Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

Testing a tape library

As recently written, I have acquired a tape library with a 15-tape magazine. It contains a DLT-8000 tape drive which, although it is no longer state-of-the-art, is a step up from the DLT-7000 I am currently using. Today, I will try using this unit for the first time. I’ll do a simple write, try changing tapes, etc. I’ll be using my previous postings on this topic, such as one on using tape libraries […]

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Adding a new tape library

Recently, I rearranged the bottom shelf of my rack and rotated the DEC library 90°. Then I placed a new [to me] Overland DLT MinilibraryXpress (model LXM8115). I plugged the cable from my server into the Overland unit and daisy-chained that to the DEC library. The grey cable which leads up and out of the photo leads to the server. The cable which leads slightly up and to the left and then loops

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cannot open SCSI device ‘/dev/pass11’ – Permission denied

Right after getting my SCSI cable problems fixed, I was all set to run some Bacula jobs. They immediately started failing: 27-Nov 12:59 bacula-dir JobId 112458: Start Copying JobId 112458, Job=CopyToTape-Diff.2012-11-27_12.58.05_08 27-Nov 12:59 bacula-dir JobId 112458: Using Device “DTL01” 27-Nov 12:59 kraken-sd JobId 112458: Ready to read from volume “DiffAuto-2357” on device “MegaFile” (/storage/compressed/bacula/volumes). 27-Nov 12:59 kraken-sd JobId 112458: 3301 Issuing autochanger “loaded? drive 0” command. 27-Nov 12:59 kraken-sd JobId 112458: 3991 Bad

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It was the SCSI cable

Last night I powered on my DEC tape library. I had forgotten to power it on earlier in the week after a maintenance session. Backups to tape were queueing up. Bits needed to be moved. Queues needed to be emptied. I powered on. I ran camcontrol rescan followed by camcontrol devlist. The tape library was not showing up. Did I manage to kill it? Did I unseat the SCSI card? After removing the

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Routing Problems

It seems there is a problem between my home and my server in Austin: $ traceroute supernews.unixathome.org traceroute to supernews.unixathome.org (206.127.23.226), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 L100.PHLAPA-VFTTP-84.verizon-gni.net (98.114.194.1) 6.680 ms 3.669 ms 4.230 ms 2 G0-6-2-2.PHLAPA-LCR-21.verizon-gni.net (130.81.109.140) 3.756 ms 4.053 ms 4.384 ms 3 ae0-0.PHIL-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.209.178) 3.718 ms 3.787 ms 4.293 ms 4 0.xe-7-1-0.BR1.IAD8.ALTER.NET (152.63.3.85) 11.601 ms 11.975 ms 11.818 ms 5 xe-2-1-0.er2.iad10.us.above.net (64.125.13.173) 11.294 ms 11.610 ms 11.789 ms 6

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WordPress Migration: Tidying up the comments

This is the seventh in a series of articles on my migration to WordPress. In this post, I’ll talk about how I did some cleaning up of the comments after I imported them. Clean? What’s to clean After importing the comments, I noticed, or rather, I was reminded, that Phorum does some things that WordPress doesn’t. Specifically tokens. Tokens? What tokens? When I copied over the comments from my old system, I took

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WordPress Migration: Updating the comment signatures

This is the sevent in a series of articles on my migration to WordPress. In this post, I’ll talk about how I updated some of the comments to deal with some tokens left over from the previous system. Tokens? What tokens? When I copied over the comments from my old system, I took the raw text. In hindsight now, as I type this, I think I could have injected the token values into

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WordPress Migration: redirecting old URLs

This is the sixth in a series of articles on my migration to WordPress. In this post, I’ll talk about how I enabled the old URLs. This is important only if you want the ‘old’ content to be found. This is especially important if your website is well established. People will have links to your website from their websites. Search engines have results which need to continue to be valid. Myself? I know

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