Posted by Slobodan Kovačević
on November 09, 2008
Recently I had a problem on my Torrent box (an old PC that I use as dedicated torrent client) that runs Ubuntu. For some reason my root partition was being mounted as read-only. Everything else seemed to work (all other partitions were mounted properly), but I couldn’t change any of my config or do anything on root partition.
I did the usual stuff:
- Run fsck checks and it said that everything is fine
- Used Ubuntu’s live CD to boot, which got me read-write access to root partition. I changed some things in fstab, tried to get it to be rw permanently. No matter what I did as soon as I rebooted the root partition was once again read-only.
- I tried booting from some repair disks I have, but all checks passed and no problem was detected.
Finally, I read somewhere that a similar problem was caused by faulty superblock on hard drive. Fortunately Ubuntu stores superblock backups in different places around disk, so I decided to try to restore it from one of those backups.
It turned out that all I needed was a single command (this Ubuntu forum post helped) to restore superblock:
e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/hdc1
After that my root partition was back to read-write mode. 
Before you do stuff like that to your computer I suggest that you read man pages for mke2fs and e2fsck. It will prevent you from doing something foolish like deleting your whole hard drive.
Posted by Slobodan Kovačević
on September 17, 2008
Mosso’s hosting cloud at $100 / month seems like a good solution to get a scalable server. However one thing bugs me, actually two things…
First one: they offer FTP only access. Meaning you cannot deploy sites directly from code repositories (i.e. git or svn). That sucks.
Second thing that bugs me: for $100 you get quite a lot of computing power which can be used to run multiple sites – but you are only allowed to have one Rails app running. Only one. If you want additional Rails apps (for example to have a test server) you need to pay an extra fee.
I know it’s cloud computing and that you have to be able to run it with any additional configuration (that’s why I think it’s ok that you have to freeze your gems in Rails apps, because you cannot install any gems yourself)… but not being able to checkout my code from repository and having to upload the whole app each time you make changes is really annoying.
In their defense, the support guy said that they are working on it, but he could give me an ETA when they’ll allow something like that.
Posted by Slobodan Kovačević
on July 13, 2008
[condensed from 'this should be interesting' tumblelog]
Posted by Slobodan Kovačević
on July 06, 2008
This is the first weekly condensed edition of my “This should be interesting” tumblelog. Every Sunday I will re-post most interesting posts here on the Icebergist.
Posted by Slobodan Kovačević
on July 04, 2008
Today I tried to upgrade my Mac from 10.5.3 to 10.5.4 using normal Software Update. That didn’t go as planned as installation hanged at “Configuring Installation” and only thing I could do is shutdown the computer.
After some research and few unsuccessful retries I have finally managed to solve the upgrade problem by downloading standalone 10.5.4 update from Apple download section; booting in safe mode (hold shift key when booting) and then installing the update.
