graphic, representation
To get a visual representation of hard drive temperatures, I wrote a small script. The output of this script looks like this:
This output is tailored to the exact disk lay-out of my storage
server. However, it is also usable for other servers. You have to edit the
lay-out depending on the system.
This script assumes that you have smartmontools installed on your system. It uses smartctl to obtain the drive temperatures.
The script can be found here or here in tgz format.
Even today people do not understand how important it is for the safety of your data to make backups. I was asked to perform some data recovery on a hard drive of an old computer, which still contained important documents and photo's.
The first thing I did was to make a disk image with ddrescue. I always work with the image and not with the original drive, to prevent any risk of accidentally messing things up for good.
Example:
ddrescue -r 2 -v if=/dev/sdf of=/storage/image/diskofperson.dd bs=1M
Next, I tried using gparted on this file but got this error:
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Error: /storage/image/diskofperson.dd: unrecognised disk label
(parted) quit
Also fdisk -l didn't work:
Disk /storage/image/diskofperson.dd doesn't contain a valid partition table
It seemed that the partition table was gone. I used the utility testdisk to recover this partition, to no avail. Why this tool didn't work is beyond me.
I found a very old utility called 'gpart' that just searches a disk for existing partitions. I just want to know the starting offset of the relevant partition.
So I ran:
gpart -g /storage/image/diskofperson.dd
And I got nothing useful, although a partition was found:
Begin scan...
Possible partition(DOS FAT), size(57255mb), offset(0mb)
End scan.
So I ran the command again with more verbosity:
gpart -g /storage/image/diskofperson.dd
...
Begin scan...
Possible partition(DOS FAT), size(57255mb), offset(0mb)
type: 011(0x0B)(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT)
size: 57255mb #s(117258372) s(63-117258434)
chs: (1023/255/0)-(1023/255/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r
hex: 00 FF C0 FF 0B FF C0 FF 3F 00 00 00 84 38 FD 06
End scan.
...
This time I got something useful. The s(63-117258434) part shows the starting sector, which is 63. A sector is 512 bytes, so the exact starting offset of the partition is 32256.
So to mount this partition, just issue:
mount -o loop,ro,offset=32256 /storage/image/diskofperson.dd /mnt/recovery
And voilá, access to the filesystem has been obtained.
/storage/image/jdiskofperson.dd on /mnt/recovery type vfat (ro,loop=/dev/loop0,offset=32256)
If a system is connected to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), it is possible to determine how much power it consumes. For this purpose, I wrote a small script:
Host:~# ./ups.sh
UPS model: Back-UPS RS 1200 LCD
APC model: Back-UPS RS 1200 LC
Capacity: 720 Watt
Load: 18 Percent
Usage: 129 Watt
Time left: 33 Minutes
Status: ONLINE
Host:~# ./ups.sh
UPS model: Back-UPS RS 1200 LCD
APC model: Back-UPS RS 1200 LC
Capacity: 720 Watt
Load: 19 Percent
Usage: 136 Watt
Time left: 22 Minutes
Status: ONBATT
This script assumes that:
You are running a unix
You run apcupsd
The script can be downloaded here:
