code in the ruins

I just think it's really interesting that Oracle is buying BEA and Sun is buying MySQL, and that both acquisitions were announced on the same day.  That is all.

This weekend I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while - I installed the dd-wrt firmware on my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. dd-wrt is based on the original firmware from Linksys, but it adds a ton of new features.

Since installing it three days ago, I've done various things that I couldn't have done before:

• Static DHCP leases for my machines, so they always get the same IP address. This also makes the router act as a DNS server for free.
• SSH access to the router
• WPA2 wireless security
• Increased the transmission power of the router's wireless signal
• Set up NTP to keep the router's time current
• Set up IPv6 on my home network using 6to4. The router will automatically assign IPv6 addresses to all clients.
• Mounted a Samba share on the router

I love doing this kind of thing. dd-wrt is a fantastic piece of work, and has increased the value of my router a great deal.

The most satisfying bit was the IPv6 setup.  I find it kind of nifty that simply having a single IPv4 address entitles me to several quintillion contiguous IPv6 addresses. You know, just in case.

Since the boot drive on my home server, obelix, died, I've been trying to get at its data.  The large part of the important data had been on a separate drive, mounted as /home, so there was nothing of critical importance, but I still wanted to recover some of the config files and such that I'd spent years setting up.

I knew that it wouldn't be easy - the first sign of trouble with the server, after all, was when it hung during boot with the message "Remounting root partition read/write."  Sure enough, when I pulled out the drive and put it in another machine, it couldn't be mounted, not even read-only.

First thing I did was to run fsck on the malfunctioning reiserfs partition. After a while, it exited, telling me that the drive had bad blocks. Great.

So I ran badblocks and got a list of five block numbers, and then fsck.reiserfs –fix-fixable, passing it the list of bad blocks, to see if it could work around them. It choked on one, telling me I'd have to run fsck.reiserfs –rebuild-tree on the partition. When I did, it died at the same point - I wouldn't be able to repair the filesystem while it was still on the malfunctioning drive. I'd need to dump it out to a file on a good drive. Unfortunately, I didn't have anything handy that could hold the entire partition, so I took the bad drive to work with me.

Once there, I hooked the drive back up and dumped it to a file on a network share (thanks for the space, John). As fsck.reiserfs recommended, I used dd_rescue, which can nicely handle bad blocks by zeroing them out on the destination. It completed successfully, finding several bad blocks and dealing with them gracefully. Then I ran fsck.reiserfs –rebuild-tree on the dumped file. It also completed successfully this time, so I held my breath and mounted the dumped file with mount -t reiserfs -o ro,loop, and, thankfully, it worked. I'm now copying everything I need onto a good drive.

Even though it wasn't that important, I'm glad it worked out. I've never had to recover a bad drive before, so now that I've had the chance, I'll know more about what to do when the time comes again.

In the evening on Monday, December 31, my venerable home Linux server, obelix, went down for the last time.  His boot drive developed a bad block and could no longer be mounted.  Efforts are still underway to recover the data from the drive, but on Tuesday, I made the decision to decommission obelix for good.

obelix was a Dell Dimension L667R with a Pentium III and 384 megabytes of RAM.  I've had him for about seven years.  I bought him (refurbished!) on a whim, somewhere in the distant past.  He was extremely versatile; he acted as web, file, and database server, as well as providing services to our network as a Samba domain controller and an LDAP, DHCP, and DNS server.  In his early years, he was also my primary workstation, running countless window managers, desktop applications, and games over the years.  Due to his having a FireWire card installed, I used him to capture DV from my video camera to edit on another machine.  He spent most of his lifetime as a Gentoo Linux box, no doubt logging thousands of hours of software compilation.

Until recently, he served my websites over my home connection, although since I recently began hosting with Dreamhost, he no longer performed this function.  This was a major factor in my decision not to stand him back up after the disk failure.  Although he had still been providing network, file, and database services, I knew that I would no longer need a dedicated server at home once the websites had been moved to external hosting.  So I moved his large data disk to another computer and dismantled the Samba domain, which was more or less unnecessary to begin with.  His primary function as a database server was to host my Amarok music collection database, which was easily rebuilt after he went down.

I will miss having obelix around, though; I named him after my favorite Asterix character, I've had him longer than I've known my own children, and I knew him backwards and forwards.  Tinkering with Gentoo, Apache, MySQL, OpenLDAP, and Samba on obelix was how I began to truly solidify my knowledge of Linux system administration; using obelix absolutely helped get me where I am today.

It's somehow fitting that he should go out on the last day of 2007; it's been quite a year.  There's been a lot of anxiety, some deaths, a birth, some sickness, some health, some successes, some failures, a new job, many highs, many lows.  It hasn't been the easiest year to live through in a lot of ways.  In no way is the loss of obelix anywhere near a significant event in the face of what's happened this year, but it does sort of reinforce the feelings I have about 2008 - cautiously hoping for a clean slate.  The new year always brings new things and does away with some of the old.  Whether that's for good or ill, we'll just have to wait and see.