lowfi

I have recently been doing a little renovating of my fileserver, and ran into a heap of trouble. The fileserver originally ran on a RAID 5 with 3 disks on Debian GNU/Linux, no LVM. I bought 2 more disks and wanted to RAID them together and put the whole system on LVM for more modularity. My approach was to install Ubuntu with LVM on my 2 new disks then transfer my important data over to it from my old system, then add the RAID 5 to Logical Volume. I had everything set up to the point where I was adding the old RAID to the new LVM, when I realized that I had added it to the wrong volume group, because I had failed to name it properly. I then used the command “pvremove -ff /dev/md2″ in hopes of being able to then add it to my other logical volume (my home directory).

At this point, I don’t know why, but I restarted the computer.

BAD IDEA!

To my dismay, that whole volume group, which happend to have my root filesystem on it was dead! After some googling I tried to run the recovery tools that come with LVM2 and the tool uuid_recover to no avail. I was starting to take a damage assesment of the lost data. I was not enough to cry about, thankfully, but enough to feel that feeling in your stomach..you know the one. I sat there trying different live cds that were LVM aware to see if I could mount my data. No luck there.
Somewhere in my mucking around, I had managed to overwrite my Logical Volume descriptor metadata with the “pvcreate” command on top of what could have been recoverable volumes, so they were very much invisible to any Logical Volume aware tool.

Here is how I got my system back:

In a last-ditch-ghetto-hack effort to recover my data I threw in the Ubuntu install CD that I had used to initially to set up the system and loaded up the partitioner.
It recognized my RAID partitions fine and even that they were Physical volumes for LVM. Great! From there I set up all of my logical volumes EXACTLY how they were initially, without including the RAID 5 that I was trying to add. I named the Volume Group the same name, and the logical volumes the same with the same sizes exactly. In the Ubuntu installer you can specify whether or not to overwrite existing data on the partitions. MAKE SURE NOT TO OVERWRITE THE PARTITIONS! After this was all configured, I went ahead and wrote the partition tables to disk and as soon as that finished, I popped the CD out and rebooted the computer. Viola, my system was back.

It’s a little known fact that Webrings are comming back in a big way. In other future news, Frank Chu is the logical choice as the next President. I found out about him on Laughingsquid just recently and after some research, I have concluded that he is the logical choice as the next president. With quotes like:

Or some Tentrological counterparts . . . maybe even some Zegnatronic humanoids . . . or maybe an Octrological a-steroids . . . or maybe even an Omegatronic androids. Maybe some kind of combinations that were, you know, like a Betatronic human. A bionic man.

How could you not be a fan of this dude. He is so coherent, yet so out-there it makes me wonder if he is just a normal guy that is doing some kind of social expirament. Then again, maybe he is just batshit crazy. Link to full text.

As you may or may not know, this site is powered by the Wordpress engine. I used the K2 theme as a starting point for it’s ajax comments and live search code (neither of which seem to be working as of this post..). The feel that I was going for is sterile (stark white background) and organic (the heart) because the nature of the site’s name. It is still a work in progress, but so far I am happy with the results. I know it looks horrible in IE, but thats the Microsofts damn fault for making a shitty non-standards compliant POS of a browser.

The crown achievement of the site is the rollover heart menu at the top. It’s done in CSS, which turned out to be a pain to get working (still doesn’t in IE, see above comments). I may retool it with the sprite graphic technique thats descrbed on A List Apart, which may resolve some compatibility issues on top of being just a cool technique in general.

My previous personal website was Assimilate.us, which I was running a weblog engine called Blosxom on. It was cool for a while, it’s simple to design around and a cool idea for a basic weblog. As I used it, I found it holding me back more and more. There is no commenting system built in, it’s a plugin that you have to install which I couldn’t get working with a moderate amount of fooling around. I kept trudging along typing my posts using VI on the webserver, which admittedly made me feel more hardcore than the rest of these wussy ass bloggers that used fancy web-based text entry (most of them probably don’t even know what a terminal is). After some thought and coercing from my brother, who is also a technology eliteist I made the decision to move on. I knew that WordPress was the next step, it has a big community behind it, it’s open source etc. It also turns out that the guy who wrote Blosxom, Rael Dornfest recently moved his site to a different bloging engine called Typo. Now, I’m sure Blosxom will live on because there are undoubtedly a number of people still using it, but I can’t help but point out that it’s a sinking ship.