Archive for the ‘WLUG’ Category

Benchmarks of an Intel SRSC16 RAID controller

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

One of our clients gave us an Intel server with an Intel SRSC16 SATA RAID controller and a 500 GB +hotspare RAID1 set up on it, to install XenServer Express 4.0.1 system. While building the system up for him, I noticed abysmal write perfomance. It was taking around ...

Upgrading jabber.meta.net.nz

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

I've finally gotten sick of the jabber.meta.net.nz services having a negative impact on the rest of the server due to the transports chewing up lots of ram, and so have put together another server and will start migrating things over. The new server is a dual 1GHz Coppermine P3, with ...

iSCSI for SCSI device passthrough under Xen Enterprise

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

I recently had to add a SCSI tape drive to a Xen Enterprise server, and needed to use BackupExec under one of the Windows domU's as the backup software. Luckily, Greig did this a few months ago already using the iSCSI Enterprise Target, and put his notes up ...

NUT: Network UPS Tools

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

I was tweaking the UPS rules at a client's site, when I noticed that the base NUT configuration that we use didn't really do a hell of a lot. The example config files had some hints as to what were needed, but unless I missed something fundamental, didn't have the ...

“Useful” command line tools

Monday, August 20th, 2007

A coworker was doing some work on a server we're building up, and wanted to kill a bunch of processes. The killall binary wasn't installed for some reason (default etch install, probably just missing the package), but he found a killall5 binary instead. For those of you who don't know, killall5 ...

Miro - Internet TV

Saturday, July 21st, 2007

Miro, formerly known as Democracy TV, made its first public release a few days ago.  It's available at http://www.getmiro.com/. Miro is like a blog aggregator for video sources such as YouTube and Google Video, as well as provider content such as various news  and science tv channels, The Onion. Installing it ...

make-kpkg and recent 2.6 kernels

Friday, July 20th, 2007

I keep hitting a bug in make-kpkg when building recent kernels, and I always forget the fix. So, blogging it here for ease of reference [code] make-kpkg uses version.h to get UTS_RELEASE. UTS_RELEASE has moved to utsrelease.h. Right after you get the error, modify debian/ruleset/misc/version_vars.mk -UTS_RELEASE_VERSION=$(shell if [ -f include/linux/version.h ]; then \ - ...

Feisty Fawn and Software RAID

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

It turns out there's a race condition in Feisty Fawn, which can cause software RAID sets to not be set up on boot. This is problematic if you have your root partition on software RAID Bug #75681 discusses this in some detail, although there are several suggestions on how to fix ...

Debian Etch and apt-proxy issues

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Debian Etch (4.0) was released on Monday, and I have to say I wasn't at all prepared. I've got about 70 machines that will probably need to be upgraded to Etch at some point in the near future. I could leave some of them running sarge, but I'll definitely have ...

Puppet - a system configuration tool

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

I saw a couple of blog posts about puppet recently. I've been meaning to investigate cfengine for a while now, and puppet was a new angle on the same problem. From the intro: Puppet is a system configuration tool. It has a library for managing the system, a language for ...