Linux supports hot-adding disks but whenever I add a new vdisk in VMware the new disk doesn’t show up unless I reboot, which defeats the purpose of hot-add. This command forces a rescan of the bus:

echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

dmesg shows the new disk has been found:

  Vendor: VMware    Model: Virtual disk      Rev: 1.0 
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
 target0:0:2: Beginning Domain Validation
 target0:0:2: Domain Validation skipping write tests
 target0:0:2: Ending Domain Validation
 target0:0:2: FAST-40 WIDE SCSI 80.0 MB/s ST (25 ns, offset 127)
SCSI device sdd: 1048576000 512-byte hdwr sectors (536871 MB)
sdd: Write Protect is off
sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdd: cache data unavailable
sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdd: 1048576000 512-byte hdwr sectors (536871 MB)
sdd: Write Protect is off
sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdd: cache data unavailable
sdd: assuming drive cache: write through
 sdd: unknown partition table
sd 0:0:2:0: Attached scsi disk sdd
sd 0:0:2:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0

Now, why there’s no “rescan_sata” command is something I can’t fathom, but that’s Linux for you.

So I’ve gone back to Linux from Mac, due to the SSD issues I had with my Macbook Pro basically making VMware unusable. A Win7 VM would grind the guest and host to a halt on the 7200 RPM SATA OEM drive, and the SSD wouldn’t work, so I put the SSD back in my HP and installed CentOS 6 x86_64. Not really ideal, but at least it works.

CentOS 6 ships with Firefox 3.6.9, which is really old by now. Fine for a server, but I wanted FF6. I grabbed the Firefox 6.0.1 bz2 from VoxCast, unzipped it and copied it to /usr/lib64/firefox-6. Then I ran yum remove firefox to remove 3.6.9 and avoid any issues. I tried the instructions from my older post on this subject but for whatever reason it didn’t work – I’m guessing because I’m not using the distro’s Firefox RPM.

I followed these instructions to get the Flash 11 64-bit plugin installed. It still wasn’t working though.

I ended up creating a symlink:

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /home/evan/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

When I started up Firefox after creating the symlink, Flash worked.

Additionally, to set Firefox 6 as the default browser, run gnome-default-applications-properties, select Custom, and paste /usr/lib64/firefox-6/firefox %s in the Command: field.

Update: I upgraded my home desktop PC from FC12 to FC14 last night and used the above procedure to install Firefox 6.0.2 on it with Flash 11. So, in case anyone was wondering, the above works for Fedora as well.

MongoDB has log rotation functionality built in, but since I run CentOS I like to have everything managed through logrotate. The 10gen RPM I installed doesn’t have a logrotate script, so I wrote one. Create file /etc/logrotate.d/mongod:

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/var/log/mongo/mongod.log {
        daily
        rotate 30
        compress
        dateext
 
    missingok
    notifempty
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
        /bin/kill -SIGUSR1 `cat /var/lib/mongo/mongod.lock 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
    endscript
}

logrotate runs at 4 AM daily by default (via the script in /etc/cron.daily/logrotate). The file above rotates the mongod.log file daily, retaining 30 days of files, appending the date to each one after rotation (rather than the “.1″ or “.2″ suffix) and then gzipping it.

I got this idea (from this blog post) that it would be cool and great if we had an IRC server to facilitate communication within our team.  I started checking out some different IRC servers to see which ones supported the main features I wanted (LDAP auth & SSL).  I started out with ratbox but I didn’t really like it.  I found InspIRCd and after some config tweaking it’s working well.  Here’s the info from modules.conf for authentication against Active Directory (so people login with their AD usernames):

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<module name="m_ldapauth.so">
   <ldapauth baserdn="OU=Users,DC=example,DC=com"
   attribute="sAMAccountName"
   server="ldap://activedirectory.example.com"
   killreason="LDAP auth failed"
   searchscope="subtree"
   binddn="CN=binduser,OU=Users,DC=example,DC=com"
   bindauth="password"
   verbose="yes"
   userfield="yes">

Here’s the configure line (since I had to build from source):

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/inspircd --enable-gnutls --uid 101 --enable-extras=m_ldapauth.cpp --enable-extras=m_ldapoper.cpp

I still have some more customization to do to make ChanServ work, but since this is internal I don’t know if that even matters.  Also I can’t seem to get SSL working – I tried compiling with –enable-openssl but that failed, so I went with –enable-gnutls, which worked, but I can’t connect via ircs:// in my client.  If it looks like people are interested in this I may fix it up, but I have a feeling most people won’t be as enthused about it as I am.

Updated 8/31/2011 See my newer post on this subject.

I know I’ve been through this before because I’ve setup Fedora before and it’s working. But I just installed FC12 on my desktop at home (since my Seagate drive bricked itself a few days ago and I had to reinstall anyway) and while I finally got the Adobe Flash plugin working, it didn’t have any audio, which made YouTube kind of suck. Anyway, this of course was a solved problem, I just forgot where the fix was located… but duh, it’s on the Fedora website. A simple

yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 \
    nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 \
    libcurl.i686

and everything appears to be fine. Thank you Fedora!

My work laptop, which I got around the end of 2006, was starting to run like crap. Pretty sure it started around the time I put antivirus on it, which reinforces my theory that antivirus is a virus itself. Anyway, being bored with Windows XP and having already played with Windows 7 at home, I decided to install Linux. The last time I tried Linux desktop was around RedHat 7.3, which was a long time ago… pre-Fedora even. I’m pretty happy with CentOS on the server side and was set to try CentOS 5.3 on my laptop when someone suggested I go with FC due to more bleeding-edge driver support. Even though the hardware is pretty old at this point I figured it was worth a shot.

Generally everything works pretty well. Everything pretty much works out of the box – I had dual screens up at native resolution, it even recognized my phone as a camera when I plugged it in to charge it. Best of all, I was able to resize the NTFS partition (rather than blowing it away) so I can still boot back to XP when the need arises.

There are 2 problems I’ve had so far though:

• the computer now hovers between 76 and 85 degrees Celsius, whereas under Win XP it generally peaked around 68 C. I tried underclocking the CPU down to 250 MHz but the problem persisted.
• The Java plugin for Firefox … wtf? How can this not work? I downloaded Sun’s JDK and symlinked the libjavaplugin_whatever into /usr/lib64/mozilla/whatever/ and that didn’t work. Then I tried “yum install java-plugin” or something like that and that installed some OpenJava-ish plugin which looked like it was going to work, but when I logged into the Raritan KVM and clicked “Connect” it wouldn’t work. I booted up Win XP in a VM and Firefox with Java works fine. Really annoying and dumb.

I’ll probably try Ubuntu tomorrow as several people suggested it runs cooler than Fedora. If that fails then I guess I’ll go to Win7 after all. I also want an SSD for my work laptop now… my Windows VM seems to spent eternity spinning my crappy 5400 rpm drive. Plox.