HTNet

After moving it to its new home, the web server at my office decided not to boot up. The server runs on CentOS4 and is configured to perform updates daily. It choked during init and the last messages shown before the system froze are as follows:

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,22)
Kernel panic - not synching: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,22)

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• The Unix Toolbox describes a bunch of useful Linux/Unix/BSD commands to help you use the command line more effectively.
• If you like to have a list of common (and not so common) Linux commands in alphabetical order, then check out O’Reilly’s Alphabetical Directory of Linux Commands.
• Pixelbeat also has a nice list of Linux commands grouped categorically.
• If you’ve just started with Linux, you’d appreciate Linux Newbie Guide’s Linux Shortcuts and Commands.
• Want to really get up to speed on your Unix command vocabulary? You’ll find it hard to beat Learn UNIX in 10 Minutes.
• Want a printable Linux guide? Download Unix/Linux Command Reference, a one paged PDF document that you can print out and stick somewhere near your terminal.

Read through, try out, understand, enjoy and more importantly share!

I’ve been using rsnapshot to backup the /home partition on our Samba server since God knows how long. rsnapshot takes the pain out of backup maintenance on Linux systems and is very easy to set up.

rsnapshot is one of those tools that you just need to configure once and once working as expected, there will be no more tinkering with it ever.

To help you get started with minimal problems, go through the documentation. It’s written systematically and should give you more than sufficient information.

As a server administrator, there’s nothing that bugs me more than services that die all of a sudden. For a web server, an hour’s down time could mean losing a few hundred visitors. This could translate to a loss of advertising income too if you serve ads on your web pages.

I found a snippet of code that I modified to use as a simple service monitoring and restarting tool that I would like to share with all of you.

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One priceless benefit of having a web hosting provider that gives you SSH access to the server is that there’s a wealth of command line tools that can make data management very easy for you. In this post, I’m going to illustrate how you can use some of MySQL’s command line tools to back up (export) and restore (import) your database.

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