Hi, if on your CentOS instance you can see some of this lines in your /var/log/messages


... /sbin/mingetty[1816]: tty2: No such file or directory
... /sbin/mingetty[1817]: tty3: No such file or directory
... /sbin/mingetty[1818]: tty4: No such file or directory
... /sbin/mingetty[1819]: tty5: No such file or directory
... /sbin/mingetty[1820]: tty6: No such file or directory


edit /etc/inittab and comment the relative lines

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
#2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6


save it and then use the following command

kill -HUP 1


That’s all!

In the last days I spent some time to take care of some AWS instances, and I ported one of this from instance-store to EBS, so the whole server is persistent and can be restarted without any data loosing.

• Start ad instance-store machine, modify as you like.
• Create a Volume with the size of 10GB and attach it to instance (suppose that it will be /dev/sdf).
• format it as EXT3
  mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf
• mount it
  
mkdir /mnt/ebs
mount /dev/sdf /mnt/ebs

• sync the instance with the volume
  
rsync -avHx / /mnt/ebs
rsync -avHx /dev /mnt/ebs

• flush and umount
  
sync
umount /mnt/ebs

• detach the volume and create a snapshot
• register the AMI
  
ec2-register --region $REGION -s $SNAP –name $NAME –description “$DESC” –architecture $ARCH --root-device-name /dev/sda1 --block-device-mapping '/dev/sda2=ephemeral0' --block-device-mapping '/dev/sda3=ephemeral1'

  change the appropriate parameter with your own

Now you have a fresh EBS AMI ready to boot into a new instance.

If you are experiencing the following error in your /var/log/messages


... ... modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.16-xenU/modules.dep: No such file or directory


download http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/modules-2.6.16-ec2.tgz, extract into / and the exec


$ depmod -a


Hi,
yesterday I’ve upgraded my notebook to the development version of Kubuntu, there was only 2 problems. The first is that my “sudo update-manager -d” does not work properly, I got a dependency break that I resolved reading the relative Launchpad bug. Another problem was a post upgrade problem, the nvidia driver (ver. 256.44) was not loaded and for resolve it I just added the following lines to my generated (with nvidia-xconfig) xorg.conf


Section "ServerFlags"
Option "IgnoreABI" "True"
EndSection


Now everything seems to work well!

Hi,
I need to add a software RAID 1 to our development server. Actually it is a used server so I cannot do it during installation phase. After searching a bit into the web I found a very nice guide here.

In the last months we released under our brand name the web vocalization service. This service is able to read your site only adding a link/form on your pages. In the next days you can find on our site the various pricing, initially only three version will be available: Free (with advertising), Basic and Plus.
We have in development some platforms integration too, for now Wordpress (soon available on this blog obviously) and Drupal, in the next months some other platforms will be take in care (if you need some specific platform integration does not hesitate to ask).

Let me to know your feedback.

Looking for a fast and safe mode to increase the size of a Xen VM I find this link that match exactly my situation: a image disk with only two partitions, the root partition and a swap partition.

So this is the steps that I followed to reach my goal:

1. create a backup of the diskimage that you want to modify
2. shutdown domU
3. add extra space to the image by entering: dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 >> /path/to/diskimage (this would add another 1024M to the DomU image)
4. boot domU
5. disable swap partitions by entering: swapoff /dev/xvda2 (or what corresponds to your setup)
6. fdisk /dev/xvda (or what corresponds to your setup)
7. press p + enter so see the whole disksetup
8. delete the second swap partition by entering d + enter and then 2 + enter
9. delete the system partion by entering d + enter and then 1+enter
10. recreate the system partition with the same start cylinder than the older one but an end-cylinder bigger than the old cylinder value. press n <enter> p <enter> 1 <enter> and then enter the values
11. recreate the swap partition (with n <enter> p <enter> 2 <enter> and appropriate values
12. chance the partition type of partition 2 to swap by pressing: t <enter> 2 <enter> 82 <enter>
13. exit fdisk by pressing w <enter>
14. execute: mkswap /dev/xvda2 to make the swap space ready
15. reboot domU
16. execute: resize2fs /dev/xvda1

Be aware that if you have a different partition schema this would not work!

echo 1 > /proc/sys/xen/independent_wallclock

Now you can force the host date.

Hi,

after looking some usefull guides to create Amazon Machine Image based on CentOS distribution, I decide to write the steps that i followed.

First of all we need of a CentOS machine, if you don’t have it use a virtual machine program (on my Kubuntu based laptop I use VirtualBox), once we have it login and start:

• create image file (in this case about 1,1GB of space reserved), take in mind that this will be the size of your / mountpoint on AWS, so if you want to use the whole size use 10GB (count=10240)
  
dd if=/dev/zero of=base-server.fs bs=1M count=1024

• then create the file system
  
mke2fs -F -j base-server.fs

• create a mount point and mount the image file
  
mkdir /mnt/ec2-fs
mount -o loop base-server.fs /mnt/ec2-fs

• prepare a base filesystem structure
  
mkdir /mnt/ec2-fs/dev
/sbin/MAKEDEV -d /mnt/ec2-fs/dev/ -x console
/sbin/MAKEDEV -d /mnt/ec2-fs/dev/ -x null
/sbin/MAKEDEV -d /mnt/ec2-fs/dev/ -x zero
mkdir /mnt/ec2-fs/etc
mkdir /mnt/ec2-fs/proc
mount -t proc none /mnt/ec2-fs/proc

• create a yum-xen.conf file with the repository info (in this case for i386 32bit architecture)
  
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exclude=*-debuginfo
gpgcheck=0
obsoletes=1
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
reposdir=/dev/null
metadata_expire=1800
[base]
name=CentOS-5.3 – Base
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.3/os/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
priority=1
protect=1
#released updates
[update]
name=CentOS-5.3 – Updates
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.3/updates/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
priority=1
protect=1
#packages used/produced in the build but not released
[addons]
name=CentOS-5.3 – Addons
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.3/addons/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
priority=1
[extras]
name=CentOS 5.3 Extras $releasever – $basearch
baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.3/extras/i386/
enabled=1

• install all packages in “Core” group (optionally use “Base” or whatever you want)
  
yum -c yum-xen.conf --installroot=/mnt/ec2-fs -y groupinstall Core

• edit network interface configuration file /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
  
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes
IPV6INIT=no

• turn on networking editing file /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/sysconfig/network
  
NETWORKING=yes

• create the file /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/hosts and add at least the localhost interface
  
echo "127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost" > /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/hosts

• copy your resolv.conf, when boot from AWS DHCP was changed
  
cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/resolv.conf

• edit the file /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/fstab (32 bit linux machine match only m1.small and c1.medium instance with this mount points)
  
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 swap swap defaults 0 0

• if you need more packages install now with yum
  
yum -c yum-xen.conf --installroot=/mnt/ec2-fs -y install wget
yum -c yum-xen.conf --installroot=/mnt/ec2-fs -y install curl

• disable selinux in /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/selinux/config by setting SELINUX=disabled
• move TLS library out of the way (if you have it)
  
mv /mnt/ec2-fs/lib/tls /mnt/ec2-fs/lib/tls.disabled

• put your ssh public key for root user (if you want to use another user, create it) in /mnt/ec2-fs/root/.ssh/authorized_keys or read the following step if you prefer to use the AWS assigned key-pair
• create the file /mnt/ec2-fs/usr/local/sbin/get-aws-credentials.sh (have you installed curl? is needed for this script)
  
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -d /root/.ssh ] ;
then mkdir -p /root/.ssh
chmod 700 /root/.ssh
fi
# Fetch public key using HTTP
curl -f http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-keys/0/openssh-key > /tmp/my-key
if [ $? -eq 0 ] ;
then
cat /tmp/my-key >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
rm -f /tmp/my-key
fi

  make it executable
  
chmod +x /mnt/ec2-fs/usr/local/sbin/get-aws-credentials.sh

  add it to /mnt/ec2-fs/etc/rc.local
  
# get AWS credentials
/usr/local/sbin/get-aws-credentials.sh

• chroot into your image
  
chroot /mnt/ec2-fs /bin/bash

• start your services at desired run level and emtpy yum cache
  
chkconfig --level 345 sshd on
yum clean all

  then exit from chroot
  
exit

• umount image file
  
umount /mnt/ec2-fs/proc
umount -d /mnt/ec2-fs


Now your image file is ready, simply create bundle volume and upload to S3

• install ruby, download ec2-ami-tools and install it
  
yum install ruby
wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh ec2-ami-tools.noarch.rpm

• create bundle volume (put file in /tmp)
  
ec2-bundle-image -i base-server.fs -c my-cert.pem -k my-private-key.pem -u 1234-5678-9101 (amazon account id)

• upload to Amazon S3
  
ec2-upload-bundle -b base-server -m /tmp/base-server.fs.manifest.xml -a my-aws-access-key-id -s my-secret-key-id


Now you can register an AMI and launch your instance.

Enjoy!