• RHEL 8 CentOS 8, Alma Linux 8, Rocky Linux 8 System Not Booting with RAID or on other servers/computers Solution for dracut and initramfs missing kernel modules


    This seems to have changed for RHEL 8 where a normal dracut to update your initramfs creates a system that only boots for the running kernel. For example if you have Kernel 5 and then chroot into a RHEL 8 variant which uses kernel 4.18, and run dracut, it seems that by default the system will be unbootable. It is also the case that if you move your RAID array or drives to another server that it will be unbootable, because dracut seems to only include modules needed for the curre........
  • Linux grub not using UUID for the root device instead it uses /dev/sda1 or other device name solution


    You can read lots of posts about this issue but there is not much information about why this is the case or how grub determines the root= device name. Some even suggest modifying grub.cfg manually which is a disaster as the next kernel update will cause grub to revert back to the device name. For most people this won't be an issue but those using template system, automated deployments and working in embedded may run into this issue with custom embedded and created minimal kernel........
  • Centos 7 not mounting /etc/fstab partitions


    If you are doing a custom deployment and image, make sure that when you rsync'd or tar'd that you didn't mess up the symlnk of /etc/mtab to /proc/self/mounts ln --force -s /proc/self/mounts /etc/mtab Will fix this........
  • GlusterFS HowTo Tutorial For Distributed Storage in Docker, Kubernetes, LXC, KVM, Proxmox


    This can be used on almost anything, since Gluster is a userspace tool, based on FUSE. This means that all Gluster appears as to any application is just a directory. Applications don't need specific support for Gluster, so long as you can tell the application to use a certain directory for storage. One application can be for redundant and scaled storage, including for within Docker and Kubernetes, LXC, Proxmox, OpenStack, etc or just your image/web/video files or even da........
  • How To Enable Linux Swapfile Instead of Partition Ubuntu Mint Debian Centos


    This may be necessary if you have a VM or if for some reason you just want to be more efficient with your space and have the flexibility of changing your swap space at will. What we mean is the ability to use a "swap file" or similar to the Windows "pagefile" that normally resides on the root or c: partition of Windows. Here's all you have to do and then you to can have a single partiton with everything, including the swap file on the root partition if you........
  • bash cannot execute permission denied


    $ ./test.sh bash: ./test.sh: Permission denied This happens normally because you are on a partition that was mounted as "user" and without the exec option. Also be sure to add exec at the end so no other options set noexec. Change your fstab or add exec to your mount options: /dev/md127 /mnt/md127 ext4 auto,nofail,noatime,rw,user,exec 0 0 ........
  • Linux How To Stop Missing Drive from Halting Boot Process in fstab


    When you automount a drive in /etc/fstab even if it's not important like an external drive that you only use sometimes and is not required for booting, it will prevent a successfuly boot. If you disable quiet mode for booting you will see something like below "A start job is running for dev-disk ...." How do we fix an fstab entry from preventi........
  • Convert and install to LUKS Encrypted Drive Ubuntu 18.04 19.10 Linux Mint and Debian Based Linux


    The reason for doing this is that the installer doesn't seem to work properly for LUKS and the server installer doesn't even support LUKS anymore. When you use the GUI install on Desktop for LUKS it won't boot and will just hang after you enter your password. So the only reliable way is to do it ourselves. 1.) Make a default minimal install of Ubuntu 2.) Have a secondary disk on the server or VM. 3.)........
  • CentOS 8 how to convert to a bootable mdadm RAID software array


    The cool thing here is that we only need 1 drive to make a RAID 10 or RAID 1 array, we just tell the Linux mdadm utility that the other drive is "missing" and we can then add our original drive to the array after booting into our new RAID array. Step#1 Install tools we need yum -y install mdadm rsync Step #2 Create your partitions on the drive that will be our RAID array Here I assume it is /dev........
  • Ubuntu/Debian/Linux won't boot and drops to Busybox shell after cloning HDD with dd


    I don't recall having this issue in the distant past but nowadays at least Debian seems to be very picky about this. I used dd to copy one hard drive to another and tried booting it. Everything seemed fine with grub working but each time it would drop to the busybox shell. There is no particular error so this is misleading. Normally the first things you would check are to make sure your fstab is correct (that the UUID is correct)and that you've updated grub.&........
  • Linux Unable to mount cifs/smb share in /etc/fstab


    sudo mount -a Unable to find suitable address. [35758.706993] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation. [35758.707247] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -111 [35795.476160] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation. [35795.476346] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -111 When the above happens "Unable eto find suitable address" it usually means the smb nam........
  • Migrate Centos 7 from Single HDD to mdadm RAID 10 array:


    Done on Centos 7.3 very important as clearly based on older guides it was a lot easier and more simpler! Hint do not use grub2-install! If you have trouble booting after this check this CentOS mdadm RAID booting/fixing guide. One huge caveat if you are an oldschool user or sysadmin who has avoided UEFIbooting The nor........
  • Migrating from Linux Mint 17.2 mdadm RAID array to a new one (because I upgraded to larger drives).


    1.) Replicate the number of partitions in your new drives. gdisk /dev/sda gdisk /dev/sdb I created 3 partitions of the same same size. partition #1: +1G (/boot) partition #2: +60G (swap) partition #3: rest of it (/) #note if you are using GPT/gdisk you need to create separate a partition at least 1MB in size (in my case I would a 4th partition and mark it type ef02).........
  • Errors were found while checking the disk drive for /.


    Iwill start by saying I think I know what caused this boot-time error on Linux Mint but should also apply to Debian and Ubuntu. I changed my BIOS time to several hours in the past to match the current time, but this caused Linux to think there were incorrect filesystem times. The problem is that it seems when you hit this I am not sure what is happening, it doesn't seem to be doing fsck and hangs without prompting the user. What I have found is that........
  • Mount a SMB Samba share in fstab Linux Debian/Ubuntu/Centos


    Add the following to fstab where 192.168.1.125/Media is the samba share and where /home/homeuser/Downloads is where you want to mount. Change user and pass to what is needed (if no pass is required it still works fine with the below). //192.168.1.125/Media /home/homeuser/Downloads cifs user=guest,pass=bla 0 0 mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //192.168.1.125/Media, &nbs........
  • Centos 6 how to guide convert LVM non-RAID into mdadm 1/10 RAID array live without reinstalling


    Here is the scenario you or a client have a remote machine that was installed as a standard/default minimal Centos 6.x machine on a single disk with LVM for whatever reason. Often many people do not know how to install it to a RAID array so it is common to have this problem and why reinstall if you don't need to? In some cases on a remote system you can't easily reinstall without physical or KVM access. So in this case you add a second physical or disk or already ha........
  • mount -o bind permanent in /etc/fstab howto


    mount -o bind /somedir /anotherdir In /etc/fstab /somedir /anotherdir none bind 0 0........
  • Howto Convert Xen Image to KVM


    #count=10000 makes an image of 10000MB make sure your image is at least the same as your existing dd if=/dev/zero of=yourimage.img bs=1M count=10000 # losetup -fv newimage.raw # fdisk -cu /dev/loop0 # kpartx -a /dev/loop0 # dd if= of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 # e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 # resize2fs /dev/mapper/loop0p1 # a lot of guides tell you to edit /etc/fst........
  • Migrate Linux Mint OS from one drive to another


    mount -o bind /proc /sda2/proc mount -o bind /dev/ /sda2/dev mount -o bind /sys /sda2/sys chroot /sda2 mint / # mount -o bind /proc /sda2/proc mint / # mount -o bind /dev/ /sda2/dev mint / # mount -o bind /sys /sda2/sys mint / # chroot /sda2 mint / # cd ~ mint ~ # ls Desktop mint ~ # cd / mint / # ls bin Desktop dev-temp home&nb........
  • How to view an EFI GPT partition in Linux


    Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes 256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38761 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16128 * 512 = 8257536 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 38........
  • Centos 5.5 RAID 1 boot issue


    I installed 5.5 with a 300GB RAID 1 partition (boot is also on this partition). It booted up fine the first few times until after I used a Live CD and accessed the array, and it became named /dev/md127 for some reason. Now whenI boot into CentOS I get a kernel panic and different errors, once I got "invalid superblock", even though the array is fine (it didn't happen again, probably because I was sure to dismount and stop the mdadm array properly). Here's what........
  • Viewing and Connecting to an SMB Samba Share on Windows/Linux/Unix


    This will give you the basic info needed to browse and connect to Samba shares from the command line. From the GUI of Gnome or KDE etc, it is pretty standard and straight forward. However, I've found very little guides on how to do it from the command line and if you're like me, a nerd who prefers command line for its simplicity and for remote use, this is the way to go. First get a list of all the Samba/SMB shares on the target. smbclient -L hostname........
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