
Archive for June, 2007
Melburn-Roobaix 2007
Saturday, June 30th, 2007Adding a physical disk to LVM in Redhat/CentOS
Friday, June 29th, 2007Posted here for googlers and for my own future reference. Documentation pulled together from about 4 different sites. Could possibly be sub-titled: “Holy crap, the disk in my VMware installation is too small – it’s split up into 2GB files and using vmware to resize it seems like voodoo”
Problem:
My computer only has 20GB of disk space. I just have 1 partition. I want to add another disk (40GB). I don’t want to add another partition (and I really don’t want to reinstall the whole system), I want to increase the size of the root partition to 60GB. i.e. I want the root partition to span across two physical disks.
Solution:
- Add new physical disk. Boot.
-
# pvscanThis will show you the current physical volumes.
-
# fdisk /dev/sdbAdd the disk to your machine as a primary partition. Partition type: “
8e(LVM)”. Obviously/dev/sdbmay be different on your system. -
# pvcreate /dev/sdb1This creates a new physical LVM volume on our new disk.
-
# vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sdb1Add our new physical volume to the volume group:
VolGroup00. Again, this group name may by different for you, but this is what Redhat & CentOS assigns by default when you install your system. -
# pvscanYou should see the new physical volume assigned to VolGroup00.
-
# lvextend -L+40G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00This increases the size of the logical volume our root partition resides in. Change the
-Lflag as appropriate.
We’ve just added 40GB to the logical volume used by the root partition. Sweet as. Now we need to resize the file system to utilize the additional space.
-
Reboot into rescue mode using your CentOS CDROM.
From memory this involves typing
linux rescueas your boot option. - When prompted, skip the mounting of system partitions.
-
# lvm vgchange -a yThis command makes your LVM volumes accessible.
-
# e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00Run a file system check, the
-fflag seems necessary. No idea what we do if the returns an error? -
# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00Without any parameters resize2fs will just increase the file system to the max space available.
Reboot and your root partition is now 40GB lager, spanning multiple disks. Yay.
Speedy iCal Events & To Dos with Quicksilver
Friday, June 8th, 2007Karl bought a MacBook recently. He asked me if there was a way to quickly add events/appointments into Quicksilver. He gets lots of emails with dates for gigs and wants to be able to quickly add them to his calendar without manually adding them in iCal.
So the idea is that you should be able to copy any semi-sanely formatted date/time and quickly add it to the iCal calendar of your choice and provide an event title.
There are some instructions around, but they’re a little incomplete. They omit the first step which I’m posting here for googlers. Here it is:
Enable iCal Plugin
- Invoke Quicksilver, go to Preferences.
- Check “Enable advanced features” an relaunch Quicksilver when prompted.
- Invoke Quicksilver, go to Preferences -> Plugins. Click “All Plug-ins” on the left, select “Calendar”, then check the “iCal Module”.
- Optional Step. After enabling this plugin I was able to disable advanced features and the plugin seemed to remain active.
Now we have the ability to use iCal actions. Sweet. Onto the good stuff.
Creating a New iCal Event
- Invoke Quicksilver
- Type “.” to invoke text mode.
-
Type “[date] — [ event_name ]“. e.g:
Next Friday 1PM -- Beer!Note that the double-dash (
--) is really important here. - Use the “Create iCal Event” action. (i.e. Hit [tab] to go to the “action” field – then type “event”).
- Select the Calendar you want to add the event to. (again, hit [tab] to get to this field).

Creating a New iCal To Do
Exactly the same process as above, but choose the “Create iCal To Do” action.
Date Formats
According to the Quicksilver docs for the iCal plugin, the date can be in the following formats:
| 2/4/07 3pm | (default format) |
| 2007-02-04 | (note long year number) |
| feb 4 | (english month names are understood) |
| friday 12pm | (english day names are ok) |
| next wednesday 13:00 | (use next because today is wednesday) |
| 15.2.07 | (feb 15th 2007, cause 15 can’t be a month) |
| 3.2.07 | (march 2nd 2007!!) |