privatehuff's questions

I have two servers and one seems to have configured something "out of the box" to allow "ssh servername.local" to work. I really like this and looked into it, but I don't see any difference in their configurations.

server1: (ssh by name works)
$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 server1

server2: (ssh by name does not work)
$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 server2

server1.local connects fine, server2.local gets this response:
ssh: Could not resolve hostname server2.local: Name or service not known

I have done nothing to set up DNS, and the revolv.conf files of both servers are the same.

server2 is running ubuntu server 9.04 32-bit (jaunty), and server1 is running ubuntu desktop 9.10 64-bit (karmic).

Can anyone tell me where I should look to see what is different, and why it works on one but not the other?

GOAL: Get a text file on my file server into my gmail inbox.

The file server is running Ubuntu Server 8.04 I currently SSH into it from time to time and to check logs, SMART stats for hard drives, and such. I'm looking into setting up a scheduled script that runs some commands and sends me the output via email.

The only issue I'm having is with actually getting the email sent. I have no experience with email config under linux and all guides pointing to sendmail seem to assume lots of things on behalf of myself and my current config. The servers are set up for file sharing with samba and NOT as mail, web, or dns servers. I don't want to run a mail server or route anything from the server or receive any mail on (or with) the server, unless any of that helps me accomplish the goal. The file server is on our normal network and has internet access.

I own several website domains (and have a hosting package). I've been able to set up apps like thunderbird to send mail using one of the accounts from my website by filling in smtp.mydotcom.com for the outgoing server to use and changing ports etc to match the information from my website's cpanel config page. Is there a way to do something similar so I can send an email from my file server to my external email?

EDIT: Here are the steps I took after reading Dennis Williamson's answer below. I was up and running in only a few minutes!

Install esmtp:

sudo apt-get install esmtp

I created a new email account on my website (called "alerts") and edited /etc/esmtprc like this:

hostname=mail.mydomain.com:26
username=alerts+mydomain.com

(These values were provided by the cpanel admin page)

Then I created a file called "eheader" with the default top of email:

To: Me <[email protected]>
From: Alerts <[email protected]>
Subject: subject

Message Body

So, in order to fire off the mail the following command can be used:

cat eheader <file1> <file2> ... <fileN> | /usr/bin/esmtp -t

So it's easy to vary which files are sent for the daily/weekly/etc jobs.

We transfer large media files to and from a few workstations and file servers (audio/video files, as large as 20GB each in some cases) and sometimes I get the feeling the network is bogged down as a result (directory listings can take 5-10 seconds to show up, folders are "calculating size" instead of displaying their total size, etc)

Most of the workstations and both of the servers have a second unused gigabit Ethernet port. I have heard that connecting these to another switch and setting them up as additional routes under a different subnet could be helpful, but haven't seen a recent enough article on the topic to convince me that it is worth it. (I have a spare 8-port unmanaged gigabit ethernet switch, plenty of cat5e, and precious little time)

Does anyone do anything like this or know whether it would be worth the effort?

So, let's say your server had 6 healthy hard drives. A drive fails (will not mount/detect, drops out of raid with errors) or is failing (SMART getting worse, etc). You need to swap out the bad drive. When you open the case you see.. six identical hard drives.

How can you tell which one is no longer healthy/mounting/functioning?

System would be linux, most likely ubuntu server, using at most simple software RAID. The hard drives would be SATA and connected directly to the motherboard. (no raid controller)

I don't want to randomly disconnect drives until I pick the correct one. The drives all appear identical to me; I imagine there is some common way to identify which drive is which that I am unaware of. Does anyone have any pointers/tips/best practices? Thanks!

EDIT: I had wanted this to be 'generalized' in a hand-wavy sort of way, but it just came off as 'incomplete' and 'horrible'. My bad!

We are a small company that does video editing, among other things, and need a place to keep backup copies of large media files and make it easy to share them.

I've got a box set up with Ubuntu Server and 4 x 500 GB drives. They're currently set up with Samba as four shared folders that Mac/Windows workstations can see fine, but I want a better solution. There are two major reasons for this:

1. 500 GB is not really big enough (some projects are larger)
2. It is cumbersome to manage the current setup, because individual hard drives have different amounts of free space and duplicated data (for backup). It is confusing now and that will only get worse once there are multiple servers. ("the project is on sever2 in share4" etc)

So, I need a way to combine hard drives in such a way as to avoid complete data loss with the failure of a single drive, and so users see only a single share on each server. I've done linux software RAID5 and had a bad experience with it, but would try it again. LVM looks ok but it seems like no one uses it. ZFS seems interesting but it is relatively "new".

What is the most efficient and least risky way to to combine the hdd's that is convenient for my users?

Edit: The Goal here is basically to create servers that contain an arbitrary number of hard drives but limit complexity from an end-user perspective. (i.e. they see one "folder" per server) Backing up data is not an issue here, but how each solution responds to hardware failure is a serious concern. That is why I lump RAID, LVM, ZFS, and who-knows-what together.

My prior experience with RAID5 was also on an Ubuntu Server box and there was a tricky and unlikely set of circumstances that led to complete data loss. I could avoid that again but was left with a feeling that I was adding an unnecessary additional point of failure to the system.

I haven't used RAID10 but we are on commodity hardware and the most data drives per box is pretty much fixed at 6. We've got a lot of 500 GB drives and 1.5 TB is pretty small. (Still an option for at least one server, however)

I have no experience with LVM and have read conflicting reports on how it handles drive failure. If a (non-striped) LVM setup could handle a single drive failing and only loose whichever files had a portion stored on that drive (and stored most files on a single drive only) we could even live with that.

But as long as I have to learn something totally new, I may as well go all the way to ZFS. Unlike LVM, though, I would also have to change my operating system (?) so that increases the distance between where I am and where I want to be. I used a version of solaris at uni and wouldn't mind it terribly, though.

On the other end on the IT spectrum, I think I may also explore FreeNAS and/or Openfiler, but that doesn't really solve the how-to-combine-drives issue.