While creating the FreeBSD package for 5.0.0, I noticed a few new things to be aware of.
With 5.0.0 comes a new backup catalog script. It parses the bacula-dir.conf file and extracts what it needs from that. This means you only need to specify the database connection information in one place and it is not passed […]

From this morning’s log after a weekend power failure:

Mar 15 09:15:45 subie kernel: GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: rebuilding provider ad8 finished.
Mar 15 09:20:58 subie fsck: /dev/mirror/gm0s1f: UNREF FILE I=35 OWNER=root MODE=100400
Mar 15 09:20:58 subie fsck: /dev/mirror/gm0s1f: SIZE=151568652480 MTIME=Mar 13 16:03 2010 (CLEARED)
Mar 15 09:20:58 subie fsck: /dev/mirror/gm0s1f: UNREF FILE I=15356429 OWNER=dan MODE=100644
Mar 15 […]

A friend is looking for a job. She specializes in testing of software systems for compliance with Pharma GCP standards. Please share this post.

After rebooting kraken to take a photo, I found nagios was displaying an error for my smartmon checks: NRPE: Unable to read output.
Running the command by hand on the nagios server, I found:

$ /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_nrpe2 -H kraken -c check_smartmon_ad24
NRPE: Unable to read output

But from the remote server I got:

# /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_smartmon -d /dev/ad24
OK: device is functional and […]

The smartmon bug I mentioned a few days ago has a patch. It was submitted 24 Jan 2010 but was closed after the maintainer said he would release a new distfile soon.
It hasn’t arrived. I sent him and email tonight as a follow up the PR.
In the meantime, I’ve applied the patch to […]

NewEgg has received and processed my returned purchases. I’m impressed. I mailed them on Thursday (I think) and here it is, Wednesday. I should expect to see the refunds on my credit card within 2-3 days.

I do like CoolDrives.com.
I was shown this quick swap drive tray and started hunting around. This spare parts page is interesting and reminds me that I want to buy different cables for the file server.
Also neat are these hard drive cases for when your HDD is not in use.

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI harddisks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure. (The above shamelessly taken from the supplied URL).
I […]

I thought I’d run some simple tests, based on a tuning thread I found:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=./file1 bs=1m count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 14.283206 secs (75175127 bytes/sec)

And while the above was running:

# zpool iostat 5
capacity […]

Tonight’s goals:

Install a second HDD
get gmirror running
install the remaining 5×2TB HDD
add the two RAID cards

After adding in the second HDD for the OS, dmesg shows this:

ad4: 76319MB <seagate ST380815AS 4.AAB> at ata2-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
acd0: DVDR <tsstcorp CDDVDW SH-S223C/SB01> at ata3-master UDMA100 SATA 1.5Gb/s
ad8: 152587MB <wdc WD1600AAJS-75M0A0 02.03E02> at ata4-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s

The following shows […]