Month: August 2014

while formatting a newly added disk to my ubuntu server I got this error.

symbol lookup error: mkfs.ext3: undefined symbol: ext2fs_add_journal_inode2

don’t worry too much if your situation is similar like mine then its easily fixable. after googling alot I got some hints that this is due to DELL APP ASSURE AGENT installed on ubuntu server.  Yes I have dell appassure agent “appassure-installer_ubuntu_amd64_5.4.2.192”
quick fix to resolve disk format issue is to Remove dell appassure agent , Reboot Server, Format your disk and mount etc as normal  , then install dell appassure agent to carry on backing up your server.

ok to un-install Dell appassure agent we need same version .sh  file which can be download from dell site as i allready have this on my server so Uninstall command is as below

./appassure-installer_ubuntu_amd64_5.4.2.192.sh -u

hit y  for yes to carry on un-installing agent and once finished just reboot the server.

once back on ,  I can now format my newly added disk without any issues.
——————————————————————————

root@ubuntus1:~# sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdc1
mke2fs 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014)
Discarding device blocks: done
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
655360 inodes, 2621184 blocks
131059 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=2684354560
80 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
——————————————————————————————————–

and can mount new drive and start using as normal and install Dell AppAssure Agent on server .

./appassure-installer_ubuntu_amd64_5.4.2.192.sh

hope this will help someone who using dell appassure on same server.

Regards

Harjeet Singh

at some point servers do need storage expansion, I got this ubuntu server 14:04 running on Hyper V,  and as it was running out of space so here is this how to about Ubuntu Server add new hard drive.

Lets start with listing/getting information about drives attached to server.

sudo lshw -C disk

this will present you with information about current or newly attached drives. as below
————————————————————————————–

*-disk:0
description: SCSI Disk
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
size: 50GiB (53GB)
capabilities: gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
configuration: guid=fb9fc69a-9620-40e7-b1af-86d5e32c56b0 sectorsize=4096
*-disk:1
description: SCSI Disk
physical id: 0.0.2
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.2
logical name: /dev/sdb
size: 20GiB (21GB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: sectorsize=4096 signature=078fcf65
*-cdrom
description: SCSI CD-ROM
physical id: 0.0.1
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.1
logical name: /dev/cdrom
logical name: /dev/sr0
capabilities: audio
configuration: status=ready
*-disk:2
description: SCSI Disk
physical id: 0.0.3
bus info: scsi@0:0.0.3
logical name: /dev/sdc
size: 10GiB (10GB)
configuration: sectorsize=4096
————————————————————————————————-

now we can see all disks and newly add disk here is *-disk2,  NOTE DOWN logical name : /dev/sdc

so its “sdc” disk that I need to add to server.

Lets partition the disk using below cmd

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc

type m for further information on FDISK usage
————————————————————–

root@ubuntus1:~# sudo fdisk /dev/sdc
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0xb9e19996.
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
After that, of course, the previous content won’t be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

The device presents a logical sector size that is smaller than
the physical sector size. Aligning to a physical sector (or optimal
I/O) size boundary is recommended, or performance may be impacted.

Command (m for help): m
Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the DOS compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition’s system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)

Command (m for help):

——————————————————————————

type  n   to create new partition.

I will use primary  so type p  for primary. and just hit ENTER for next 2 prompts about number and size  as i want to just have single partition using all size. so start and finish point keep default.

Finally type w  and hit enter to write information about partitioning. and this will come out of FDISK menu.

After creating single partition next we will need to format the partition ,  I will be using EXT3  , commands for EXT3 and EXT4 are same.   so its SDC1  we are going to format.

sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdc1

Now if all goes good this should format the disk and ready for mount.  But I had little issue here due to reason that I allready had DELL APP ASSURE agent installed and i got this error.
Creating journal (32768 blocks): mkfs.ext3: symbol lookup error: mkfs.ext3: undefined symbol: ext2fs_add_journal_inode2,  if you don’t have DELL APPASSURE Agent installed format should finish fine for you as normal .

Next step is to create mount point and mount the newly formatted drive and add info for automatically boot on startup

lets create mount point i will go upto top level by cd .. , cd ..   just to ensure not creating new dir at wrong place.

mkdir data2

now edit fstab to add mount point informaiton

vi /etc/fstab

and add below line to end of file

/dev/sdc1    /data2   ext3    defaults     0        2

save/quit your editor. make sure you use device information and mount point name etc according to your server

sudo mount -a  

this will mount drive. also it will be mounted on start up etc.

just to confirm use “df -h” to display drives information
———————————————————————
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 48G 8.7G 37G 20% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev 482M 4.0K 482M 1% /dev
tmpfs 99M 252K 99M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 493M 0 493M 0% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user
/dev/sda1 511M 3.4M 508M 1% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb1 20G 45M 19G 1% /media/cryodata1
/dev/sdc1 9.8G 23M 9.2G 1% /data2

——————————————————

as we can see last line shows us /dev/sdc1  is mounted on /data2

hope this will help someone.

Regards

Harjeet Singh

I came across this issue today, got  Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS running on a DELL PC OptiPlex 380 box. for some reason I had to move this to a new similar DELL PC. now I took sata HDD out from existing PC and installed this to new PC.

having thought that hardware is exactly same so I won’t have any issue. but after starting up found out that Networking is not working at all,
ifconfig  shows me only one local adaptor .

ok not to worry here is fix : how to fix missing network adaptor after moving Ubuntu server HDD from one box to another.

Edit “70-persistent-net.rules” files using VI or your faveroute editor.

vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

and look for similar lines as below , at bottom.  starting with SUBSYSTEM. you might have only one line but for some reason my file had two such lines.

# PCI device 0x8086:0x1004 (e1000)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="0a:00:25:c1:b3:eb", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

Delete these lines that start with SUBSYSTEM  or simply comment out #SUBSYSTEM and so on.

save file and exit your editor.  for vi its ESC  then type “:wq”

reboot system. and now it should just work as normal.
hope this will help someone.
Regards

Harjeet Singh