New Year, New System

I've spent most of the last two weeks setting up a new server and clients ready for the school year. The server went pretty smoothly, and is performing well for the teachers. The management interface is easy and comprehensive, and of course most of the work goes on via ssh which I am used to.

http://www.linuxschools.com/

However, the client is causing me a lot of work. Its xfce on ubuntu, which sounds OK, but there are so many things to change.



It started out quite normally, with me uninstalling a bunch of stuff we don't need (like eclipse and netbeans, blender and ardour - all great apps, but aimed at the top end of high school and above). Instead I installed our regular tuxpaint, gcompris, scratch and all those great programs we love, and simpler programming tools like bluefish and geany.

Then there were some simple things to configure, like locale and keyboard. But they turned out not to be so simple - the client is heavily locked down, and there are pages of cryptically-titled xml files to edit in obscure corners of /etc. Oh dear, how much time I've spent on this, and now I've discovered that usb drives don't automount........
update: they do if they are vfat format, which is all anyone except me is likely to bring.

And I still haven't found where to unlock the wallpaper. The main feature our students will want to use!
update: found it! There was a script running in autostart.

My plan to simplify the roll-out was to install to a netbook (smallest HD client we have), configure to taste, then clone everywhere. If I ever get the client working right, this will still be the plan, but I'll need to increase the disk size on desktops to be able to install a few more things (like chromium, kdenlive, kdeedu, ooo4kids). Then I'll make another clone image.

So I followed this tutorial to resounding success and wanted to preserve it here for future use:

http://codesilence.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/live-resizing-of-an-ext4-filesytem-on-linux/

First: Increase the disk size.

In ESXi this is simple, just increase the size of the virtual disk. Now you have a bigger hard drive but you still need to a) increase the partition size and b) resize the filesystem.

Second: Increase the partition size.

You can use fdisk to change your partition table while running. The stock Ubuntu install has created 3 partitions: one primary (sda1), one extended (sda2) with a single logical partition (sda5) in it. The extended partition is simply used for swap, so I could easily move it without losing any data.

1. Delete the primary partition
2. Delete the extended partition
3. Create a new primary partition starting at the same sector as the original one just with a bigger size (leave some for swap)
4. Create a new extended partition with a logical partition in it to hold the swap space

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

me@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 268.4 GB, 268435456000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32635 cylinders, total 524288000 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e49fa    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1   *        2048   192940031    96468992   83  Linux /dev/sda2       192942078   209713151     8385537    5  Extended /dev/sda5       192942080   209713151     8385536   82  Linux swap / Solaris Command (m for help): d Partition number (1-5): 1 Command (m for help): d Partition number (1-5): 2 Command (m for help): n Partition type:    p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)    e   extended Select (default p): p Partition number (1-4, default 1): Using default value 1 First sector (2048-524287999, default 2048): Using default value 2048 Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (2048-524287999, default 524287999): 507516925 Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 268.4 GB, 268435456000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32635 cylinders, total 524288000 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e49fa    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1            2048   507516925   253757439   83  Linux Command (m for help): n Partition type:    p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)    e   extended Select (default p): e Partition number (1-4, default 2): 2 First sector (507516926-524287999, default 507516926): Using default value 507516926 Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (507516926-524287999, default 524287999): Using default value 524287999 Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 268.4 GB, 268435456000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32635 cylinders, total 524288000 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e49fa    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1            2048   507516925   253757439   83  Linux /dev/sda2       507516926   524287999     8385537    5  Extended Command (m for help): n Partition type:    p   primary (1 primary, 1 extended, 2 free)    l   logical (numbered from 5) Select (default p): l Adding logical partition 5 First sector (507518974-524287999, default 507518974): Using default value 507518974 Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (507518974-524287999, default 524287999): Using default value 524287999 Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 268.4 GB, 268435456000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32635 cylinders, total 524288000 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e49fa    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1            2048   507516925   253757439   83  Linux /dev/sda2       507516926   524287999     8385537    5  Extended /dev/sda5       507518974   524287999     8384513   83  Linux Command (m for help): t Partition number (1-5): 5 Hex code (type L to list codes): 82 Changed system type of partition 5 to 82 (Linux swap / Solaris) Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 268.4 GB, 268435456000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32635 cylinders, total 524288000 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000e49fa    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1            2048   507516925   253757439   83  Linux /dev/sda2       507516926   524287999     8385537    5  Extended /dev/sda5       507518974   524287999     8384513   82  Linux swap / Solaris Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy. The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8) Syncing disks. me@ubuntu:~$ sudo reboot

I noticed afterwards that I didn’t set the bootable flag but apparently you don’t really need it.

Third: Enlargen the filesystem.

You can do this with resize2fs online on a mounted partition.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

me@ubuntu:~$ df -h Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1        91G   86G   12M 100% / udev            3.9G  4.0K  3.9G   1% /dev tmpfs           1.6G  696K  1.6G   1% /run none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock none            3.9G  144K  3.9G   1% /run/shm none            100M   16K  100M   1% /run/user me@ubuntu:~$ sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1 resize2fs 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012) Filesystem at /dev/sda1 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required old_desc_blocks = 6, new_desc_blocks = 16 The filesystem on /dev/sda1 is now 63439359 blocks long. me@ubuntu:~$ df -h Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1       239G   86G  142G  38% / udev            3.9G   12K  3.9G   1% /dev tmpfs           1.6G  696K  1.6G   1% /run none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock none            3.9G  152K  3.9G   1% /run/shm none            100M   36K  100M   1% /run/user

Slight catch: After rebooting the swap space wasn’t active. Turned out you need to run mkswap, adjust /etc/fstab to the new UUID and turn the swap on

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

me@ubuntu:~$ sudo mkswap /dev/sda5 Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 8384508 KiB no label, UUID=141d401a-b49d-4a96-9b85-c130cb0de40a me@ubuntu:~$ sudo swapon --all --verbose swapon on /dev/sda5 swapon: /dev/sda5: found swap signature: version 1, page-size 4, same byte order swapon: /dev/sda5: pagesize=4096, swapsize=8585740288, devsize=8585741312

Edit /etc/fstab to replace the UUID for the old swap partition with the new one from mkswap.