Déjà Dup - Out of space...

I use Déjà Dup to backup my Fedora 18 desktop. Déjà Dup being a graphical front-end to duplicity.

Recently these backups ceased to work, with Déjà Dup complaining that it didn't have sufficient space to continue. A quick investigation showed almost all of the 4GB of /tmp was being utilized. Obviously a deep flaw in the design of Déjà Dup, but in the meantime I needed to get the backups working once again.

What needs to be done is to set the variable TMPDIR to somewhere with more free space and then run Déjà Dup. In my case running this from the terminal was enough to get the backup working:

TMPDIR=/data/tmp  /usr/bin/deja-dup --backup

For a more permanent solution put the TMPDIR variable in .profile

HP Microserver Remote Management Card

The optional HP Microserver Remote Management Card (BMC/RAC, call it what you will) features IPMI, which I previously had configured using OpenIPMI on my Centos 6.3 system. There was one issue that required working around, in that the BMC address as reported by the BIOS was 0xCA8 rather than the real address of 0xCA2. To get the ipmi module to load you had to create the file:

/etc/modprobe.d/ipmi.conf

Containing:

options ipmi_si type=kcs ports=0xca2

That all worked nicely until I upgraded the server to Centos 6.4, at which point IPMI stopped working completely. What has happened is that RHEL now has the ipmi driver built into kernel and not as a loadable module any more (who's bright idea?).

You can read all about the driver here.

The fix is now to pass the driver options to the kernel at boot by appeneding the cmdline for the kernel in GRUB with:

ipmi_si.type=kcs ipmi_si.ports=0xca2