by siyb

Over a year ago I installed the first harddrive upgrade on Sycorax, the siyb.de server. (Un)fortunately harddrive space doesn’t last forever, so that recent events forced me to upgrade the storage hardware once more. Due to a lack of money I choose to use mdadm to create a software raid above 4 newly purchased harddrives that have been connected to a PCI SATA II controller, anything else would have force me to buy a new motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Ingredients:

• 1* SATA Controller PROMISE SATA300 TX4
• 4* SAMSUNG SATAII 750 GB F1

Although I am really happy with my Seagate harddrives that I have used in the first Raid, I have chosen to use Samsung hdds this time because they are quiet, cool and supposedly last for a long time (we will see :>). This report will feature hardware assembly as well as setup of the encrypted software raid.

First of all I had to prepare the server for the new hardware by connecting an additional cable to my Enermax Liberty ELT400AWT and installing an extra fan, to cool the hdds, that would be placed above one another and therefore require some active cooling.

After installing the controller card the hdds could be connected and the machine was ready to be turned on again

Lets build the raid, I found some good tutorials online that helped me setting up the mdadm raid, they can be found in the appendix. I suggest that you take a look at them if you are planning to create a software raid yourself, my notes are just “guidance” and a small reference, but I will not going to explain any little detail. Anyway, here is what I did (Debian Lenny, standard Debian kernel in use):

Installation of required packages:

apt-get install hashalot cryptsetup mdadm

Software raids consist of partitions rather than physical devices, so naturally the first thing to do was to create partitions on the new drives that I could use to assemble a raid, I choose to use cfdisk for comfort, but you might as well consider fdisk or other tools.

cfdisk /dev/sdb
cfdisk /dev/sdc
cfdisk /dev/sdd
cfdisk /dev/sde

I created one partition per drive, which left me with a total number of 4 partitions to use with my raid5.

mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=5 –raid-devices=4 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1

Before formatting the raid device /dev/md0, I took some time to encrypt the device:

cryptsetup –verbose –verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/md0

After that formatting is a piece of cake

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0 cryptraid
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/cryptraid

Adding the following lines to /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab allows the device to be mounted automatically when starting the computer

In /etc/crypttab:
cryptraid /dev/md0 none luks

In /etc/fstab:
/dev/mapper/cryptraid /mnt/storage ext3 defaults 0 0

The result:

/dev/mapper/storage 2063G 13G 1945G 0.7 [………………………………………………………….] /mnt/storage

• Linux Wiki - mdadm
• Rebuilding software raids
• Linux Home Networking - Linux Software Raid howto

by siyb

I realized today that there is a new Eggdrop version available and took the freedom to create a xMind release containing the new Eggdrop version. Please note that xMind development has been “stopped” some time ago and that I will only fix critical Bugs and add features if I need them. Both installers have been tested and should work, please refer to the xMind wiki if you have difficulties installing. If you do not want to use 1.6.19 I suggest that you download r1 that still uses 1.6.18.

xMind ListonBeta6.1r2 .tar
xMind ListonBeta6.1r2 .run

by siyb

While I was surfing the net today I came across a familiar artist by the name of Ryan8bit, that participated in the Dark Side of Phobos compilation/sampler that was discussed on geek\o/sphere before. According to his lastfm page, most of ryan’s songs are metal covers of videogame related themes such as the ones from Megaman, Descent and Zelda (to mention some of them).

Check out his songs, I assure you it’s worth it :>

by siyb

mount.at will go down at approximately 14:00 CET today due to maintenance related issues. Please be patient, we will try to keep the downtime as short as possible. In the period of this downtime the following services will not be available: jabber, svn, web, irc, game and teamspeakserver.

Please keep in mind that you are able to reach our IRC network by using a different server.

//edit: jabber service is available now again, please note that you will have to reregister with the icq/msn transport(s)
//edit2: Man this is really beginning to PMO … well mount.at will hopefully be online again tomorrow …

by siyb

Eight days after the release of version 1.1, version 1.2 has been completed and may be acquired from our Debian depot or its git repository. The plugin loader as well as the clientsettings option window have been remodeled and plugins are now provided as special formatted tarballs that can be easily installed using the well known plugin installer. Additionally, the IRC away system has been fully implemented now and is therefore ready to be used.

Some nasty and pretty annoying bugs have also been fixed, for instance, all channelflags will be excluded from the nick autocompletion now. For a full list of changes, bugfixes and additions please take a look at the changelog. Windows users will not be able to run this version of tIRC, I simply do not have enough time to modify the code so that it is fully windows compliant.

The platform independence of tIRC defiantly is an important matter, as the client was in fact designed to run on many different platforms, but ever since the introduction of the trayicon and the trayicon flashing mechanism in particular, platform independence was at stake, due to the two completely different approaches of winico, that relies on the windows api and Freedock. The tIRC project is therefore looking for a windows maintainer / packager that is capable of fixing windows related issues within the tIRC code as well as creating full installer packages, for one click installations.

If you are an interested, capable and motivated windows user, that is willing to invest some time and sweat creating a tIRC windows port please let me know. In the meantime, if you are using Windows and want to run tIRC you will have to find a workaround yourself, submit your patch if you did :>.