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The last few days, I’ve been playing with Ubuntu Server 9.10. It hasn’t been perfect. There have been problems along the way. So everyone else knows the issues, I’ll list a few here with a little detail.

It all started during the Server 9.10 x64 installation.

Be certain to check out the comments for solutions to issues as I discover them.

Over the years, I’ve been using this blog to help myself remember how to do things and to share some great tools and techniques with you. I figure it is time to recap some of those articles whether they are computer, financial/retirement, or just interesting things.

Nothing really to report this week. Doing RMA stuff on an old Antec 550W PSU and getting an estimate to fix the Dell laptop.

Last week, my main laptop died taking my main xUbuntu installation with it. Ok, it really didn’t take it, since I have backups and the hard disk was fine. Further, because I run it in a VirtualBox VM, picking it up and moving it to a different physical machine was fairly simple, once I had a machine ready for VirtualBox.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last week building a new machine, migrating Linux servers around, rebuilding a Windows7 Media Center machine, fighting with a bad power supply, poor connections in DVDs and network cables. Finally, everything is starting to work as expected. I was feeling lucky, so I decided to update the main xUbuntu desktop VM from 8.04 LTS to 9.10. Yes, I said update, not do a fresh install. BTW the 8.04 install was an upgrade from 6.06 originally.

xubuntu 8.04 —> 9.10

Today I migrated a RAID5 external array from 1 server to my newly built Core i5 server. I specifically chose to use software RAID when I installed it in 2007 just so this migration would be possible and easy.

Basically, everything went as planned with only one small issue.

Last evening, I noticed that my Dell 1535 Laptop wasn’t responsive. It was recording a TV show with the Hauppauge 950Q USB QAM tuner at the time, among other things that it always does.

Below I’ll discuss symptoms, trouble shooting methods and my resolution

This is a series of articles around building a new Intel Core i5 server for use in a small business. Please start with New Server Build Part 1

• Part 1 – Parts is Parts
• Part 2 – Build
• Part 3 – Burn In and OS
• Part 4 Conclusion

In Part 3, I ran a few tests. They all completed cleanly.

Lilo / XFS

So with all the equipment here, I began the server build. Refresh your memory for components by reading New Server Build – Part 1.

• Part 1 – Parts is Parts
• Part 2 – Build
• Part 3 – Burn In and OS
• Part 4 Conclusion

The Old Machine

Before beginning this build I booted the old machine; it was running FreeBSD previously. It had an Athlon 1800+XP CPU, 2GB DDR RAM and AGP graphics. It also had an S3-Virge PCI video card AND an SMC 1000base-tx GigE NIC. Both the NIC and video card were reused in the new server build.

The old machine also had (3) IDE devices – (1) DVD-RW and (2) WD 250GB disks. The motherboard only supports 1 IDE cable, so I’ve connected it to the DVD and 1 of the disks. At some point, I need to boot off USB or get/scrounge a SATA boot disk. I do have a spare 3.5" 1GB SATA, but that is used for weekly off site backups currently. I’ll probably try using a 2GB SDHC flash drive for boot since the host OS only runs the hypervisor.

Bad Parts

I’ve needed to build a new server for about 6 months, but delayed spending the money as long as possible. I’ll be reusing many old components and have purchased the main new items listed below.

• Part 1 – Parts is Parts
• Part 2 – Build
• Part 3 – Burn In and OS
• Part 4 Conclusion

Server Purpose

Update May 2021

dpkg -l 'linux*' | awk '/^rc/{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt purge -y

Original Article

If you run Ubuntu Server LTS releases like I do, you are probably wasting disk space and, because of that, backup storage because old files tied to old kernels aren’t cleaned up automatically.

After locating and cleaning up the old kernel files, I regained over 1GB of space. I was getting low on storage on / otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.

First Method – Package Manager

When you use a package manager for installations, you want to use it for removals too.
First, I want a list of installed kernel specific packages

sudo dpkg-query -l | egrep -i ‘2.6.17|2.6.2[0-3]’

Ouch. That’s a big list with many old, unused packages still installed. If you have Synaptic installed, using the search in that tool will let you easily multi-select packages for removal. Without X/Windows, you’ll be at the command line with me. Time to start removing them with cmds like this.

sudo apt-get remove linux-source-2.6.17 vmware-player-kernel-modules-2.6.17-10 xen-image-xen0-2.6.17-6-generic-xen0 linux-image-2.6.20-17-generic linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20-17-generic

Package managers remove libraries and programs, but avoid removing configuration files, since the next version of a tool probably needs them. If you are truly removing an application, you’ll probably want to purge the install to remove the conf files too.

Second Method – Find and Locate

I use locate and updatedb. I can’t imagine running servers without these tools. To start, I wanted a list of locations to look through and determine how much waste I had. On the server, we are using kernel 2.6.24-26-generic today. To find almost all the files, use

locate  2.6.24 | egrep -vi /backup > /tmp/old-kernel-files

These commands return a list of files, remove backups from that list and put the list into a /tmp file for reference.

On my Ubuntu system, files were located in:

/boot

/lib/modules

/lib/firmware

/linux-restricted-modules/

/usr/src

I had about 10 old kernels lying around beginning with 2.6.17. Because I wanted to be very careful with removing these files, I manually typed the cleanup commands in each directory. A few examples:

sudo rm -rf 2.6.17-*

sudo rm -rf 2.6.24-2[3-4]*

sudo rm -rf linux-headers-2.6.17-1*

sudo rm linux

sudo rm -rf linux-source-2.6.17 orig-linux-headers-2.6.17-10*

Definitely be careful. It is easy to remove the wrong files by accident with a bad pattern.

Good luck getting that space back!