James Stull

Ever heard of DISKPART? You have now. It's a very easy way to manage your disks in Windows 2000, XP, & 2003. It's a standard tool for XP and 2003 however if your running 2000 then you will need to download it. The links are at the bottom of this post. This little command line utility is very easy to work with but powerful. For example: lets say you added a disk to your RAID5 set and you want to add it to your current volume. Instead of taking the time to convert to dynamic disks which would lead to down time since the volume would need to be unmounted you can use diskpart to expand it. The way you do this is by running the diskpart command, type "list volume", then select the volume by typing "select volume N" N being the volume number, then type "extend" to extend to the max size or you can type "extend size=N" this time N represents the size in MB. Diskpart does have some limitations but you will find it very helpful. You ca...

I recently upgraded a server and installed a RAID5 set just to house the database running on that server. After a little research I found that it was really easy to move a MySQL database. Here is how you do it. First off since I run CentOS this is going to be Red Hat/CentOS specific. However, you can use these methods on any distribution. After you configure your RAID set or formatted your hard drive you want to move your MySQL database to you will need to mount it, lets say you mount it to /database and you already updated fstab. If MySQL is running make sure you shut it down: #/etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql stop OR #service mysql stop Now unless you want to put your database in the root of /database you will want to create a sub-directory: #mkdir /database/mysql Copy your database files: #cp -R /var/lib/mysql/ /database/mysql Setup the correct permissions: #chown -R mysql.mysql /database/mysql Rename your old directory (or you can delete it): #mv /var/lib/mysql/ /var/lib...

I'm currently supporting 2 sites that are about a mile apart. I've got a T1 that bridges the 2 networks together but I wanted some redundancy (not to mention a faster connection). So I decided to invest in a couple of Cisco 1300 wireless bridges which would give us a 54mb link. The problem was I wanted to test them, along with the routing, in a lab environment. I had a couple spare 2600's laying around so I connected them up and did some searching. After a while I came across this Cisco page that shows you how to make a loop back end both physically and logically for your router. This is great if you only want to test your CSU/DSU, but I wanted to actually make a T1 cable to test the routes to make sure they worked the way I needed them to before I applied them to the production network. So I yanked out a few feet of Cat5 and created a T1 cable that basically mirrored the loopback on both ends. It worked great and I had a full 1.544mb connection between the CSU/DSU's....