We all know the cat /proc/cpuinfo etc for finding out the CPU information, but I had no idea how to find the model of the motherboard without checking my server spreadsheet list.
Enter DMIdecode.

Find Server Hardware Information
Show your current motherboard
dmidecode --type baseboard

You can also use:
bios
system
baseboard
chassis
processor
memory
cache
connector
slot

Find Networking Hardware
Show your current speed and duplex
dmesg | grep -i duplex

Or use ethtool
ethtool eth1

After playing a little bit with WINE I decided to try PlayOnLinux instead – MUCH EASIER!

However, when installing the Office 2010 suite, I breezed through the Outlook setup and ended up picking some wrong information. At that point I’d generally open up the Mail Control Panel on windows and remove the offending profile. Linux is a little more difficult.

~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/Office2010/drive_c/windows/system32 > POL_Wine control.exe

This then opens the control.exe application which allows you to select the mail control panel and then from here remove the profile (or change it).

I had a Dell Poweredge 2950 that had been faithfully running proxmox 1.9 (upgraded from 1.7, to 1.8, finally to 1.9) for about a year now. I finally got enough time – and pestered other people about moving their virtual machines to other servers – in order to redo the machine with additional RAM and Prox2.3

So I upgraded the server from 16GB to 32GB – DDR2FB so… – and attempted to boot off the ISO Prox 2.3 image.

As this is a 2950 and not say an R520, the DRAC (not idrac) is pretty much useless – even with the “enterprise” level, it’s bare bones at best. The newer idrac systems (drac6, 7+) are all much better for remote management. As such, I had a monitor and keyboard plugged into this server on my workbench.

Prox displays and says “hit enter to boot”. Hit enter. Screen gets all fuzzy – digitally – and I can’t actually see anything to proceed. Reboot. This time I put in some arguments:
debug vga=normal

Detecting network settings … done
\nInstallation aborted – unable to continue (type EXIT or CTRL-D to reboot)

Reboot
debug vga=normal noacpi
Same issue – unable to continue

Well this is going nowhere fast. Aha! I see the BIOS was 2.2.6 and the newest release is 2.7.0 – this may be the problem. Grab my trusty USB drive and format for DOS/win98 bootable, put the BIOS flashing executable on the drive, boot off the USB and update the BIOS.

Same issue. Argh.

I attempted the debug vga=normal again, only this time instead of rebooting I decided to check out the /var/log area and see if anything was posted.

There was an Xorg log file – it was the only log file in there – and I found some interesting stuff:

XF86OpenConsole setsidfailed operation not permitted
open ACPI failed – file not found

Great. Just on a whim, since I’ve seen the digitally Xorg screens from my past experience with FBSD, I decide to try a different monitor.

Eureka! The problem was my 19″ LCD was being read by Xorg as something not compatible with the currently loaded drivers. I ended up using a spare 15″ LCD and it booted right up.

TL:DR Keep a small LCD around for certain linux experiments.

I had just done apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade when I saw something that made me cringe:

No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
plymouth
linux-image-3.2.0-38-generic-pae
ubuntu-minimal
plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text
linux-image-generic-pae
linux-generic-pae
mountall
upstart
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Well that’s not the exact error – I ended up seeing “disk out of space” among other issues. Basically the /root filled up and it broke my apt-get upgrade right in the middle of updates. No good.
So I go to /boot and clean up the older kernel files – just make sure you delete the “abi”, the “config”, the “initrd”, the “System.map”, the “vmcoreinfo”, the “vmlinuz” etc all with the same version number.

Then I went about reinstalling the packages. Unfortunately since some of the packages were already installed prior to running out of space, the dependencies were a little off.

apt-get install -f was no help:

You might want to run ‘apt-get -f install’ to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
initramfs-tools : Depends: initramfs-tools-bin (< 0.99ubuntu13.1~) but 0.99ubuntu13.1 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

And I didn’t want to have to restore this beast since the last full backup was over 2 months ago. So I had to carry on.

First I noticed that initramfs-tools needed the bin installed, but the bin was too new for initramfs-tools to utilize and therefore could not update even via –configure. Chicken and egg?

So then I looked up what versions were available so that I could downgrade:
apt-cache showpkg initramfs-tools-bin

Versions:
0.99ubuntu13.1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-updates_main_binary-i386_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)
Description Language:
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8
Description Language: en
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_i18n_Translation-en
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8

0.99ubuntu13 (/var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages)
Description Language:
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8
Description Language: en
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_i18n_Translation-en
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8

Ok, so this was getting easier. All I have to do is install the older version. I had to look it up since it generally doesn’t happen too often:
apt-get install initramfs-tools-bin=0.99ubuntu13

The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
initramfs-tools-bin
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

From there I run the following:
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoremove
apt-get autoclean
reboot

Profit.