Linux

How to use Xen virtual disks with RHEL6

RHEL6 does not come with Xen support as dom0. As domU however, you may still use RHEL6 and binary compatible distributions. Recently I've had some issues with partitioned xvda1 devices where one partition should be used as physical volume. The following dracut hook helped me to boot the system and to get rid of the dracut emergency shell.

How to mass rename your iso movie database

Sometimes you want to rename your movies on disk according to a fixed naming scheme. The following script searches the open movie database for your flick and then renames it as <movie title>(<year>).iso and also saves the cover picture for it.

How to pretty print lists in Python

Sometimes you need to output tables on the console with Python. This module may be used to pretty print them. Input data provided as lists is analyzed and each cell gets formatted according the cell with the maximum length. The cell data gets aligned and printed surrounded by ASCII boxes. You might have seen a similar data output in tools like the mysql client

How to quickly restore lvm2 volumes from saved layout

~/lvmrestore.py.html

Sometimes you need to quickly reconstruct a Logical Volume Manager 2 layout. For example if you need to do a bare metal restore and just kickstarted your Linux Server and you want to recreate the lvm volumes before you restore your backup. Or if you need to transfer a system to another server and you want to quickly copy the lvm layout so that you can start rsyncing your data. The following script allows you to restore a lvm2 layout from the saved command output of 'pvs' and 'lvs'. Of course you may also modify that layout and pipe it to this script to create all the necessary lvm commands to construct it from scratch.