I was a bit surprised to find my Apache httpd server had crapped out at 4am this morning. Looking in the last log I see
[Sun Mar 16 04:51:37 2008] [notice] SIGHUP received. Attempting to restart httpd: Syntax error on line 182 of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf: Cannot load /etc/httpd/modules/mod_status.so into server: /etc/httpd/modules/mod_status.so: undefined symbol: ap_mod_status_reqtail
Thanks to the PC Notes blog of é»’ã•ã‚“ I see this is a common problem (and I haven’t been hacked).
I updated by Apache httpd server yesterday, but didn’t bother to restart it. When Logrotate went to rotate the httpd logs at 4am it tried to tell httpd to do a reload (i.e. it sent a SIGHUP), but the running version of httpd wasn’t able to load the new version of httpd’s modules, so it crapped out.
A restart fixed everything.
I’ve tidied up the LinuxSoftware Wiki a bit. With content there going back 8 years it’s got out of date and crufty in many places. Mostly I use it as a back up to my brain, but it is a shared community resource, anyone is welcome to edit and use the tips and hints there. Of course I delete the spam (not much of that recently though).
Caught up with Simon at the iconic London Bar. The bar is looking better than it’s dreary days just before it was shut down, most of the lights are even working. And it looks much much better than the weird temporary identity crisis when it was pimped as a “country music bar”. It’s hard to believe there really were Indian heads and Confederate flags hanging in there. Thankfully it’s back to the Underground signs and such for an old London-town atmosphere again. Staggered back home and had a good sleep.
LVM has the cool feature that you can create a snapshot of a logical volume which captures a copy of the volume at that moment in time. This can then be backed up without worrying about the volume changing or being locked while it is being read.
modprobe dm-storage
lvcreate -s -L 100k -n snapped /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
The problem is the snapshot needs free space on the disk (in the LVM volume group) and normally all of this is already allocated to the existing volumes. This gives a ” Insufficient free extents (0) in volume group VolGroup00: 1 required” error message. Robert had the clever idea of using a ramdisk as a temporary place to store the snapshot. Fedora boots with 16 x 16M ramdisks enabled, so this works.
pvcreate /dev/ram1
vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/ram1
lvcreate -s -L 100k -n snapped /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
A snapshot without touching the disk! Very clever.
When finished with it, just remember to clean up
lvremove /dev/VolGroup00/snapped
vgreduce VolGroup00 /dev/ram1
Had a green curry at Wok’n'Noodle with Tim, before helping him with the set up of his blog “Scratch my tummy“.
Had fantastic weather for a climb of Mt Ruapehu with Brian and Michelle. We took the chairlift up and then followed the Knoll Ridge T-bar up and then followed the valley up from there. This is described in my DoC pamphlet as “the most common summer route”, but if I did it again I’d take the other route up along Restful Ridge. The Knoll Ridge way was OK, but I did lead Michelle up onto a steep slope of very loose rock which was a bit tricky. We came back via Restful Ridge and found it much simpler.
Had good views of the Ngauruhoe, and the Desert Road from the Dome, but the view towards Mt Taranaki was blocked by the higher point of of Tahurangi. The Dome Shelter has been repaired since the September 2007 eruption.
When we stopped for lunch I discovered my bag of chips had expanded like a balloon with the lower air pressure. Made our way down in time to catch the chairlift back to the carpark.
