It is simple, here is what you need to know

You can format it EXT4, but ext2 and ext3 are also OK ! ext2 and ext3 allow up to 16TB disks, and file sizes of up to 2TB, ext4 allows much more.

Any linux kernel newer than 2.6.31 should work just fine with “Advanced format” drives using the exact same steps in this article.

MBR only supports 2TB drives, you need GPT, so let us get started

1- apt-get update
2- apt get install parted
3- parted /dev/sdc
4- mklabel gpt
5- Answer yes to: Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? yes
6- mkpart primary ext4 0% 100% (to make a partition as big as the disk (will occupy starting from first megabyte (for alignment) to the end of disk))
7- quit

FYI, if you want multiple partitions, here are the 2 lines that should replace step 6
6- mkpart primary ext4 0% 40%
6- mkpart primary ext4 40% 100%

and remember to format both (sdc1 and sdc2) when you are done with parted

Now to formatting the drive

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1

Before mounting it, i like ext4, but i don’t want a journaling OS on this drive that is not the system drive, so i will need do a few things to the drive first

Lazy writeback

tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdc1

No Journaling

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdc1

Now to check what we have

dumpe2fs /dev/sdc1 |grep 'Filesystem features'

Or maybe if you want the whole thing on the screen

dumpe2fs /dev/sdc1 |more

if has_journal option exist when executing the first – you have journal on the file system

And there we are, Now we need to mount it at boot time by adding it to fstab, to do that, we will need the disk’s unique ID !

8- Now executing the following command will give you the unique ID of this new partition for use with fstab (The disk list we will edit below in step 10)
blkid /dev/sdc1
9- create the directory where you want to mount your hard disk, for example
mkdir /hds
mkdir /hds/3tb
10- Now, we add the following line to fstab, notice that noatime increases performance, but some applications might need or rely on it. postfix does not and i have verified that.

UUID=b7a491b1-a690-468f-882f-fbb4ac0a3b53       /hds/3tb            ext4     defaults,noatime                0       1

defaults and noatime are but only a couple of options, here are more options that you can add
nofail = If the disk is not present, continue booting
nobootwait = Limit the amount of time you plan to wait
noauto = Don’t mount it until I issue a “mount /dev/sdb1”, or mount “/hds/thisdisk” command

11- Now execute
mount -a

You are done,. if you execute
df -h
You should see your 2+TB hard drive in there !

To make sure the drive is aligned correctly, i like to write a file on it and see how fast that goes… so let us use a 2GB file

dd if=/dev/zero of=/hds/WD2000_3/deleteme.img bs=1M count=2000

Outcome came out (for a western digital black 2TB)
First run: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 5.94739 s, 353 MB/s
Consecutive runs: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 11.1405 s, 188 MB/s
Outcome came out for a western digital green 3TB
First run: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 8.32337 s, 252 MB/s
Consecutive runs: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 14.376 s, 146 MB/s

the consecutive runs give close results, what i printed here is the average

My old tablet (HP tc4200) had problems with the wireless adpater , A broadcom BCM4309

To find out what the Broadcom wireless adapter model is i issued

lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4

For yours, you may need to check with this website here as you may or may not need the sta or the b43legacy driver, in general here are the popular models

STA – BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4313, BCM4321, BCM4322, BCM43224, BCM43225, **BCM43227, **BCM43228

b43 – BCM4306/3, BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4318, BCM4320

b43legacy – BCM4301, BCM4306, BCM4306/2

http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Supported_devices

The, now that i know… i edited /etc/apt/sources.list and added the contrib and non-free repositories

then

apt-get update

apt-get install firmware-b43-installer b43-fwcutter

And what do you know, just reboot and it works

Inspecting Postfix’s email queue.

This post explains how to view messages in the postfix queue, another post on this blog explains how to delete or selectively delete from the postfix queue

1- Postfix maintains two queues, the pending mails queue, and the deferred mail queue,
the differed mail queue has the mail that has soft-fail and should be retried (Temporary failure),
Postfix retries the deferred queue on set intervals (configurable, and by default 5 minutes)

In any case, the following commands should be useful

1- Display a list of queued mail, deferred and pending

mailq

or

postqueue -p

To save the output to a text file you can run

mailq > myfile.txt

or

postqueue -p > myfile.txt

the above commands display all queued messages (Not the message itself but the sender and recipients and ID), The ID is particularly useful if you want to inspect the message itself.

2- View message (contents, header and body) in Postfix queue

Assuming the message has the ID XXXXXXX (you can see the ID form the QUEUE)

postcat -vq XXXXXXXXXX

Or to save it in a file

postcat -vq XXXXXXXXXX > themessage.txt

3- Tell Postfix to process the Queue now

postqueue -f

OR

postfix flush

4- Delete queued mail

Delete all queued mail

postsuper -d ALL

Delete differed mail queue messages

(The ones the system intends to retry later)

postsuper -d ALL deferred

Delete from queue selectively

To delete from the queue all emails that have a certain address in them, we can use this program (perl script)…

NOTE: This perl script seems to be free, and is all over the internet, i could not find out where it originates or who wrote it.

1- Download this file, unzip, and upload the file to your server, then from your bash command line, Change Directory to wherever you uploaded this file, for example cd /root (Just an example, You can upload it wherever you wish)

NOTE: A second script here works differently, i have not yet tested it, download it here

Now, from within that directory, execute…

./postfix-queue-delete.pl anyaddress@example.com

Any mail that has this email address in it’s IN or OUT list will be deleted

The script uses the postqueue -p then looks for your string, once found, it deletes the email by ID, this means that this script can delete messages using any text that appears when you run mailq (or postqueue -p), so if you run it with the parameter joe all mail with addresses such as joefriend@example.com and

Other moethods exist, like executing directly

mailq | tail +2 | grep -v '^ *(' | awk  'BEGIN { RS = "" } { if ($8 == "email@address.com" && $9 == "") print $1 } ' | tr -d '*!' | postsuper -d -

——————————–

Sample Messages in a differed mail queue

——————————–

SOME282672ID 63974 Mon Nov 29 05:12:30 someaddresss@yahoo.com
(temporary failure. Command output: maildrop: maildir over quota.)
localuser@exmple.com

———————————-

SOME282672ID 9440 Wed Jun 30 05:30:11 MAILER-DAEMON
(SomeHostName [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] said: 452  Mailbox size limit exceeded (in reply to RCPT TO command))
username@example.org

———————————-

SOME282672ID 4171 Thu Nov 25 13:22:03 MAILER-DAEMON
(host inbound.somedomain.net [yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy] refused to talk to me: 550 Rejected: 188.xx.179.46, listed at http://csi.cloudmark.com/reset-request for remediation.)
someuser@example.com

———————————

SOME282672ID 37031 Thu Nov 25 08:53:36 someuser@example.net
(Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=example.com type=MX: Host not found, try again)
someuser@example.com 

Section 1: My hard drive has bad sectors / Blocks / area

Do i need to change it ?
Not necessarily, but If it is in warranty, and they allow you to replace it, a new one is not a bad idea, otherwise read on

it all depends on whether the bad sectors are expanding or not, if they are not, they are probably caused by shock to the hard drive, usually, it is enough to mark them as bad using “chkdsk /r” on windows and leave the drive working.

To find out if your bad sectors are Spreading or not spreading, do a “chkdsk /r” four times, make sure the same number appears in the second and third and fourth time (Forget the first time), then, if the second is different but the third and fourth are the same, then do the test 2 more times, and make sure you get the same number of bad sectors for trials 3, 4, 5, 6, if so, your bad sectors are not spreading.

You did not mention backup in the answer before, do we need to backup ?
People would typically ask you to backup just in case, i say you should always have backup of your most important files, non spreading sectors of the hard drive, in my humble experience do not contribute negatively to reliability, so my answer is, backup should be done regardless

How do i know how many bad sectors are marked on an NTFS hard drive ?
There is a tool called nfi.exe that comes with a bundle Microsoft makes available here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253066/en-us this tool is part of (OEM Support Tools), it can tell you everything about a disk formatted in NTFS

On a linux box, there is a simple way to search for some text inside a file using regular expressions in the command line

So, the short answer, in Linux, you can simply execute this line

grep -R -B3 -A4 "MYTEXT" /var/ > /root/findingres.txt

this will show you 3 lines before the text and 4 lines after the string and the file name, it will search in the /var/ folder, and will store the searching results to /root/findingres.txt

The above is a simple example, you can use regular expressions to find more complicated stuff

Also, if you want to search the entier hard drive for a string, and you want to search only in one type of file that you want to specify using a file extension you can use the following

grep -R --include=*.txt "MYTEXT" /etc/

Now, if you want to search for a file by file name,

find / -type f -name "myfile.txt"

would look for an exact file name, if you are looking to find a file using wildcards, for example, any file that ends in a certain extension you would

find / -type f -iname "*.psd"

If you want to include directories in your search, remove the -type flag

When i get delivery problems like the message i got today from a microsoft exchange server

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

host mail1.example.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] said: 550 5.7.1 Message rejected due to content restrictions (in reply to end of DATA command)

I usually run the test on the following locations

1- the road runner website allows you to check cloudmark… run a scan with
http://postmaster.rr.com/amIBlockedByRR

tells me about
Return Path Reputation Network Blacklist :
Spamhaus (ZEN) :
Road Runner Blocklist :
FBL Enrollment :
Road Runner Internal Name-Based Block :
Cloudmark Sender Intelligence :
Return Path Sender Score Reputation Score :
historical Road Runner Internal IP Address-Based block records

Now, MXtoolbox

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

for

AHBL
BACKSCATTERER
BARRACUDA
BURNT-TECH
CASA-CBL
CASA-CBLPLUS
CBL
IMP-SPAM
INPS_DE
ivmSIP
ivmSIP24
LASHBACK
MAILSPIKE-BL
MAILSPIKE-Z
NIXSPAM
NOMOREFUNN
PSBL
RATS-Dyna
RATS-NoPtr
RATS-Spam
REDHAWK
SEM-BACKSCATTER
SEM-BLACK
SORBS-DUHL
SORBS-SPAM
SORBS-WEB
SPAMCANNIBAL
SPAMCOP
SWINOG
TRUNCATE
UCEPROTECTL1
UCEPROTECTL2
UCEPROTECTL3
WPBL

If i can not see anything in the blacklists / blocklists above, i will generally contact the server administrator

I like the idea of Dual SIM android phones because one SIM can provide data at a cheaper rate, the other can be my phone line, and i will not experience overages on my main phone like (billed at a premium when over quota).

The LOWDOWN, Get SAMSUNG, if you like get the ALCATEL, stay away from the LG, it is a disaster, 3 LG Phones suffered the same exact problems.

I have tried 3 Android dual SIM phones to date.

Samsung Galaxy Y Duos (S6102)
Excellent up to now, no problems with this phone at all, but we have only used it for 3 days up to now (We are 3 people with three phones)

ALCATEL ONE TOUCH BLAZE DUO OT-890D
A bit slow, dialer good, not very responsive, but works as a mobile phone, don’t expect to flawlessly play angry birds

LG Optimus NET duo – LG-P698
A complete disaster despite the excellent hardware (for the price), All 3 phones (now replaced with the SAMSUNG) have the same exact problems, software for all 3 phones was updated to the latest software, and still a disaster.

The best hardware rendered useless with LG’s very bad dialer, the dialer hangs, sometimes calls people and there is no way to stop the call, takes a good 10 seconds at best to hang up, and if you press hang up more than once, it will call the person back, all in all, the basics are hell in this phone.

The battery is also very very bad, 16 hours at best if you don’t use it at all (Had one 3G sim card and 1 GSM only SIM card), the power manegemnt of the phone is not all that good and that is probably the reason it depletes a battery bigger than the samsung battery in much less time.

The good side of it is that it is very fast when sharing the internet by becoming a potable hotspot (WIFI tethering), it’s browser is good, it’s hardware is good, it has 512MB of ram (That’s plenty), but it is a very bad phone.

For some reason, when you look for a way to move a folder and all it’s sub folders into another folder, overwriting the files if they exist on destination, you will find very little information, the reason behind that is that the mv command that both renames files and folders and moves them does not support the -R switch (Recursive), the answer is that you copy them, then delete the source

So, if i downloaded wordpress and i want to update my installation with the new files i would

cp -R /var/vhosts/wordpress/* /var/vhosts/example.com/

this will update my copy of wordpress by moving the contents of the wordpress folder into the virtual hosting directory of my website

KEEP IN MIND THAT THE mv AND cp COMMANDS OVERWRITES WITHOUT PROMPTING….

to make it prompt before overwriting you must provide a -i parameter

If you don’t want a prompt, and you still want to NOT overwrite destination files… you will need to also set the “–reply=no” (depreciated) parameter so that the mv command will answer NO to all overwrite situations

NOTE: –reply has been depreciated (no longer works)

the linux move (mv) command : Moving folders

to move a folder into another folder, assuming there is a file names text.txt inside the folder /hds/ssd/mysql/moveme/text.txt, after this command we will have the file in /hds/ssd/mysql/into/moveme/text.txt

mv /hds/ssd/mysql/moveme/ /hds/ssd/mysql/into/

To move the contents of moveme including sub-folders directly into the folder into without moving the folder moveme itself

mv /hds/ssd/mysql/moveme/* /hds/ssd/mysql/into/

This post is rather old, and everything is secure on the internet these days, so rather than FTP, it is recommended that you setup the new user with SFTP instead (Secure file transfer protocol), SCP is another option, but i have an sftp article ready for you here

So here is a quick guide to setting up a user to have access to a certain directory via FTP

You probably already use a Linux server, you access your files via SFTP or SCP, but you want to give someone access to a certain directory within.

Here is how it is done on a Debian squeeze machine

apt-get install pure-ftpd-common pure-ftpd

Then we need to add a group and default user for our program

groupadd ftpgroup
useradd -g ftpgroup -d /dev/null -s /etc ftpuser

pure-pw useradd test1 -u ftpuser -d /home/ftpusers/test1

pure-pw mkdb

This creates the file mentioned earlier called /etc/pureftpd.pdb, this file houses all information related to your virtual users

pure-pw passwd test1

Once password is set, update the database

pure-pw mkdb

To delete a user

pure-pw userdel test1

pure-pw show test1

pure-ftpwho

Create symlink to add PureDB to authentication methods

cd /etc/pure-ftpd/auth
ln -s ../conf/PureDB 50pure

Disable PAM authentication unless you need it

echo no > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PAMAuthentication

Disable UNIX authentication unless you need it

echo no > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/UnixAuthentication

Today, as i was managing my PLESK Version 9 for Windows server, i noticed that every website i put a tick beside and tried to remove (deleting all files and all related), i ended up disabling and it just won’t get removed

So here is the solution

Open the command prompt
in the command prompt (CMD) change the directory to the plesk bin directory like so

cd c:ParallelsPleskadminbin

Then, execute the command

domain.exe --remove domain.com

You should now find that the domain is no longer in the list of domains.

Sometimes i get an error deleting stating that a file (dll) in system32 directory is in use by…. the answer is reboot the server, then try deleting a few times with the command above until you see the success message

Just like the previous post, the reason why running from the command line works and from the control panel does not work is unknown to me.