Recently I received an email from Caroline Middlebrook promoting her free guide on creating mini sites with WordPress, I’m not looking at creating mini sites here but there is some good tips there none the less, especially for people that are new to WP. Any way onto my check list:

• Install CMS Software, in my case this is WordPress so some of these points will be specific to that platform though other CMSs will likely have an equivilent.
• Choose and set your permalink structure, this is the format of the URL for each post. I like to use: /%year%%monthnum%/%postname%.htm as this means posts are grouped (artificially) in a folder per month and are only one directory level away from your sites root.
• Enable Askimet antispam and make sure that you have a valid key.
• Install tracking software, be it Google Analytics or something else. You can generally either use a plugin to add it to your site or add a bit of Javascript to your themes footer.php. I need to find (or write) a plugin that works with the latest code version of Analytics as maintaining multiple themes will become a pain
• Create a new FeedBurner account to track your subscribers and follow the instructions (installing another plugin) to make your feed URL point at the burnt one.
• Install and automate a backup system. A good method is to use the plugin WP-DB-Backup and get the files emailed to you on a daily basis. This is where having a free email account with large storage space can come in very handy.
  • General Options -> Weblog Title - Set to whatever the title of your blog is
  • General Options -> Tagline: A short (sentence) description of the site
  • Reading Options -> Show at most: 8 posts, I find 8 is enough for my blogs (the default is 10)
  • Reading Options -> Syndicate the most recent 20 posts - This is double the default but gives new subscribers plenty to read
  • Reading Options -> For each article, show: Full text - I find showing the full text is the best way to keep subscribers, it does mean you get less visitors to your site but is worth it in other ways. If you use the more tag you’ll need to install a plugin like this for full feed syndication to work.
  • Discussion Options -> Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 1 or more moderation, I go for all other default options but do manually approve ALL comments with links in

Next up is to through the other options and change any accordingly, these are the ones I find are worth changing:

Once your blog is set-up it’s a good idea to keep it running (doh), Vladimir has some great tips on insuring your blog.

I will be adding to this list as I remember, learn and discover new things that I should be doing. If you have any suggestions for the list please let us know via comment.

This post is just about setting up new blogs, I will go into promotion and launching in a future post.

Tags: adding, age factors, Bank-of-America, CMS, disk cylinder, Free, PDF Generator, QuickTime, solaris 8, Tutorial, WordPress

If you’ve ever gone to mirror a system drive with Solstice Disk suite, you know how frustrating it can be when you either don’t have any more slices to use for your meta database partitions, or all the space on the disk has already been allocated to existing partitions. While Disk Suite only requires one partition be reserved for its meta database information on boot drives, two are really suggested for redundancy purposes, and in the example below, I found myself needing to mirror a system disk that had only one remaining partition, and no space left that could be used for the meta database.

While I could have taken a small amount of space from the swap partition and re-allocated it to a new meta database partition on slice 7, this solution would not have been elegant, and I would have still only had one meta database partition. As it stood, the system had the following filesystems on the following disk slices:

c1t0d0

Part	Tag
0	root
1	swap
2	backup
3	usr
4	usr/local
5	opt
6	var
7	unused

In order to bring the system into line with my standards and prepare it for proper mirroring, I would have to carve up another disk, and migrate the data to it.

Here is what the partition table on the new disk looked like:

c1t2d0
Current partition table (original):
Total disk cylinders available: 24620 + 2 (reserved cylinders)

Part	Tag	Flag	Cylinders	Â	Â	Size	Blocks	Â
0	root	wm	0	-	1088	1.50GB	(1089/0/0)	3146121
1	swap	wu	1089	-	6896	8.00GB	(5808/0/0)	16779312
2	backup	wu	0	-	24619	33.92GB	(24620/0/0)	71127180
3	-	wm	6897	-	6967	100.16MB	(71/0/0)	205119
4	-	wm	6968	-	7038	100.16MB	(71/0/0)	205119
5	opt	wm	7039	-	8853	2.50GB	(1815/0/0)	5243535
6	usr	wm	8854	-	12483	5.00GB	(3630/0/0)	10487070
7	var	wm	12484	-	24619	16.72GB	(12136/0/0)	35060904

Now that everything is all laid out, we can start moving all the data from c1t0d0 to c1t2d0, keeping in mind that we will be merging /usr/local onto /usr on the new system disk… Here we go

Make a new filesystem for /:

# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0
newfs: /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0 last mounted as /
newfs: construct a new file system /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0: (y/n)? Y

Mount the new / filesystem as /mnt:
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0 /mnt
Move the data from c1t0d0s0 to c1t2d0s0:
# ufsdump 0f - / | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
Add links
Set directory mode, owner, and times.
set owner/mode for ‘.’? [yn] y
Directories already exist, set modes anyway? [yn] y
DUMP: 405886 blocks (198.19MB) on 1 volume at 406 KB/sec
DUMP: DUMP IS DONE

Unmount /mnt
# umount /mnt

That’s the general idea… Now we just have to do the same thing for the other partitions, leaving out swap, backup, and our two meta database partitions of course. These partitions (1,2,3 and 4) should be left alone for the time being, as they are never mounted as filesystems.

# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s5
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /opt | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s6
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /usr | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
# newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s7
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /var | ( cd /mnt ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt
Finally, the /usr/local partition
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5 /mnt
# ufsdump 0f - /usr/local | ( cd /mnt/local ;ufsrestore xvf - )
# umount /mnt

Now that we have all the data moved, we still don’t have a disk that is bootable. Since the whole idea here is for us to end up with a new bootable system disk, we have to install bootblocks onto the new system disk. This is done with the installboot command:

# installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0

Now that we have the bootblocks needed to boot the solaris kernel, the last thing we have to do is make sure our new vfstab file points to all the right partitions.

Mount the new / partition:
# mount -F ufs -o rw /dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0 /mnt
Edit the new vfstab file:
# vi /mnt/etc/vfstab
For the information given in this example, this file will contain the following entries:

#device	device	mount	FS	fsck	mount	mount
#to mount	to fsck	point	type	pass	at boot	options
#	Â	Â	Â	Â	Â	Â
fd	-	/dev/fd	fd	-	no	-
/proc	-	/proc	proc	-	no	-
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s1	-	-	swap	-	no	-
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s0	/dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s0	/	ufs	1	no	-
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s5	/dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s5	/usr	ufs	1	no	-
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s6	/dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s6	/var	ufs	1	no	-
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0s7	/dev/rdsk/c1t2d0s7	/opt	ufs	2	yes	-
swap	-	/tmp	tmpfs	-	yes	-

Notice that the target number will remain 2, not move to 0 when we swap the disks and boot from the new one. To resolve this, it is strongly suggested that you rebuild the solaris device tree and change the vfstab file to reflect the new disk position.

That is everything! We now shutdown the system, swap the positions of c1t0d0 and c1t2d0 and reboot off our new system disk. We are now ready to move onto the mirroring process.

Source of article:http://spiralbound.net/

Link:http://spiralbound.net/2005/05/10/how-to-copy-a-solaris-boot-drive-to-a-disk-with-a-different-partition-layout

Tags: boot, computer, disk, disk cylinder, disk label, disk suite, disksuite, howto, metadb, mirroring, mirroring scripts, partition, partition layout, process, risky, server, Solaris, Solaris, solaris 8, Storage, sun microsystems, swap