Linux Administration, Virtual Servers and Services, Virtualization

I started with the very nice ping script from the consttype blog, but I didn't like that the graph was so hard to read with multiple ping hosts that had similar latencies, and it would time out with more than three IP addresses, and that it took the best ping rather than the average.   So I have changed it to use a faster ping, report a ping of 1000 when it fails to connect (so you get a spike rather than a gap) and be linkable with ping_ipaddress format.

Copying a Logical Volume or Partition over SSH

This should only be attempted on either a snapshot lvm volume, or an unmounted hard drive partition!

Using ssh and dd you can copy any LVM or (unmounted) hard drive partition over the internet to a new machine easily.  You can do a "push" or "pull" copy.  Here's a "push" copy:

dd if=/dev/vg0/partition-snapshot bs=1k |
   ssh remotehost dd of=/dev/vg0/partition-destination bs=1k

In choosing a Linux desktop, I want something both highly stable and great looking.  I stare at these monitors for 10-14 hours a day!  Speed and ease of configuration/use are also important.  This post is about my journey from KDE4 to XFCE4, and is also a review of sorts.

** Note ** I've sold this card since, but I'll repost this in case it is useful to anyone:
Just a reference in case anyone else is trying to figure out how to get dual head working (with screen stretch) on Ubuntu in particular since Ubuntu doesn’t figure it out by itself. Took me awhile to get this figured out.
The magic lines (in “Device") are this

Here’s one for the hall of fame of terrible error messages.
When trying to add a mirror to a LVM volume on a linux box, you get this message:
#lvconvert -m 1 disks/root /dev/sdb2

Not enough PVs with free space available for parallel allocation.
Consider --alloc anywhere if desperate.
This message is completely useless, we have TONS of free extents on both disks. So we check for help

The best way to redirect a page is to use Apache's mod_rewrite.  Notoriously cryptic it is, but it's fast and not too hard to figure out for basic things.  Here's an example mod_rewrite to redirect http to https.   Put it in your apache config preferably, or your .htaccess file if you can't modify your config directly.

Ever try to transfer a domain off of Network Solutions before it expires? Don’t do it until you read this and avoid my mistake. Here’s the process.