dufault.info

Ramblings of a phone weenie, Linux sysadmin, and other things geeky

Hotswap a SCSI, SAS, or SATA drive in Linux

There seems to be not a lot of information on Google about this, thus, I post.
At my work, the majority of our servers have hot-swappable drive bays — however, Linux doesn’t usually automatically notice the drive is gone. Worse, sometimes it doesn’t even notice new drives hooked up.
Now, SCSI and SAS both support hot-plugging [...]

The Linux Magic SysRq key

I find it shocking how many people don’t know about this neat Linux key combination that let’s you execute various low level commands regardless of the system’s state (as long as it’s running and hasn’t panicked.)
From the Wikipedia page:
It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.
How [...]

Forcibly Triggering a Kernel Panic on Linux

This might sound strange, as people usually want to fix or prevent these from happening, I’m trying to test/ create a method of logging kernel panic messages to a remote logging server. All of the existing tutorials I found on the net were for Linux 2.4, or were incomplete.
My method involves creating a Linux [...]

A better way to find your BIOS version in Linux

Run this awesome command as root:
dd if=/dev/mem bs=32768 skip=31 count=1 | strings -n 10 | grep -i bios

A Script to Remux MKV Videos Into MP4 Videos

I’ve written a script that dumps the audio and video from an mkv file, encodes the audio into a two channel AAC stream, and remuxes the audio/video into a MP4 wrapper so it’s playable on the Xbox 360. The script is Linux-only, obviously, written in bash using mplayer, normalize-audio, mencoder, MP4Box, mkvinfo, and mkvextract [...]