One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a +screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on +Debian Edu Squeeze. The video is embedded here in quarter size, and +also available from vimeo and +download as a +Ogg +Theora file. Check it out below.
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+Once in a while my home server have disk problems. Thanks to Linux -Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but -I was -close this summer :). But once a disk is starting to behave -funny, a practical problem present itself. How to get from the Linux -device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify -the disk when the computer is turned off? In my case I have SATA -disks with a unique ID printed on the label. All I need is a way to -figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.
- -After fumbling a bit, I -found -that hdparm -I will report the disk serial number, which is -printed on the disk label. The following (almost) one-liner can be -used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:
- -- --for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u); -do - printf "Failed disk $d: " - hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num' -done -
Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the -next time, and in case other find it useful.
- -At the moment I have two failing disk. :(
- -- --Failed disk sdd1: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823 -Failed disk sdd2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823 -Failed disk sde2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1840589 -
The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on -labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able -to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to -remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label. The vendor -label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are -mounted inside my box.
- -I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux -Software RAID in the -nagios-plugins-standard -debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would -make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail. At the moment -it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really -should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which -disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.
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