Ubuntu Installation :: Use Ram Instead Of Disk - Write To Disk At Shutdown
Mar 21, 2011
I have a netbook I'm not using and which I transformed into a server with Apache, Tomcat6, Netatalk, Webmin, BIND9 and Tor.
Problem is, the disks never stop spinning because all of the programs write a few kb at least every few seconds to disk, even when nobody is connected to it.
My question is: Is there a way to have the computer boot from disk like normal (maybe even a squashfs), keep ALL CHANGES to ram and then save to disk when either the ram is full (unlikely because the server is rebooted every few days) or at shutdown?
I thought about a mixture of ramfs and unionfs but I'm not good enough yet...
Upgraded from 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS, but can't get the sound working.Have downloaded the 10.04 Ubuntu CD image to installwhen I try to follow the directions at[URL]BurningIsoHowto for burning the image............it says to Right click on the ISO image file and choose Write to Disc. I have no WRITE TO DISC option when I right click.Will some kind soul please tell me how to burn the downloaded CD image to a CD?
df -h [URL] I did the following command to find everything is in /usr or /var, then tracked it down to /usr/lib and /usr/share as the main offenders, but out of all the directories none are more than 1mb or so.
du -sh /* | sort -gr | head -n 5
I tried to uninstall firefox, which is what got me in this mess in the first place, the log claims it will remove ~240 mb but failes on a "E: Write error - write (28 No space left on device)" [URL] If I could juggle something onto an external hard drive so I can uninstall firefox I would be out of the wood. Failing that I believe a new install is in order.
This is the third 9.10 install to do this on two different laptops, so wondering what's up...
In both cases, the goal was to leave a large chunk of unpartitioned disk after the Ubuntu partitions, for a second OS install or a filesystem Ubuntu cannot create like NTFS.
When I install with manual partitions, the system can't boot and asks for me to insert a system disk and press any key. When I reinstall telling Ubuntu to "use the entire disk" it then works.
First laptop, first try:
Remainder of the 500GB disk is free space.
Fails to boot, "insert system disk".
First laptop, second try without the /boot partition:
Remainder of the 500GB disk is free space.
Fails to boot, "insert system disk".
"use entire disk" works perfectly.
Second laptop, first try:
Same thing, non-system disk or disk error, insert system disk.
Second try "use entire disk" is currently in progress but I expect the same to happen.
I downloaded the latest version of wubi and when I click to run i get the error "pyrun.exe - No Disk. There is no disk in the drive. insert a disk into drive DeviceHarddisk2DR2".
WinXp sp3 is on disk sdb, then installed Ubuntu 10.04 on sda, can go into diff OS without any problem. I am going to move sda to another machine, when I unplug sda, WinXp can't start to boot on sdb. How to fix it?below is my case output$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB ... Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
I had done a new lucid install to a 1 TB RAID 1 array using the alternate CD a few weeks back. I messed up that system trying to some hardware working that lucid doesn't have drivers for yet, so I gave up on it and reinstalled to a single 80 GB disk that I now want to move over to the RAID array.
I moved all of the existing files on the array to a single folder, then copied all of the folders from the 80 GB disk over to the array with permissions and symlinks (minus the contents of /proc and /sys, which I created empty).
These are the commands I used:
Quote:
p -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /b* cp -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /d* cp -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /e* cp -a -d -R -v -t /media/raid_array /h*
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I tried to change fstab to use the 689a... for root, but when I try to boot, it's still trying to open /dev/disk/by-uuid/412d...
So then I booted from the single disk again and chrooted into the array, then ran update-initramfs -u. I got 3 "grep: /proc/modules: No such file or directory" errors, and "cat: /proc/cmdline: No such file or directory"- so I created directory /proc/modules, created an empty file /proc/cmdline, and ran the initramfs update again. Then I tried to shut down, which hung (probably because I was doing all of this from a terminal window in Gnome), so I killed the power after a couple of minutes.
It's still trying to use /dev/disk/by-uuid/412d... to boot.
What am I missing? I assume I just have to change the UUID to mount as root, but I don't know how.
I installed Debian on my PC with a Acer Stock motherboard (xc600) with amd64 and after the installation finished it told me to remove my installation media and reboot. After reboot I was returned this message ' ERROR: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has failed.'. I have verified with gparted using mint live OS that I have Debian installed on my system.
I got believes that this may have be caused by a broken grub or I need to configure something I don't know how in BIOS.
I will update the topic later..
My installation media was a USB 2.0 flashdrive with a Debian 8.2 Jessie Installer and 9 different Linux distros. I have installed Debian multiple times before on my laptop and never had this problem so I know how to go through the installation process and set the partitions.
I have xp/fc8 on an older ide drive and just installed a new sata 1T and planned to put fc10 on it but in the process I killed my fc8 installation. I told the installer that the other disks were off limits but it was somewhat confusing at the bootloader page. So, I suspect that I told it boot off the fc8 disk. If that is the case is there a way to restore the fc8 install by somehow rescuing the /boot partition on the fc8 disk?
After installation of debian, using the squeeze net-installer, on a HP elitebook 6930P, i get the following error. "non-system disk or disk error"
It is right after boot process, and just when it should load grub. Grub is installed in the MBR. Windows7, is installed as well, and is not an option to remove. (Should not be the problem though).
/ is set with the bootable flag.
The installation went without any issues, and I have actually tried to install twice with the exact same thing.
i have been away from linux for a long while and decided to try it out again. i just received a fedora 10 dvd and went to install it.it wouldn't boot on either my laptop or pc?so i explored the disk and realised its a source disk?
1 = is the dvd disk any good to me? 2 = how can i install fedora from the disk or do i need to get another disk?
i finally decided to updgrade from Hardy Heron to Lucid Lynx. for this i made a backup of my old install, then i couldnt find my Lucid CD so i used a Karmic one to partition my old ext3 to ext4. There were some errors but after trying a few times it worked. Installed Karmic, rebooted (worked fine), downloaded all updates - (did NOT reboot to let updates take effect) and upgraded to Lucid.
Everything went fine so far. Now when i try to boot into Lucid the system hangs, i've also got a windowsXP partition on there so i tried booting that, first grub tells me Error 29: Disk write error then trying again windows seems to boot but it takes much longer than it should and seems to hang.
Then i tried Karmic and Lucid LiveCD (which i found in the meantime) none of the LiveCDs make it to boot after about 20 minutes. (previously they worked fine)looking at the errors it seems to be something about the harddrive. Why the harddrive would stop the LiveCD booting is a mystery to me but the same messages appear when i select Recovery from the Grub menu so i guess the problem is related.
Right Now I'm using hdparm command in unix to shut down the hard disk but there are few issues with it.
when it wakes back up it consumes lots power. Is there any other way to do it? Many times when I put my hard disk to sleep, I can see few bursts at the beginning and then after a while it goes to sleep. I think its because of the journaling system in ubuntu (which I use) Have anybody encountered that? What would be the best linux/unix operating system (eg: ubuntu/centos/redhat) to work on extensive hard disk operations?
I have Ubuntu 10.04 installed on my Armada laptop with a Teac CD-W24E internal and a Plextor-DVDR PX504A via USB. I use K3B for writing CD data projects to 700mb CD-RW 1-4x discs. K3B writes ok on both drives if the inserted disk is a blank disk. If I insert an appendable disk with lots of space left, it asks to blank it before writing. I find no way to write on an appendable disk with K3B. Is this a software limitation or am I missing something?
I am using kernel 2.6.32.21, and my hard disk is West digital WD10EARS-00Y, 1TB. This disk is just for data, I made 2 partitions on it, each has half. And I have another small disk for system. I am using ext3.
this is my fdisk /dev/sdc Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 1 60800 488375968 83 Linux /dev/sdc2 60801 121601 488384032+ 83 Linux
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I ran some dd to test the write throughput on /dev/sdc2. If I run it in /data2, I got around 70MB/s. If I create some directory, say /data2/dir/, and run dd again, I might get 60MB/s. Sometimes I still get 70MB/s, sometimes I get 60MB/s, differs for directories.
I wonder if this is because the allocation policy of file system, ext3, or this is from my hard drive?
I've been having a bad problem with X freezing up (but not the whole system), and I hate continually performing unclean shutdowns with the power button.Will an Alt+SysRq+o shut down the system in a way that doesn't cause the loss of disk buffers? Obviously, whatever hasn't been saved to the buffer will be lost, but my concern extends to the buffers themselves.ext4 and autofsck make this less of an issue, but I hate the thought of unnecessary silent corruption until the freezing stops.
I have formatted to EX3 in gparted all went fine, however I cannot rename the disk or write anything to it as access is locked to root Furthermore a file has been created called "lost and found" its locked and 46GB in size - what is this?
Well appears to be that i have two partitions..one of 300gb i did on windows time ago and one of 100gb where i place my DEBIAN LENNY 5.0, the problem is that i cannot write into it..only i can copy stuff from it.
I have what seems to be a hard disk Write speed problems with my first hard drive. Timing the cp command of a 700 Meg file takes about 8 secs from disk 2 to 3 but takes 25 minutes from disk 2 to disk 1.
Here are the details: Kubuntu 9.04 (Kernel 2.6.28-15-generic) Hard Disk 1 : /dev/sda (WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0) Partitioned /dev/sda1 ext3 / 10 Gigs /dev/sda2 extended 222 Gigs /dev/sda5 linux-swap 2 Gigs /dev/sda6 ext /home 220 Gigs
Hard Disk 2 : /dev/sdb (WDC WD2500AAKS-00F0A0) Partitioned : /dev/sdb1 ntfs 16 gigs /dev/sdb2 xfs /home/eric/data_drive 216 Gigs Hard Disk 2 : /dev/sdc (ST3500320AS) Partitioned: /dev/sdc1 xfs /home/eric/data_drive2 465 Gigs
By doing 'time cp ...sdb1/test.avi ...sdc1' takes about 8 seconds and same vice-versa. the command 'time cp ...sdb1/test.avi ...sdb1/test1.avi takes about 11 seconds and the same holds true if sdc1 is used But copy sdb1 or sdc1/test.avi to either sda1 or sda6 and it takes 25 minutes. Same problem if I copy from the same drive partition (sda). I have booted a livecd Knoppix 6.2 and the same problems happens.. So safe to say it's not Kubuntu. The only thing that is left to do is backup and reformat the partitions as XFS and try again. I also did a full smartcontrol Extended test and no errors. Checked all the various logs and nothing found.
I am trying to scrape all of the info off of an old Fedora disk so that I can referb the box and put new stuff on it, but for some reason I can't get the permissions (even as root) to write to the disk.
It is currently mounted under /media/backup and I can browse it all I want, but still can't write.
I am doing a program that reads data from a gps and some other devices and writes some files with all the information. When I run it normally it works fine, but if I run the program in the background (with the ampersand) files are not created until I bring it to foreground or close it. I am confused, the program should run the same way with and without the ampersand. (Could it be that the main process that creates all the threads does not create them when it is executed in background? It seems like if the program is stopped until I take it to the foreground).
I'm only somewhat new to linux but I still don't have a real grasp of it's deep innards and I had a fairly outlandish idea that I'm wondering whether is possible/plausible or not.I want to run a game server on CentOS that has a very high dependency on fast writes-to-disk. Disk writes are pretty much the single bottleneck in this server.First I looked at allowing a high queue of writes to pile up before it flushes them to the disk, but I read that this causes fsync, which is still used commonly, to take a very long time.
I've been thinking about the possibility of running the server on a RAM disk, but I still want changes to be saved to non-volatile storage. Not all at once, but have it actively write the changes to disk. The hope is that this would smooth out the peaks and valleys of write activity and improve overall performance, but I have not seen this idea discussed anywhere.
So my question is, is there any plausible way to continuously copy writes to a RAM disk to a physical drive without slowing down the speed of the writes to the RAM drive below the speed of said RAM? Or is there a better way to obtain this sort of performance, short of investing in expensive equipment?
I have encountered this problem of memory usage is increasing as the during the my program is being run until 1Mb is left then it stays at that.A part of the program is this:
In fact I'm not the systems administrator, but I have a strange problem unzipping a file. I think is a problem of memory or swap space or somethin similar, but I'm going explain the problem in detail: Distribution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 3) I'm connected as root. I have this zipped file: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 678183271 abr 7 15:30 Master032010.zip it contains a 2,4G file
As a testcase on how encryption works out of the box with OS11.4 I've formatted an external drive with encryption. All goes well and upon boot the passphrase is requested. However I cannot write files to the disk as a user and I can't find the correct mount command in order to get it mounted so that my users can write to it and not only the root.
I am experiencing disk write performance issues and I cannot find the cause. I have LSI-9211-8i SAS 2 controller (latest firmware), Centos 5.5 latest x86_64 kernel (2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 #1 SMP with latest LSI driver v. 7.00 datet Jul 27) and Seagate Cheetah ST3600057SS drives. These drives have a std write performance (sustained) of > 200MB/s (and read as well); with Fedora core 13 (same machine), issuing a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdo bs=1024k count=16384 (16 GB direct device write), gets normally to 213 MB/s (repeated retries). On Centos 5.5 I am getting speeds around 110/113 MB/s. iostat does not show anything specific (just 1.3 % wait, CPU 99.7 idle). There are 14 drives: tried with several of them, same figures. Reads go around 200 MB/s.
I got a new machine with GA-p55A-ud3 mobo and a WDC WD10EARS 1T disk. When I tried to benchmark the disk IO, I was suprised by the low write speed:
[Children see throughput for 1 initial writers = 35962.63 KB/sec Parent sees throughput for 1 initial writers = 35962.63 KB/sec Min throughput per process = 35962.63 KB/sec
I have a program that is very heavily hitting the file system, reading and writing randomly to a set of working files. The files total several gigabytes in size, but I can spare the RAM to keep them all mostly in memory. The machines this program runs on are typically Ubuntu Linux boxes.
Is there a way to configure the file system to have a very very large cache, and even to cache writes so they hit the disk later? I understand the issues with power loss or such, and am prepared to accept that. Crashing aside, in normal operation the writes should eventually reach the disk!Or is there a way to create a RAM disk that writes-through to real disk?
