I’ve had MySQL database corruption from time to time, usually on a system that either experiences a power failure or kernel panic. The process is not difficult but I always find myself relearning how to do it each time. The program mysqlcheck comes in handy to check for errors and repair them.

I had a disk which suffered some corruption recently. It’s a shame that for my recent writing of the benefits of ext3 I should suffer from some ext3 filesystem corruption. Still, it was better than with xfs which I could not ever repair due to the size of the filesystem and/or the fact that the server was 32-bit. Here’s the steps I took.

I’m a fan of Gnu/Linux software RAID. I think it makes sense as an option for anyone who wants cheap RAID. Inexpensive RAID cards or the RAID options found on many motherboards do not offer performance or manageability benefits over software RAID. One benefit about GNU/Linux software RAID is that it is far more portable than hardware RAID solutions. That is, you can actually move the disks to another machine without migrating a RAID card or worrying about RAID compatibility.

A number of people have complained that the current (Ubuntu 7.04) startup and shutdown screens lack the information that they had in earlier releases. Enabling the display of startup and shutdown messages is fairly simple and can be useful in diagnosing system problems. Here’s how to do it.

Though relatively obscure there is a set of key combinations that can be used to communicate and send commands to a GNU/Linux kernel even when the system has become unresponsive (frozen, hung, crashed). I have found it beneficial to keep these commands in mind because I have come across a couple of situations where their use proved valuable. If nothing else, the 1 thing to remember is the Alt+SysRq+H command to get help on the other combinations.

This is a simple change that can, in my opinion, greatly improve security on a server or desktop system with openssh-server installed. By simple changing the listening port from the default 22 to another value will reduce the brute-force SSH attacks on a system thereby freeing up resources and reducing the chance of the system being compromised.

Why would a system administrator want to consider Ubuntu as a server operating system? Ubuntu is a young GNU/Linux distribution and a newcomer to the server market. Still I think a case can be made for Ubuntu as a capable and beneficial operating system for servers. As well as why, for many scenarios, Ubuntu might be preferable to Debian.