February 2013

dhclient: sending a host identifier to the DHCP server

I have a special HDD. It runs FreeBSD 9.1 and contains a bunch of tools that I use when setting up new servers. I hook it up to a new server when I’m working on it. Or I hook it up to a server which is in pain and fix it. I want it to have the same IP address every time. The conventional way to do this is by MAC address. On […]

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Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD

The LSI 9211-8i 6Gb/s SATA +SAS HBA, which I recently obtained, is running the stock IR (Integrated RAID) firmware. In order to use the disks in strictly passthrough mode and avoid having any metadata written to them by the card, the card needs to be changed over to IT (Initiator Target) firmware. I had heard about this before. And I’ve read it about it on the From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS

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ZFS tuning

Wyze uses this tuning on his 2GB NAS box. # Dynamically adjust write limit based on previous txg commits to attempt # to maintain a 2-second commit time vfs.zfs.txg.synctime_ms=”2000″ # Set a minimum write limit of 50MB which is slightly more than the default vfs.zfs.write_limit_min=”50M” # Default vfs.zfs.write_limit_shift appears to be “3” which on a system # with 2GB RAM such as this one results in a write_limit_max of 256MB, which # is

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The hardware is ready. What tests to run?

I think I’m now at the point where I have all the hardware assembled and it’s ready for testing. Now I’m trying to determine what set of fio tests to run. If you know of a set of standard tests, or just have some of your own, please let me know in the comments. The hardware The disks I have assembled are all available via the LSI 9211-8i. The basic hardware specs are:

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Testing the benchmark scripts – 1

I’m getting very slow throughput on these drives during my first set of tests. I have no idea why… The drive in question is: $ grep ada2 /var/run/dmesg.boot ada2 at ahcich4 bus 0 scbus5 target 0 lun 0 ada2: <ST2000DM001-1CH164 CC24> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device ada2: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes) ada2: Command Queueing enabled ada2: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C) ada2: Previously was known as ad12 Here

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New benchmarks coming

I think y’all should consider the benchmarks to date as prototypes. Tonight I wrote some scripts which will make my tasks easier and faster. It’s great not to have to manually enter all the commands. It also makes for consistencies between each run. We’ll concentrate on just two tests: bonnie++ and fio. These tests will be performed on both ufs and zfs. I’ll also run the tests on the drive when attached to

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Benchmarking the TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 – ZFS

This is a repeat of a benchmark I did yesterday. The drive is a TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 3TB HDD. This is a 7200 RPM SATA III drive. Tests were run with FreeBSD 9.1 in the hardware listed below. Tonight, we’re going to do the partitions slightly differently, and try ZFS. The hardware We are testing on the following hardware: motherboard – SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O ATX Server Motherboard (Supermicro link): $224.99 CPU – AMD Opteron 6128

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Do you have a Seagate ST2000DM001?

Do you have Seagate ST2000DM001? This 2TB drives seems OK at straight dd output, but seems absolutely terrible at random output. If you have one, and do not mind this destructive test (IT WILL DESTROY ANY DATA ON THAT DRIVE), please let me know the results. The reason I ask is the very slow results we’re getting from a tool designed to test the throughput of an HDD based on writing data at

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How I upgrade my WordPress installations

I have three blogs run on WordPress. Each runs on its own installation of WordPress. Why? Because all the single-install solutions I’ve seen were not very attractive. Convince me otherwise. Following the official instructions, I drew up this set of instructions which work for me. Hopefully, they work for you too. But I’m sure it’d going to be cryptic at first. My WordPress is installed in the directory wordpress.installed. The webserver looks for

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