Replacing a failed disk in RAID on an OVHcloud dedicated server

Yesterday morning, I woke up to some Discord messages saying that one of my websites was offline. Not a great way to start off the morning! I tried to first ascertain the scope of the issue—turns out none of my services were accessible at all from that one dedicated server. Panic started to set in a bit… did I forget to pay my monthly server bill? Did the server get hacked? Or did the server burn down?

Basic ‘ZFS on Linux’ setup on CentOS 7

Here is a quick guide to getting a plain ZFS partition working on a Linux machine using the “ZFS on Linux” project.  I was playing around on a CentOS 7 virtual machine trying to set it up as a replication target for my home FreeNAS box as a backup.  If you are unfamiliar with ZFS, it is a filesystem for a storage environment, having features such as data integrity protection and snapshots; I came across it as it is used in FreeNAS. Here is the procedure I used:

“Error: Boot loader didn’t return any data” when booting up Xen guest

Error: Boot loader didn’t return any data I have come across this error two or three times before, and each time I spend hours trying to figure out how to get my virtual machine to boot.  This blog post is just to document a fix so that I can refer back to it, and hopefully it will help people out if they’re experiencing the issue as well.

FreeNAS and ZFS

Since I built my home server back in 2012, I’ve had a FreeNAS virtual machine running on it as the file server of my home network.  For the past two years, I’ve been using it for the simplest of tasks (serving files).  But over the past week, I’ve started looking deeper at some of the cool things FreeNAS and ZFS can do.  The descriptions of each of these are going to be brief; they can probably be expanded to a full blog post, which I may do if I have time.  However, until then, if your interest has been piqued, you will have Continue Reading

Saving keystrokes with a SSH client config file

I regularly have to SSH into my servers, and on most of the ones I connect to the SSH server is running on a non-standard port for obvious security reasons.  I used to include the port number manually in the SSH command, for example: [shell] ssh seymour.dennistt.com -p 922 [/shell] This worked… as long as I remembered to type the port number in, which was probably less than half the time on the first go.  So I finally got tired of having to retype the command with the port number in it.  Luckily you can create a SSH client configuration Continue Reading