Christian Geekery

Today I was tasked with converting an existing Gentoo box into a Samba server. This box will be used to store and share documents, but it did not have enough storage for the task. So instead of just adding another drive, I added two drives with the intention of creating a Software RAID 1 array with the drives. This will help to protect the data from hardware issues, and combined with regular backups they should be fairly well protected from user error.

I chose to go Software rather then a hardware controller due to budget constraints. Since I have not created a Software RAID array before, I figured that I may as well document the process.

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For reasons unclear to me, Gentoo merged the “ss” and “com_err” packages into e2fsprogs-libs. Unfortunately portage could not deal with the conflicting packages and people updating are now caught by some blocked packages. Fortunately this is fairly easy to fix as long as you are careful and do the update in a single session.

First you need to make sure that your portage tree and emerge are up to date.
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Many people are have been talking about replacing Apache web servers with Nginx. Some of the advantages of Nginx are Faster, Smaller resource usage, and the ability to handle many more connections. From what I have seen so far, all this is true. But not much is mentioned about the surprises along the way. So here are a couple of things that may prepare you.

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If you need access to any of the ctype functions such as ctype_alnum() in php on gentoo… You will need to add the ctype use flag or you will get this error. This is one of those odd decisions about default configurations that Gentoo has made. Not a huge problem, just inconvenient the first time you run into it.