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 […]

Tonight I managed to:

install a DVD-RW drive
install 1x 80GB SATA drive
connect all the chassis cables to the motherboard
install the network card
install FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE
start the upgrade process to FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE
install a few ports: bash, joe, sudo

The photos from tonight.
Here is the output from /var/run/dmesg.boot

Copyright (c) 1992-2009 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, […]

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HAST has just been added to FreeBSD:
HAST allows to transparently store data on two physically separated machines connected over the TCP/IP network. Those two machines together will be called a cluster and each machine is one cluster node. HAST works in Primary-Secondary (Master-Backup, Master-Slave) configuration, which means that only one of the cluster nodes can […]

The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives. It runs on various operating systems and allows you to create a bootable device from an ISO image.
This could be useful for advocacy purposes.

Interesting posts here on ZFS tuning, espcially posts #34 and #35.
Post #37 has an interesting perl solution.

I recently wrote about a tower case solution which sliced $500 off the cost. Last night we found an ASUS m/b for a Phenom II which supports ECC. This will be a cheaper faster solution. I will, however, have to buy a NIC. This NIC runs a Realtek chipset. No […]

Bacula uses flat text files for configuration. From time to time, people, usually new to the project, ask: why isn’t the configuration in the database?
Bacula uses the database to store information about what files were backed up, from what client, and when. This information is useful when you need to know how if […]