Emergency

LVM snapshots can be really handy when you’re trying to take a backup of a running virtual machine.

While cleaning up a room at home in preparation for some new flooring, I found my original documents from when I first became certified as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in Texas.

Although it’s not a glamorous subject for system administrators, backups are necessary for any production environment.

This situation might not affect everyone, but it struck me today and left me scratching my head.

The pv command is one that I really enjoy using but it’s also one that I often forget about.

If you use Fedora 11 in a virtualized environment, you may have seen this error recently if you’ve updated to apr-1.

Servers with hot swappable drive bays are always handy.

Most linux distributions use some type of mechanism to gracefully stop daemons and unmount storage volumes during a reboot or shutdown.

When it comes to frustrating parts of the Linux kernel, OOM killer takes the cake.

I found a server last week that was having severe issues with disk I/O to the point where most operations were taking many minutes to complete.

If your system abruptly loses power, or if a RAID card is beginning to fail, you might see an ominous message like this within your logs:

I found myself wrestling with a server where the Plesk interface suddenly became unavailable without any user intervention.

Here’s a pretty weird kernel panic that I came across the other day:

This error completely stumped me a couple of weeks ago.

This error will pop up when binary logging is enabled, and someone thought it was a good idea to remove binary logs from the filesystem:

It’s not abnormal for qmail act oddly at times with Plesk, and sometimes it can use 100% of the CPU.

Table corruption in MySQL can often wreak havoc on the auto_increment fields.

If you find that /dev/null is no longer a block device, and it causes issues during init on Red Hat boxes, you will need to follow these steps to return things to normal:

If you find that someone has done a recursive chmod or chown on a server, don’t fret.

If up2date throws some horrible Python errors and rpm says “rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries”, you can restore your system to normality with the following: