Disaster. It doesn't get worse.

Familiarity breeds contempt. My faithful Debian Lenny web server, git repository, mysql server, irc gateway, ftp server etc etc has exploded. Most importantly is was my LANs DHCP and DNS. What does this mean? It means, and astonishingly, that my main development machine wont even boot into X. Can you believe that? Turning DNS back on on my router confirms that DNS not working on the designated dhcp/dns server actually stops the GLX module loading on my development machine? OK. DNS is back on, courtesy of my router, and this machine is now full res again with the Nvidia drivers correctly loaded. But talk about screwy dependencies.

The server is now at the doctors hopefully getting a new PSU. The outlook is bleak. Oh yes. Contempt? Yup. I hadn't checked the server cron jobs were correctly backing up things like the individial web servers mysql dbs. They weren't. Cron had decided to give up the ghost about a month ago it seems - mea culpa - I need to discipline myself to not trust this stuff as much as I have been.

The feeling of helplessness when booting a trusted debian desktop machine only to get the "X not loaded" BSOD and then having to wait 10 seconds after every bash command because of name resolution issues is really quite accute.

Fingers crossed that Hermes responds to treatment and that the good doctors at Level 1 can graft on a new PSU. It's an old P4 machine. A rock. A workhorse. And broken.

Slow NFS Exporting on Debian Solved

I rarely reboot my main machine but when I do the export stage for nfs shares took an intoleranly long time. Googling indicated I should install portmap. It was already installed so I tried reinstalling. Still the same problem when I tried

sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

The solution turned out to be quite simple. Rather than needing to configure reverse lookup on the the DNS Server I have running (bind9), I simply added the NFS clients to my local /etc/hosts file.

e.g

192.168.0.101 hermes.richardriley.net
192.168.0.103 g4.richardriley.net
192.168.0.104 X30.richardriley.net

The time to export is not about half a second as opposed to a minute.