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Sometime ago Rebecca from Packt Publishing sent me an email asking if I would review their recently launched  book on Scalix titled ‘Scalix: Linux Administrator’s Guide’.

Yesterday I found the postal package on my table, it was from them.

I did go through the book roughly, I find it quite useful as a reference in your bookshelf. I will read through the book carefully and try to implement examples and how-tos in this book and write a full featured detailed review.

Until then stay tuned!

One of the Dell Servers, Dell PowerEdge 2850, in our Cyber Jaya DC had hard disk issues, so I had to replace it. For some reason, I had a little bit of trouble setting up and configuring hardware RAID. Mostly because the terms used in the configuration menus and the menu itself is kinda confusing

So here’s a note to myself on how to make raid in dell servers:

1. While booting the server, enter PERC/CERC BIOS Configuration Utility by pressing Control + M key.
2. From the Management menu select Configure option.
3. Select Clear Configuration from the Configure menu, Select Yes when prompted. At this point we have deleted all existing arrays and/or logical drives. Pressing Escape button go to Management menu.
4. Go to Clear option in Management menu. Select drives by pressing spacebar and when you see READY status flashing you press F10 button. Select Yes and you will be reformatting those drives. This will take some time depending on your drive capacity. With my drives (2×73GB) it took around 1hour ++. When it’s done press escape and reboot your server
5. Repeat Step 1.
6. Select Easy Configuration from Configure menu. Make sure all drives are in GREEN and READY state.
7. Using arrow keys select the drives one by one and press spacebar. This will change drives status from READY to ONLINE A00-00. Repeat this step for as much hard drives you have.
8. If you want to make a hot spare, select a hard drive you wanna make hot spare and press F4.
9. Select all ONLINE status drives and press F10. This will bring you Select Configurable Array(s) dialog. Now pressing spacebar you get A-00 window, here you should get Span-1. Press F10 key to verify your logical drive settings. Here you will get options of RAID-0 and RAID-1. When you made your mind and set your RAID configs go to Accept option and press enter. When prompted select YES.
10. Now it’s time to make our logical drive bootable. In Configure menu go to Specify Boot Drive and select Specify a Logical Drive as BootDrive. The number in Logical BootDrive set to 0. (This will change according to your drive configs). And press enter.
11. Pressing Escape button you quit from the menus and go to Exit dialog. Reboot your server and you are set to install your preferred OS now!

This note is for RAID-1 with 2×73GB SCSI hard drives. For your case it might be slightly different but the overall process should be something like this.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Here’s a snapshot of the PERC/CERC BIOS Configuration Utility

If you happened to be using TMNet(Malaysia’s leading(?!) ISP) DNS servers you probably know how much do they suck. Well here’s a small tip from me for those in need: a small list of publicly available DNS servers to make a switch.

1. OpenDNS – http://www.opendns.org – pretty much solid dns servers, highly recommended by many people.

2. ScrubIt – http://scrubit.com – Haven’t used myself, found in the net.

3. gtei.net – nosite – One of the advantages of these servers –> IP numbers easy to remember!
a) 4.2.2.1
b) 4.2.2.2
c) 4.2.2.3
d) 4.2.2.4
e) 4.2.2.5
f) 4.2.2.6

Cool, ah?

Others you can get at http://www.dnsserverlist.org/