Back up and running, despite no backups...

Well, we're back up and running today after a week of limping along.

Last week, our firewall were we had our staging env melted down (literally). Fortunately, none of the drives fried. That said, there's nothing like a bit of a crash to make you dust the cobwebs off of old file archives... :)

Despite the fact that we don't do actual "backups", we are pretty well squared away no matter what the compu-gremlins throw at us. This is because of the disaster recovery process we have in place for our customers (and ourselves).

In house, we leverage SVN for a variety of reasons:
Disaster recovery
Source code management/version management
It's just a really easy way to progress specific files and updates from development and production

If you're a development house/web shop, I'd HIGHLY recommend using it. If you want to know how we leverage it, give me a call.

If you're a client, you should ask your "agency" what they are doing to protect your assets and to make sure that they can come back if something goes bump in the night. If you're involved in the medical field or a publically traded company, this takes on a whole additional level because, without tools like these, you can't prove what was on your site on a specific day at a specific time. This is CRITICAL if you get involved in litigation over claims, statements or financially relevant events and news releases.

If you want to know more, just ask!

Mounting a Linux Logical Volume

As it turns out, it is not exactly straight forward to mount a Linux logical volume on a new machine. I've found that this is a problem whether the drive is in the box or attached via USB.

The error I kept getting was unknown fs type when I would try and mount it (I'll try it again later and get the exact error code in here).

After a little research, I found you need the following commands to do discovery on the drive so that Linux can figure out what's on it. Here's the commands necessary to make this work for a drive with a volume called LogicalVolume00 that we want to mount to /misc2:

/sbin/pvscan
/sbin/vgcfgrestore VolGroup00
vgscan -v
/sbin/vgchange -ay -v
/sbin/vgdisplay -v
mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /misc2

I'm not really sure what each of these commands does. If you understand how this works, please e-mail me or post a comment and I'll update this listing to make it more thorough.