Topic: Puzzling errors in fresh 5.6 Install

[Robert]

I believe I read ALL postings re install errors, etc. re. 5.6, and decided I would upgrade my 5.5 anyways. It all seems to work, except...

1. I did a clean install of 5.6 and set up all my network, user, etc. settings. Then, wanting to add a second hard drive, I started up fdisk. Just out of curiosity, I checked (option v) hda1, and to my surprise, it came up with a page an a half of error messages such as:

Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?)
Partition 1 does nopt end on cylinder boundary
Partitions 1: cylinder 372 greater than maximum 12
Partition 1: previous sectors 1920119918 disagrees with total 5972966
Warning: partition 1 overlaps partition 2 - etc.

What the...? How is this possible? The setup is all automatic, including the partitioning and formatting, how can the hard drive be this screwed up? Or, is it all right and there is something wrong with the FDISK program?!?

2. I reinstalled again from scratch (thinking that it might fix it), but before I did, I saved my settings on a Reinstall Diskette (option in the server console). Everything seemed to be smooth, but when the reinstall was done - another surprize - NONE OF THE SETTINGS WERE RESTORED!

3. I checked again with fdisk after the second installation, and the same errors come up.

I can't trust a server to store my files which reports a page an a half of error messages re errors in the disk structure...

I don't get it. What am I doing wrong?

[Ray Mitchell]

Dear Robert
I saw something similar to this when I was doing a test instal of 5.6 with 2 drives in RAID1. I reset the partition tables and after that the instal was OK. I think the same can apply to single disk instals as well..Try

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
and if you have a second disk
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1      

and then redo your fresh installation.
Just do the instal with one disk connected initially and add the second disk later (if it is not in RAID1)


As far as using the reinstall disk you created in server manager, this only saves your basic server parameters as set in admin control console under Configure this server.

If you want to save all your user settings, ibays etc you will need to do a backup to desktop (or tape) and restore from that after the fresh instal has been done.

Hope this helps

See the FAQ at http://www.e-smith.org/faq.php3#7q15 for additional info

I would say that 5.6 is quite reliable. I have it running nicely on a small server with no hiccups.

Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Robert]

Dear Ray,

Thank you, I did what you recommend and it worked (almost perfectly).

I got it on the reinstall disk too.

I did a backup to desktop to a Win Xp Pro workstation, the backup worked and created a 2.9GB file (with all my data on the server). However, it would not restore, so I had to manually re-set all the server parameters and transfer the files back to the original i-bays. It looks like (and other postings also indicate this)  that the backup to desktop does not wotk with large backups (more than a couple GB).

Robert

[Ray Mitchell]

Robert & all others with backup issues/confusion

This backup/restore issue has been perplexing for many users based on the comments in these forums.
It is possible to make a lage (ie >2Gb backup to desktop file) but limitations in the sme server prevent the file from being restored using sme server manager functions.
This limitation has nothing to do with what operating system version you are using on your desktop and its ability to handle large file supprot ie >4Gb.
Note that the backup and restore functions can take a looonnnggggg time to complete.

Of course manual backup is possible from the backup file, using WinRAR or Linux versions of the same. Just expand and manually copy the required files. You should also check your backup file is OK using the Verify function in server manager.

These links & thread are the answer to it all
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15411.msg59195#msg59195
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15411.msg59195#msg59195

The practical answer is to copy off all the ibay data to a workstation and then do the backup to desktop (thus keeping the backup file to < 2Gb).
Then reinstal the server software, then restore from backup, then copy all your ibay data back to the server.

Of course if you have a (big fat) tape drive then none of the above is necessary, just backup to tape and restore  from tape.
The only limitation is that you will still need to manually restore some files from the tape that are not included in the automatic restore function, see FAQ for details of what is/is not restored.
This would be the case where you have done user customisation and have data in non standard folders (ie if data is in folders other than those listed below then it will be backed up by tape but NOT restored from tape).

From FAQ at
http://www.e-smith.org/faq.php3#8q24

What does the SME Server backup do?

The backup to desktop will compress the following directories to a file named smeserver.tgz:

/home/e-smith
/etc/e-smith/templates-custom
/etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom
/etc/ssh
/root/.ssh
/etc/passwd
/etc/shadow
/etc/group
/etc/gshadow
/etc/smbpasswd

The backup to tape will backup all filesystems, however only the files and directories in the above list will be restored. The tape backup does a level 0

• backup using a program called flexbackup.

Both methods will backup MySQL data.

• Level 0 backups of "all" assume a new tape - this will trigger tape retension and erasure.

The alternatives are the flexbackup to disk and rsync (see HOWTO section), neither of which I have used, but from all reports here, they seem to do the job well, particularly when there are large amounts of data on your server.

see
http://www.e-smith.org/docs/howto/contrib/flexbackup-to-disk-howto.htm
http://www.myezserver.com/downloads/mitel/howto/rsync-backup-howto.html

Hope this helps all who have been a bit confused and unsure about this matter.
Regards
Ray Mitchell