As if I ever needed more evidence that my computers have personalities and conspire against me… Yesterday I took the ISDN card out of eagle and moved it to majestic now that the build of Trixbox on majestic is stabilising. As if to sulk, today eagle’s power supply failed.
I know that it was sulkiness, because it did it in such a way as to cause maximum impact (as if its own failure wasn’t enough). It caused an overload on the little cheapie UPS it’s connected to, which took out sputnik and eagle2 as well. Things were only down for about an hour — which is more than I can say for eagle, which is down for the count.
After a bit of a test to see that it did in fact power up on a new PSU, I started switching it into a new case (the one it came out of a few weeks ago, incidentally). I was almost finished this process though when I had a flash of inspiration — all it’s really used for now is web proxy and the e-mail portal, so why not make a virtual machine out of it? I threw the disk into a USB caddy and started transferring the image onto majestic: slow going, a 80GB hard disk over 100MB using scp (yes, it would possibly have been quicker with something else, but I’m lazy and didn’t have the disk space to image it on atlantis; and majestic’s USB is only 1.1 so that was out too)…
I had only fleeting thoughts of there being enough disk space in my VMware pool for eagle’s disk image. Sure enough, with only 1GB to go, it filled up! I moved what had been transferred to another area (almost filling it too) and then worked on ways to get it defined to VMware, which won’t read raw disk image files… QEmu to the rescue, and after a quick visit to the DAG repository to get a shiny qemu RPM I had a copy of the qemu-img program ready to go. Thinking that qemu-img might have been clever enough to just make the VMDK definition file for the existing image (what VMware uses to address a raw disk partition, I crossed my fingers and pressed Enter… But it started writing out a new file — which meant I had the problem of not enough disk space to hold two copies of the image!
At this time, eagle is still down. It occurred to me that I don’t need the whole disk, that the bulk of it is a Bacula storage pool that I can think about recovering later if I decide I need it. So I’m dd-ing and converting only part of the raw disk, which saves a lot of space — relying on the fact that LVM stores its PEs starting at the beginning of a PV though!
Crossed Wires 