So far, today have been a mess. At first when I got to work everything seemed nice and dandy, but then it came to my attention that one of our SMTP gateways had crashed, and I rushed into the case to solve it. After a little reboot it became apparent that the server lacked a little memory to do it’s job and I quickly found 512 MB og registered SDRAM for it. Also when I wanted to see if the thing could boot, it greeted me with a “LI”-prompt, not a “LILO %version”. This usually means there’s something wrong with the config, or that LILO can’t figure out what device to boot from. So, armed with the beefed up memory and a debian-installer CD I rebooted the machine again and did the needed trix to get LILO to boot.
The trick is quite simple; boot with an 2.6-kernel preferably in expert-mode (expert26) along with a nice little parameter: “ramdisk_size=128000”. This will give you a nice ramdisk space of about 122 MB RAM. After going through the initial steps of selecting keyboard and checking for hardware you simply swith to tty2, with Alt+F2. Here you now may set up the ramdisk as a new partition, and so I did with the command “mkdir /tmp2;mkfs /dev/ram1; mount /dev/ram1 /tmp2”. This create the dir /tmp2 and mounts the ramdisk there after creating a filesystem (ext3 by default) on it. Now it’s time to mount the real disk, which may be found in /dev/devices/host%/.. and so on. I mounted the / root-device as /tmp2, and mounted the orginal /tmp and /var underneath this mount. After doing this the whole thing boiled down to a simple “chroot /tmp2” followed by a “vim /etc/lilo.conf”, only to discover that the config had one char too much in it. I changed “boot=/dev/sda3” to “boot=/dev/sda”, wrote the config, ran lilo, rebooted, and everything went back to normal. That is, now with half a gig of memory to push email. That’s something atleast.
Don’t you think it stops here. No, to add up on my little server-fun the phones haven’t been quiet today. There have been customers calling non-stop since 0800, and both me, who came in at 0900, and the fellow coworkers in the noc are quite tired right now. I still got three hours left at work, not to mention that there’s a Samfundet-meeting today about school politics that I’d really like to attend at 1900. Oh well, another call incoming.
Last night were worknight at Samfundet again, and I also got to follow Jorunn quite a bit down the road to a bus-stop. Talked abit about everything and nothing, and I really like her more each minute. It’s been two weeks and I’m not coming down from the skies yet. Love you *:)
