mdadm woes

After migrating a software RAID 5 to Ubuntu LTS 12.04, the system wouldn't come up again after rebooting. I believe Chris Siebenmann to splendidly have analysed [1] the problem: a race condition with udev losing the race. His solution is to: Change /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/mdadm-functionsas follows: degraded_arrays() { + udevadm settle mdadm --misc --scan --detail --test >/dev/null … Continue reading mdadm woes →

Tomcat, Eclipse, Spring and reloading

As a webapp gets bigger the time it takes to boot also increases which is a serious factor contributing to decreased focus and productivity when programming. When running Tomcat with Eclipse, the web application may restart even for the most trivial changes incurring long pauses. I found the following settings for Tomcat to minimize restarts … Continue reading Tomcat, Eclipse, Spring and reloading →

Resolving smb server names in Linux

Windows handles NETBIOS server names just like any other DNS entry, so you can ping, http:// or ftp to any computer on your Windows network. While Linux binds those computers also via Samba, it does not export that information to the rest of the networking stack, i.e. this will fail: ping win7machine This post [1] … Continue reading Resolving smb server names in Linux →

Running a java webapp in a VPS

The market is swarming with cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) offers [1] these days, and the specs don't look bad: you can get as much as 2GB RAM, 50GB storage space and a double core 2GHz CPU for less than 10$ / 8€ and nearly unlimited traffic. That's ideal for … Continue reading Running a java webapp in a VPS →