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Mounting unpartitioned disk image files in Linux is easy. You just execute ‘mount -o loop disk.img /mnt’ right?

Well, if your disk image file happens to contain partitions its a little bit trickier. Here is what you need to do:

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With the forthcoming release of Debian Lenny it happened to be a good time for me to re-evaluate my decision to use one monster RAID6 device to back all my iSCSI targets. I ran a semi-formal test on different disk configurations for software raid and came up with these results…

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The final installment of our coraid adventure and not really much to say other than this: it works! Hotplug support is working as of kernel 2.6.25-git11 and appears to function as it should.

Thanks go to Mark Lord, Marvell Corporation, EMC Corporation and Red Hat, Inc. for the coding magic.

The next phase of this project is choosing AoE or iSCSI. The debate on the relative merits of each protocol continues to rage on the Internet but in my particular case the criteria are pretty simple; which one performs better without causing excessive system load? Just from reading about the two protocols I am already leaning toward iSCSI for the simple fact that I can use all my TCP/IP management tools (routing, NAT, firewalling, etc.) on every iSCSI device. The only (potential) drawback is CPU load on the involved systems since it has to calculate TCP checksums for all those packets. Yes, there are many, many other advantages of one protocol over the other. No, they don’t matter to me in this scenario :-) So here we go!

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You may on occasion have a need to convert .bin firmware images such as those used to flash linksys based devices into .bin formatted images that can be accepted by OpenWRT. Its actually quite easy to do:

That will strip the first 32 bytes off the image, thus making it a valid .bin formatted firmware image file. Neat, huh?

This will be pretty obvious to seasoned *nix admins but it’s possible to tar/gz/bzip files over an ssh connection onto a remote file system. Read on to find out how…

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I have added powerpc to my backports repository in addition to the already included i386 and amd64 archictectures. See this post for more information.

Enjoy!

Here’s a little script I whipped up in perl to sequentially load and erase all the tapes in an auto loader. Hopefully it is of some use to others.

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I recently converted from Arkeia (a horribly overpriced and buggy piece of software) to Bacula (a free, stable, higher performance alternative). At the same time I upgraded my backup server to Debian Etch and started having a problem where my tape library would alternatively show up as either /dev/sg0 or /dev/sg2 depending on what order things were powered up. Obviously that presents a problem if certain pieces of software expect your auto changer to located at a certain device node in /dev.

This can be fixed by making a custom udev rule…

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Well here it is. I’ve finally converted to the dark side.

Ill be moving content over from the old site Real Soon Now(tm).