It’s hard to discount how useful partimage can be. It’s an essential tool for system backup and recovery. I find myself using it for backup before making any major changes to disk. It’s got a nice curses based interface which makes it fairly easy to use.

I had a machine that was crashing (kernel panic) due to what I believe was a buggy network card. In order to keep the machine running I set it to reboot on kernel panic. Of course, in doing so all information about what caused the kernel panic was erased. I figured there must be a way to preserve that information, and there is. Unfortunately you cannot easily use it with Ubuntu at this time.

I’ve been researching open source control panels for years but have never found a product that I was completely satisfied with. I suspect this is an area where there are too many disparate products that many of them do many things well but not one does everything well enough. I decided to revisit the candidates and see if anything caught my eye to try.

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 noticed in testing some of the xm subcommands that I was getting errors. I found that these errors disappeared upon installing the python-xml package which provided the missing python modules needed by xm. I've reported the bug and hope to see it fixed promptly. In the meantime, make sure you install python-xml on any system running Xen. Who knows what other problems might result from this package being absent.