Matraex, Inc Blog

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on doing some in depth “System Discovery” work for a client.

The client came to us after a major employee restructuring,  during which they lost ALL of the technical knowledge of their network.
The potentially devestating business move on their part turned into a very intriguing challenge for me.

They asked me to come in and document what service each of their 3 Linux servers. 
As I dug in I found that their network had some very unique, intelligent solutions:

• A reliable production network
• Thin Client Linux printing stations,  remotely connected via VPN
• Several Object Oriented PHP based web applications

Several open source products had been combined to create robust solutions

• LAMP (Ubuntu and CentOS)
• CUPS
• Subversion
• PHP, PEAR
• MySQL
• openvpn
• hylafax

It has been a very rewarding experience to document the systems and give ownership of the systems, network and processes back to the owner.

The  documentation I have provided included

• A high level network diagram as a quick reference overview for new administrators and developers
• An overall application and major network, server and node object description
• Detailed per server/node description with connection documentation,  critical processes , important paths and files and dependencies
• Contact Information for the people and companies that the systems rely on.

As a business owner myself,  I have tried to help the client recognize that even when they use an outside consultant,  it is VERY important that they maintain details of their critical business processes INSIDE of their company.  Their might not be anything in business that is as rewarding as giving ownership of a “lost” system back to a client.

Matraex has officially upgraded our web based mail client from Squirrelmail to Roundcube.

Roundcube is a modern mail client utilizing newer technologies for faster and more feature rich mail interaction.  Roundcube runs on our Linux webservers, utilizing Apache, PHP and MySQL.  The software connects to the mail server using the IMAP protocol.

All address book contacts and preferences were imported to Roundcube from Squirellmail at the time of the transition.

As well as updating and implementing their own technologies, Matraex provides server administration, open source production implementation and software customizations to business as a service.

Users with questions about the new mail service or Matraex Consulting Services should contact:

Michael Blood
Matraex, Inc
208.344.1115
www.matraex.com

I just installed Debian Lenny on a Dell 2650 with an OLD PERC 3 RAID controller.

I then installed the afaapps package from Dell’s website (http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R85529&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=112003)
Use this link or just search for ‘afaapps’ under the Drivers and Downloads section of the Dell support site.

 After extracting the rpm from the downloaded file I ran alien against the file to turn it into a debian file

#apt-get install alien
#alien -d –scripts afaapps-2.8-0.i386.rpm 

Now just install the created debian package

#dpkg -i afaapps_2.8-1_i386.deb

Now that you have installed the afacli you can run it at the command line prompt which will open the PERC command line “FASTCMD>”
Then you’ll open / connect to the RAID controller using “open afa0″

#afacli
FASTCMD> open afa0
Executing: open “afa0″

A simple ‘disk list’ command to find out what your disk situation looks like

AFA0> disk list
Executing: disk list

B:ID:L  Device Type     Blocks    Bytes/Block Usage            Shared
——  ————–  ——— ———– —————- ——
0:00:0   Disk            35566478  512         Initialized     NO
0:01:0   Disk            287132440 512         Initialized     NO
0:02:0   Disk            287132440 512         Initialized     NO

you may have to initialize your disks by typeing ‘disk initialize 1′ and ‘disk initialize 2′ to make sure that the container can access them,  you can see in my example above that my two disks are already initialized.

Now I will create a volume on disk 1 and mirror that disk to disk 2

AFA0> container create volume 1
AFA0> container create mirror 1 2

At the bottom of your screen you should see the status of the mirroring Job,  something like.

Stat:OK!, Task:100, Func:MSC Ctr:1, State:RUN  16.2%

Once the job completes you can partition and format the disk.  Check the label on the disk by running:

AFA0> container list
Executing: container list
Num          Total  Oth Chunk          Scsi   Partition
Label Type   Size   Ctr Size   Usage   B:ID:L Offset:Size
—– —— —— — —— ——- —— ————-
 0      xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 1    Mirror  136GB            Valid   0:01:0 64.0KB: 136GB
 /dev/sdb                              0:04:0 64.0KB: 136GB

From this I can see that I will need to partition and format disk “/dev/sdb”

Have fun!  And if I can help you on it let me know.