php
* try to poke around as much as possible

When the computer geek in me grew up, I was excusively using Gentoo for all my needs. When I first started out learning about free software operating systems, I had used windows 98 for little more than playing Fallout and some other fun games.

In my early days (in like 2002, which is not very long ago I admit) as a GNU/Linux zealot I was installing from a minimal CD and going from stage-1 tarballs and working my way up. Wasn't very exciting watching glibc compile on a PII 400hz.

I finally gave up trying to keep my hordeinstallation alive. It's been alot of work installing and upgrading the package and every time I've failed to retain my data. I was recommended Zimbra by a friend. It turns out it's a complete suite with mta, imap, spam- and virusscanner. This meant that I'd have to give up my carefully configured mail services. After bracing myself for a number of days, I got to it.

For a very long while now, several years actually, I've been a bit annoyed by the behaviour of terminals under X when you doubleclick links. What the UI considers a word is selected. Selection 'starts' at the point that is doubleclicked and 'spreads' in each direction, stopping at a char it considers to be a word delimiter. A space is probably always considered a delimiter. Sometimes a '?' too, and often ',' as well.

Time goes by and sometimes gentoo hands you a new update to kde-base as happened today and it's compile-time again. When I first began using gentoo I sometimes watched the scrolling lines and kind of get stuck much like watching a burning fire. It would give a cosy feeling and time flew by. Nowadays I never do that for some reason, I just want to be done with it. Having invested in a Reserator, I thought I'd make good use of it and hence overclocked my CPU.

I have to say my impression is that the gentoo devs maintaining the kernel sources does a damn fine job. New versions appears in the three at a very nice rate and keeping up with the relentless pace of vanilla. At the time of this writing the latest stable kernel is 2.6.23.14 and portage just gave me 2.6.23-gentoo-r6. Good stuff. I've been compiling gentoo-sources for a few years now and it has never been smoother. A simple emerge -Nqa world * copy the old .config to the new source dir * swap the symlink make oldconfig

It was too obvious for me this time perhaps. I simply forgot to change grub's arguments from the disc to the RAID1 device. Now I can continue to expand my logical volume across both partitions and add the remaining root partition to the RAID as well.

Finally had time to finish all my data migrations with the new discs.

The original setup was (tip: use smartctl -i /dev/sdX to get the disc info):

Bought myself a couple of new disks. I want redundancy on the servers and now my economy has caught up with my needs. One of them is the latest WD Raptor and I wanted that one for the workstation so i ended up dd'ing the windows partition and making a new filesystem (ext3 with journal_data_writeback for speed) for my gentoo installation. Using dd to copy the MBR apparently wasn't enough (or maybe I didn't copy enough bytes) so i had to boot with a livecd and run grub from there. But it's all good now and I can use the old disk for my new RAID1 installation of the server running this site.