Maybe you read some of my posts on software raid and lvm, or maybe you have a spare pc lying around and want a box you can use as a small personal server and are wondering about some tips for running it with less hassle. I am sharing a few things that I have learnt about running a personal server (though some will apply to any Linux server or always-on machine) that make my life as a part-time admin easier. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor necessarily the correct way to run a box, but it works well for me and so should be useful to others as well.
Continue reading Running a personal server
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I do a fair bit of Debian/Ubuntu packaging at work (kind of on the side) and have had several people tell me that although the New Maintainer’s guide (http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ or it is available offline in the package maint-guide and also has some translations) does do an introduction it is a bit hard to follow, particularly if you have a really simple program you want to package up and release. The New Maintainer’s guide does assume you have an existing tarball to work from, and that is often not the case if you just want to package up something you have made so I thought I would write a detailed walkthrough of packaging up something simple. I have been building a backup pc our of mostly spare parts, including several old disks. To get the most reliability and space our of the disks, which are all different sizes, I decided to use software raid to mirror each chunk of data in pairs (raid 0) and then use LVM on top of each . . . → Read More: Fixing broken LVM and Sofware Raid on Linux I do a fair bit of packaging of Debian and Ubuntu packages at work, often having to make tweaks to upstream packages. I used to just hack the upstream source directly, but have now discovered dpatch. dpatch is a clever addition to the Debian packaging process which allows all your changes to be stored as patch files . . . → Read More: dpatch – using patch files in Debian packaging On Saturday I hosted a group for 30 people at IBM Hursley for a Hampshire Linux User Group meeting. We had a good set of talks, including Andy Stanford-Clark talking about his twittering house and mousetraps as well as the twittering Red Funnel Ferries [telegraph.co.uk] and his energy monitoring via Current Cost devices. I seem to recall Mark Shuttlework saying in an interview (possibly for Linux Format, possibly somewhere else) that he wanted to work with Debian to get fixed release cycles to help the Debian->Ubuntu porting efforts – It looks like he succeeded in planting the idea! I am looking forward to predictable Debian releases. The most exciting thing I know of being attempted in the next Debian release (Squeeze) is the multiarch support, which should make running 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS much better (currently some apps can install if you install the ia32-libs package however others need to be installed in a 32 bit chroot because they have too difficult dependencies to resolve). Redhat adopted another approach where 32 bit is more of a default than 64 bit than on Debian (On Debian a 64 bit install has absolutely no 32 bit support other than the ia32-libs package). Most 32 bit stuff seems to work ok on a 64 bit Redhat box but I don’t know how their approach relates to multiarch. The idea with multiarch is to natively support both 32 and 64 bit packages on the same system (I believe by changing the installer to put 32 bit libs in /lib32/, whereas I believe redhat uses /lib64/ for the 64 bit stuff and /lib/ is still 32 bit only). A copy of the Debian announcement is below: |
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