Mirroring an existing and encrypted disk with mdadm

I have all my data (personal, music etc.) stored on one 1.5TB disk and to avoid manual backups to external devices I want (need) to create a mirror. The disk itself is encrypted and formatted with ext3. The big picture is like this:

Using a 2GB Jaz drive with Solaris

If you have a old Jaz drive and want to use under Solaris, then this might be interesting for you. First build in your drive into the server. Then boot and make sure that volfs is not running (you can turn it on later again): 

Configuring YUM

I have a small VM running RHEL 6 (just for playing around). The installation was some kind hard - I have to do nearly everything by hand... Anyway the operating system itself is running now. To automatically install software from the DVD I would like to use YUM, but I have to set it up first. There is a main configuration file - yum.conf which resides in /etc. This is the default content of it: 

Configuring NTP in Solaris 10

First, go to /etc/inet and create ntp.conf. Define your NTP server and a place for the drift file:

# cd /etc/inet
# vi ntp.conf
server 172.16.10.51
driftfile /var/ntp/ntp.drift

Disable MSI on a bnx2 driver

Today I had a customer telling me that his network on one machine is slow sometimes. I took a look at it and and saw some Broadcom devices (I don't remember the model) and the bnx2 driver loaded. Also both devices were attached to a bonding device. First step was to figure out the active interface:

Obtaining NIC/LAN information in HP-UX

First find out which devices are available, by which dirver it is used, hardware path etc:

# ioscan -fnClan
Class     I  H/W Path       Driver   S/W State   H/W Type     Description
==========================================================================
lan       0  0/4/2/0        iether   CLAIMED     INTERFACE    HP AB352-60003 PCI/PCI-X 1000Base-T Dual-port Core
lan       1  0/4/2/1        iether   CLAIMED     INTERFACE    HP AB352-60003 PCI/PCI-X 1000Base-T Dual-port Core
lan       2  0/6/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0  iether   CLAIMED     INTERFACE    HP AD337-60001 PCIe 1000Base-T Dual-port Adapter
lan       3  0/6/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/1  iether   CLAIMED     INTERFACE    HP AD337-60001 PCIe 1000Base-T Dual-port Adapter

Configuring NTP in HP-UX

Assuming 192.168.1.1 is your local NTP server, then you need to edit /etc/rc.config.d/netdaemons first. Add your NTP server to NTPDATE_SERVER and change the value for XNTPD from 0 (zero) to 1 (one):

Setting the keyboard layout with hal

Everytime when I start my X it has a US keyboard layout. After login I could change it with:

$ setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout de

to work with my german keyboard layout. But I have to do it everytime when I log in, which is not very professional. Even modifying the xorg.conf to load the german keyboard layout did not work:

Setting up a pppd server

Introduction

I tried to clean up my space a little bit and found some old modems and a analogue telephone system. Perfect for playing around, setting up a pppd server and client and remember some old times. And so I decided to create this small workshop. Maybe somebody wants/needs to do the same one day. Currently I am using the following hardware:

Extracting images from a pdf file

This week I went to the local photo shop in our town to scan some documents. I gave the salesperson my documents and he told me to come back in a couple of hours. I returned and received my scanned douments. At home I figured out that he gave me a CD with a couple of pdf files (my fault, I forgot to tell him that I need images). Here is a trick that will extract images from a pdf document: