Posts Tagged ‘server’
Getting ‘dd’ to take a dump
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in Linux on November 11th, 2009
I’ve been using dd a lot more these days. It seems like I’m blanking a hard drive or making a copy of one everyday now. If you have ever used dd, you know that it does not like to tell you how far along it is in the process of doing its thing. Well I have a solution to fix this!
Open up a new shell be it on the same machine with the old Ctrl + Alt + F# combo, a new ssh section, or a new terminal window. Once in the new shell enter:
watch -n 30 kill -USR1 1234
replacing 1234 with the process id of dd, and then then hit enter. Now every 30 seconds dd will take a dump and tell you whats going on.
To get the process id of your dd command run:
ps ax | grep dd
and there you have it. Now you can see where your dd process is at.
New blag, kind of
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on February 2nd, 2009
If your reading this blog post, you are seeing my new layout, on a new server, on a new blog platform. Over the weekend I started moving to a new server and during the process changed from Typo to WordPress. I hope you like the new layout, its a bit lighter than before, and the new server is a bit faster than the old one.
Good bye triple displays, hello HD TV.
Posted by: Jacob Atkins in General on March 23rd, 2008
Not long ago I made the purchase of two 19" LCD monitors for the my rig. With the addition of two new monitors to the family that meant that there would be one extra. After a while I deiced to use it as a third display to increase my desktop space and what not. But after installing the video card I purchased to run the third display I found out that X11 and Nvidia don’t play nice together with more than two displays, that is unless you have two video cards with the same series GPU (I have a 6600 and the new one was a 5200). So After about two weeks of trying to come up with a way to fix this so that all three displays would place nice together, I have given up. I found several little posts on the internet about patching X11 so that it will work with three monitors, that being two of them playing with nvidia and one X does. But I have come to the decision that I will just make a MythBox and use the third display as a new HD tv like setup.
At the time I also have a nice server setting in my room that only shares files, runs MySQL, subversion, and is my test bed for my work in rails. So why not toss a capture card and my 5200 into it and use it as a TV? the capture card really doesn’t have to be much simply because I have a TiVO so it only needs to have a way to get the signal. So I’m planing on this nice little upgrade to cost me anywhere from $20 to $200 depending on whether or not I decide to get a nice big old HDD to put in it as well.