Linux on BAFM

LVM Quick Reference: Setup, Extend, and Resize Filesystems

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:43:50 +0000

A hands-on reference for creating and extending LVM Physical Volumes, Volume Groups, and Logical Volumes, plus growing XFS and ext3/ext4 filesystems.

Reset Master Boot Record (MBR)

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:34:04 +0000

Since I’ve been playing with my AutoYAST setup for the last few days, working out the kinks (for example SLES10 not being able to install into the MBR), I needed a way to zap the MBR (as in remove grub to see whether or not the installation would install a new loader). So after quickly googling, I found this:

`1`	`dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1`

That actually does the trick. The loader as well as the partition table are gone after wards!

diskinfo

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 16:39:24 +0000

Get a list of all disks and show the serial numbers

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#!/bin/bash

if [ ! -x /usr/sbin/hdparm ] ; then
 echo "Missing hdparm"
 exit 1
fi

for disk in /dev/sd?; do
 echo "$disk: `hdparm -I $disk | grep "Serial Number:" | awk '{ print $3 }'`"
done

idle3 wrapper

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 16:33:12 +0000

Another wrapper (like mdstat), that’ll look through my Western Digital disks and fix any disk not having the head parking timeout set to a configured value.

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#!/bin/bash

FIRMWARE_TIMEOUT_SH=138

if [ ! -x /usr/sbin/idle3ctl ] ; then
 echo "idle3-tools is missing."
 exit 1
fi

for disk in /dev/sd?; do
 # idle time should be set to: 138 (300s)
 # 138-128=10
 # 10x30=300 seconds
 FIRMWARE_TIMEOUT_IS="$( /usr/sbin/idle3ctl -g $disk | awk '{ print $5 }' )"

 if [ "$FIRMWARE_TIMEOUT_IS" -ne "$FIRMWARE_TIMEOUT_SH" ]; then
 /usr/sbin/idle3ctl -s$FIRMWARE_TIMEOUT_SH $disk
 fi
done

Linux: Convert Gigabyte into Blocks

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:55:32 +0000

I just googled again for a Gigabyte to Blocks converter when I stumbled upon this:

`1`	`echo "(1510241024*1024)/512" \| bc`

Easy to use and yet handy.

Adapter bonding on Linux

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:47:23 +0000

Well, today I had a rather weird error. I was testing the adapter bonding on one of the boxen designated as Tivoli Storage Manager Server, when I noticed that the bonding wasn’t working as expected when simulating an error (that is unplugging one of the TP cables for the bond).

Now, the bond had “mode=6 miimon=100” as options. After running “linux bond debug” through Google (which turned up nothing useful, besides one document on the Oracle Wiki about IOS/Linux adapter teaming), I figured “Hey, just lets test switching the arguments.” And guess what ?