I have just finished setting up a large RAID 5 array on my home media server and I wanted to monitor the array so I can replace any faulty drives. Smartctl does a good job of warning me about any disk errors, but I also wanted to monitor any errors from the array itself. I found that there is a daemon in Fedora call mdmonitor, that will do the job for me. I tried starting the server, but did not receive any feedback from the service. No errors, no start or fail message. I did some digging and found that I needed to set the following parameter in the /etc/mdadm.conf .

MAILADDR user@example.com

This file is usually created from a mdadm –detail –scan > /etc/mdadm.conf, and needs this parameter added manually.

Just installed Hylafax on a Fedora 6 installation, and here are a few things I had to figure out. I have not looked at Hylafax for a few years, and it has not changed much in installation process but it is a very mature and active project.

We had a spare Pentium 3 box at work, and we needed a fax server to just receive fax’s from 2 lines, and forward them via email to one person that organizes them. I ordered a couple of modems of eBay, totalling $35, be sure they are Linux compatible. Stay away from Win Modems! The install went with no problems, just downloaded the latest RPM on the website and everything went well. Just follow the docs on the website, not much to it.

Setting up faxgetty in the inittab caused me a problem until I realized that I need to have a unique identifier on each line of the respawn command.

m0:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/faxgetty ttyS2
m1:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/faxgetty ttyS3

I then rebooted and then did a faxstat to see the status of Hylafax.

HylaFAX scheduler on fax.westprobenefitsystems.local: Running
Modem ttyS3 (+1.604.538.9895): Running and idle
Modem ttyS2 (+1.604.536.1552): Running and idle

I then searched for a local Fax Back service to test everything, and faxes came in and spooled to /var/spool/hylafax/recvq/

We want the faxes to be delivered to one person, so I went into /var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxDispatch and changed the following line

SENDTO=myemail@mycompany.com;

I also wanted to have the fax number displayed in the notification email instead of the device name. This is what I added to the FaxDispatch

case “$DEVICE” in
ttyS2) DEVICE=604.555.1111;;
ttyS3) DEVICE=604.555.2222;;
esac

What a way to spend 2 days of my easter weekend. I added some RAM and added a drive to the RAID array of the main server.

I needed to dived the extra space over 3 partitions currently on the server, so I needed a partitioning tool, and I did not want to pay for it. I have used Knoppix in the past and loaded up QTParted, and it has worked well. I went to use this tool again, but found I could not move partitions. So I did some searching and found GParted, and they had a Live CD.

So I made sure I had a complete backup and booted up the CD.

Very basic interface, but it was all that was needed, nothing more. The program scanned my drivers and found everything. I then proceeded to resize, and move partitions. The tool did everything I needed! I then Hit apply, and a warning came up saying it might take a long time, and I assumed maybe a few hours.

11 hours later the first partition was done, now came the other 2. just under 20 hours from starting, the process was finished. The only complaint that I have is that there was no message box on the screen reporting that the operations were complete.

While a few commands, such as ‘cd’ are built directly into bash; many of the most important commands come from coreutils, a GNU package containing over a hundred commands.

Some are the well known commands such as ‘ls’, ‘mv’ and ‘cat’. While there are some more obscure ones that are not always discovered because there are also more modern programs that can do similar jobs.

http://commandline.org.uk/2007/ten-cool-coreutils-commands/

Becoming a free software developer, part III: Programming for the impatient | Free Software Magazine