<3 Ubuntu Rescue Remix ISOs hmm by seagate NS disk is rated for 10 yaers life i think by smart appears 1 VPS has been recovered successfully and moved to kvr25. I almost can't believe my eyes... 24 to go... sound laborious if it gets bad ddrescue can be handy it keeps trying to read blocks, and if it can't then it zero's them which can be better than having no data oh it says it odesn't write zeros Ddrescue does not write zeros to the output when it finds bad sectors in the input, and does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps without wiping out the data already rescued. oh maybe it uses sparse files? Copying this partition with normal Un*x tools like cat or dd will fail, as those tools abort on error. dd_rescue instead will try to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors. The output file naturally will have holes in it, of course. You can write a log file, to see, where all these errors are located. ahh jlgaddis: you're probably sleeping, but if not, check your vps. it just came back up. migrated to host kvr25. I did like 10 forced fsck's and they all passed, but i'm still weary until a customer says, "yep, it's all there!" roger, standby w00t you're awak *awake looks good so far mercutio: yeah, i've used ddrescue before; it's a neat tool web server is up, sites accessible, ssh'd in w/o issue wow that's awesome the RAID was spitting out errors like it was on fire nothing abnormal in dmesg i couldn't dd your image until now... the raid was going down in a ball of flames. but by some stroke of luck, the raid *finally* rebuilt. and now i did not get any I/O errors when dd'ing your image. anyway, not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. 2 down, 23 VMs to go... awesome everything looks good, afaict jlgaddis: very glad to hear me too, tyvm! hmm maybe i should backup my vps :) yeah, i hadn't done a full off-site since 11-jun. about to run one now. =) mercutio: backups are a good idea :) yeah i'm doing a tarball now there's not a lot on there but still.. well i'm actually doing bzip2... i hope it's ok using quite a bit of cpu.. i figure it's the middle of the night in the US anyway ... full backup from los angeles to chicago at 100 mbps ... =) i'm getting 15 megabit damn you :) i think i'm cpu bound maybe i should backup to chicago and not compress i'm using duplicity for the backup, it's doing compression and encryption on the fly, fwiw oh? i'm using ssh and tar -C/ -vcjf - back to new zealand though and it seems to go 2 to 16 megabit physics and tcp bandwidth/delay product =) hmm it shouldn't be it can do faster than that with http i think it's the bzip2 and it could also be doing lots of small files like /usr/src has openbsd source code in it with lots and lots of file names like it's at 22 megabit now it's doing my 200 mb test download (which i really don't need to bakcup) it's nearly done aynway LOL, now that kvr04 has been rebooted, and my 984 days of uptime has been thwarted, I can *finally* replace that failed DIMM from almost 3 years ago... wish i knew a good way to find out which stick is bad lol trial and error memtest and count yay, full backup done usually odd first stick even second stick then memory location now just need to automate nightlys but i had dead memory on a laptop once and i had no idea which was first or second stick took out a stick got way more errors and i was like YAY it must be the other stick now, bedtime. =) great job garry, thanks again! oh unless it auto takes it out of the pool of memory jlgaddis: np! jlgaddis: ty for your patience :) up_the_irons: How goes the restores? Ugh, not awake yet, clearing out my spam and I see spam claiming to be UPS, and I go, WTF why would a UPS send an invoice? arenlor: people ship through ups all the time fink: I was thinking it was a Uninterruptable Power Supply. hah he's shaking you down "it would be a shame if the next time you had a power outage, i just *forgot* to switch over to my batteries!" Yeah lol help i dun made a booboo oh wait ryk: What type of mistake? well, openbsd allows you to choose to redict local console output to com1 serial in the installer, which i chose ryk: Try the serial console? however, i've now found that both the vnc console as well as the serial console only become available for input after the boot in other words, i can't get anything in to the bootloader prompt before it's too late and starts booting from either console i just need them to put the ISO in is all to change it, since I'm currently locked out of the vps and wanted to get into single user mode but now realized i can't due to the above. vnc console you're in a race against time to connect and hit 'control' on your keyboard the iso should be in the cdrom you have some time to press an f11 key or somesuch to get to the iso if you connect the vnc at the right instant ooh i got it this time! but if you get that timing right you should also be able to hold control on your keyboard to bypass the boot.conf ;-) console starts on vga, if you put in boot.conf 'set tty com1' then you're not going to see anything on com0 there is a com0? the serial console at arpnetworks is com0 ah why would the hardware emulate then discard a whole com port? toddf: would you recommend just always keeping it on vga? I find ssh + serial console much easier to interact with than vnc. it truly depends on if you find it more conveneient or not. for me cutting/pasting the console is awesome, any ddb> prompts easy to interact with and copy, not to mention I have a remote ssh key from a remote conserver capable of logging the console of my vps. try that with vnc! heh yeah i use the serial console iwth my xen vps provider, it works well because it never drops off it used to drop off everytime up_the_irons made a conserver config change, but now that -HUP is in use, ... ;-) this just seems tricker during boot trickier how? if you don't mind more delay you can always 'set timeout 120' in /etc/boot.conf to give you 2 minutes to hit console before it boots regardless if its serial or vnc is that 2 minutes of it sitting at the boot> prompt? i see by the man page that that is the case. excellent Is there a guide on how to use the serial console + ssh here at ARP networks? mnathani, this? http://support.arpnetworks.com/kb/vps/out-of-band-management mnathani: when you log in to ssh to the console server, you'll see some instructions as well toddf: so it doesn't drop off anymore? heh, i don't remember even doing -HUP... but maybe i did... mnathani: there's some docs here: http://support.arpnetworks.com/kb/vps/out-of-band-management jlgaddis: any issues with the vps?