July 2010 Archives

The specter in the distance II

I came across this today and oh boy are these people nuts?  IBD and the 2nd American Revolution.  I think too many people look upon the romanticized historical fiction that is the founding of this nation and think all the wrong things.  They imprint their desires on the circumstances surrounding the birth of America and believe that they can return to a time that never existed, in a world that has completely changed.  Too many think revolution will give them what they want.  Its just another bubble.  The bursting of that bubble though, will make the recent financial crisis look like a parking ticket.

A revolution would just be one sub-group's attempt to dominate the political, economic, and social aspects of the nation.   However they fail to see the strength of America.  Our divisive ideologies are actually what makes the nation strong.  The debate is long and tedious.  But in crisis we seem to come together nicely.  The pendulum swings folks, don't forget that.  It swings as necessary by the collective will of the people.  Don't break it just because you don't like where its at this moment.  Give it time, it will swing the other way.

The result of another revolution may not destroy the nation.  We have the history of the civil war to thank for validating that possibility.  But I sure as hell don't want to raise, protect, and nurture a family through such an event.  What sane human being would promote such ideas?  



Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 Raid and LVM recovery

You would think an upgrade from one Ubuntu LTS to another would be smooth and easy.  Alas the upgrade on our main data machine went in the opposite direction.  The main problem had to do with our most important data... mainly photos.  There are cd backups of course, but I assume I'd never need anything beyond the raid array.  Of course, the upgrade lost the array information.  *glee*.  I'm logging this in case anyone else hits the issue.  On boot, I got an error saying that /mnt/safe wasn't available, did I want to wait, skip, or drop into a recovery console?  I skipped and the rest of the boot continued.  Then I had a Nvidia driver issue (perhaps another post).  After restarting X, I got to the desktop.  

From there I dropped a terminal and realized *oh crap* I had no idea about where the partitions were for my raid!  Deep breath.  So first I tried to install dmraid, but it seems thats integrated into 10.04 now.  After some reading, I decided to also try installing lvm2 per someones suggestion.  No fun/easy automatic recovery.  Ok, I knew the raid information should have been in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf.  Alas it was empty.  At this point I figured I should see if I even had a raid to recover.  I can't imagine why not... and with that:

sudo cat /proc/partitions

to see which partitions were present.  And then in turn I ran

sudo sfdisk -l /dev/sdX

for each device, looking for the magical "Linux raid" type.  I found a few.  I also found one made with gparted, which sfdisk doesn't grok.  Gave me a little pause for concern, but I found my disks (or at least enough to recover the array).  Then I used:

sudo mdadm --examine --scan /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1

And found my array.  Yay!  Cut and paste the output to the bottom of /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf and restart.  My array is up and back in business =)   Now I just need to take care of this Nvidia problem.  







Me

 

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