bacula: cannot restore without a bootstrap file

After a long time I decided to install and work with bacula again. After installation, configuration and running some jobs, I tried to restore a backup from the night. The result was the following:

...
05-Nov 07:56 bacula-dir JobId 11: Fatal error: Cannot restore without a bootstrap file.
You probably ran a restore job directly. All restore jobs must be run using the restore command.
...

Nginx server_names_hash_bucket_size

Today I installed nginx to support multiple Server Blocks/Virtual Hosts. When I configured the second or third Server Block and restarted Nginx, I encountered the following error:

# systemctl start nginx
Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

Apache virtual host

My company asks me to create two new websites. One for the internal intranet another one for the internal blog. For the intranet drupal should be used and for the blog wordpress should be used. To sum it up: two new websites accessable under:

http://intranet.company.com
http://blog.company.com

Configure Nagios statusmap with User-supplied coords

The statusmap is most useful if you use the User-supplied coords function (imho). This article covers the following topics:

Add coords to the host definition
Set the User-supplied coords statusmap as default
Change the image from ? to a valid gd2

Install and run ColEm

ColEm is an emulator for the old but impressive ColecoVision. This article will show you how to install the emulator and a short introduction how to use the emulator. I build the sources successully on my notebook (running Slackware64-14.1) and on my Cubietruck (running Linaro-13.04).

7z

If you're faced with a 7z file then you need a program like 7za to extract these archives. If your distribution has no 7z package you need to download the sources first:

Editing MP3/ID3 tags

A couple of days ago someone asked me how to change the ID3 tag in MP3 files via commandline. There are a couple of programs out there and the first one I found did the job right: id3ed
To get id3ed running download the source from http://freecode.com/projects/id3ed first. Then extract the tar file and build the source:

Sendmail with LDAP support in Slackware

The sendmail package that comes with Slackware has no LDAP support. In case that you need it then this article might help. It covers the following topics:

1. Recompile and reinstall sendmail with LDAP support
2. Reconfigure OpenLDAP
3. Reconfigure sendmail and import aliases into LDAP

Before you try to use this description make sure that you know a little about OpenLDAP and sendmail itself! This article was tested on a Slackware environment but should also work for any other Unix/Linux (except for recompiling the sendmail package).

List DVD content

If you need to know what is on your DVD then you can use mplayer. With the right option mplayer lists the content of any DVD. This is very useful if you need to copy your DVD's to harddisk etc. (especially for TV series on DVD). Just run the following mplayer command to list the DVD content (output truncated - very): 

Adding Nagiosgraph to Nagios

This article is an update to my prior released article about installing Nagios in Slackware.
Nagiosgraph allows you to add very nice graphs to your Nagios which is extremely helpful. With these graphs you'll be able to look into the past a little and probably do some trending for the future. You can act before it is too late.
Before you can begin to install Nagiosgraph you need an additional package rrdtool. First create a directory where you can store the sources and change into it: 

Basic Nagios installation

This article is about basic Nagios installation in Slackware. It is not about configure Nagios completely, adding hosts etc. It is just a basic tutorial howto install Nagios from sources.
Before you begin create a directory where you can store the Nagios sources:

# mkdir -p /usr/src/nagios && cd /usr/src/nagios

Installing Slackware ARM in Qemu

ARM, ARM and ARM. Everybody is using it - knowing or not knowing. So I decided to write a small tutorial about installing Slackware ARM in Qemu. For this tutorial I expect a few things:

- you should be able to install Slackware
- you should have worked with Qemu
- you should know how Linux boots

Get installation date

If you need to determine the installation date of your server then you have a couple of options like look into your network documentation, check for install logs on the server etc. In most cases you don't have these kind of options and with all the different Linux distributions around it can get difficult to get a proper installation date. The next few hints are really just hints to give you a small clue when the installation date was.

Setting up a SAN

I have some FC hardware and I thought I try to setup a small SAN. Here is my hardware list:

Server (hq01): Slackware64
FC Adapter: QLogic 2300 (1 FC Port)
San Switch (ssw01): Compaq StorageWorks San Switch 8 (Brocade)
Storage (stor01): Sun StorEdge 6120 (14x33GB)

sccli command examples

Yesterday I finally managed to reinstall a V480 with Solaris and a attached StorEdge 3310. Beneath a few example how to install the required software and how to use the command line tool sccli on Solaris Sparc.

Bringing a Compaq StorageWorks San Switch 8 back to life

I hope I don't promise to much with this heading...
Here is the situation: I got an old unused Compaq StorageWorks San Switch 8 without any information (IP, username, password cable etc). As usual I wanted to use it, so here is a short description of what I  did to bring the machine back to life. A default serial cable does not work, when the switch was released Compaq had is own pin layout. The only chance to communicate with the switch is via network. When you open the SAN switch you should see a couple of LED's near the ethernet connector like this:

Battery state of a LSI MegaSAS 9260

A few days ago a collegue asked me to check the battery status of a raid controller. He gave me the login to his machine and I found this raid controller: 

Meassure disk performance

This tutorial was tested on Slackware Linux only but should work for any other Unix with some minor changes in the iostat options. Keep in mind that some file systems (zfs, vxfs etc.) have their own tools to measure disk performance. In this case you should refer to them.
To meassure the disk performance of a specific disk use iostat - not dd. You can use dd to create some load but not to meassure the performance of a disk. The usage of iostat is very easy, a simple example for /dev/sdb could look like this: 

Remove carriage return ^M from a text file

Sometimes I have text files with a trailing carriage return character like this:

# vi file.txt
...
"foo"^M
"foo"^M
...

Password status

Today I needed to check a old web server running a few simple web sites. The owner of the server asked me to check all non system users and their access rights. The first thing I did was checking for all available users: