Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

BSDCan 2013 – registration now open

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BSDCan 2013 will be the tenth BSDCan. This will be big. A huge party is planned for the Friday night. We’re also bringing in some big-name speakers for the tutorials and talks. Do not underestimate how much you’ll learn, how much fun you’ll have, and how many good working relationships and friendships you will develop at BSDCan. One word of advice: accommodation. Book it now. I know that on-campus accommodation will sell out […]

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Even bonnie++ shows the 50% performance hit

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I’m still seeing a 50% performance hit when I try bonnie++. It’s pretty clear. One system is getting 456MB/s sequential read. While the other is doing 265MB/s. Both machines are using the same type of HDD: The 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300. The faster server This is on bulldog, the faster machine but destined to have fewer HDD. All HDD are directly connected to the motherboard. $ bonnie++ Writing a byte at a time…done Writing

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same HDD, different server, +50% performance hit

6 Comments / Disks, hardware / By /

As you’ll no doubt know, I’ve recently bought two new computer, and built them up. I’ve settled on the Toshiba 3TB DT01ACA300 HDD as my drive of choice for these systems. I ran a few tests recently and found some interesting results. I haven’t published them here yet. My main test is a database load. I just take an 8GB text file and create a PostgreSQL database from it. The file in question

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This harddrive is getting on in life

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While on a recent trip, logcheck started telling me about a problem: Mar 19 07:26:55 bast smartd[1573]: Device: /dev/ad0, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 9 Power_On_Hours. Looking at the full output: On line 59, you’ll see that this drive has been in use for 7.4 years. Other than that, it seems to be OK. This link seems to indicate there is nothing to worry about. This system dates from at least October 2005. It

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Oops, I deleted my boot partition

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About a week ago, I was doing some HDD benchmark tests and I accidentally specified the boot drive as the source for a test. Oops. Everything was OK. Until I rebooted. It would not boot. I figured I knew what happend. I’d munged my boot code. And I knew how to fix it. However, I didn’t realize that I’d also deleted the boot partition. I asked on the FreeBSD dev IRC channel. db

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Deleting old Bacula Volumes

6 Comments / Backups, Bacula, FreeBSD, Open Source, PostgreSQL, ZFS / By /

From time to time, my Bacula – space and time website shows some old jobs that need to be copied to tape. Stuff from 100 days or more. There’s no reason to copy stuff that old to tape. It’s already been copied to tape. So why does it appear? Last night I swapped some tapes in the tape library. This morning they would have been used and recycled. I’ll bet that those tapes

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ssl-admin: revoking a certificate

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A server was decommissioned lately. It was running on a VM. Given that I do not have physical control over the HDD, I will be revoking the certificate for that server. This certificate was used for VPN access. That’s something I don’t want to be used by anyone else. Here is how I revoked it. I do not know why I had to enter 5 twice.

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Automating that regression testing

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I’ve been testing drives lately. Mostly hard disks, but also one solid state drive. The test itself is automated, but manually started. That’s because it requires a reboot between each run. That restricts testing time to certain hours of the day. I’d like to automate this. Today I had what may be a clever solution: Use the @reboot feature of crontab(5) to start a script after reboot In that script, cd to a

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smartctl: Toshiba HDD serial numbers are only 9 characters

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I noticed today that the serial number for Toshiba drives, as retrieved by smartctl(8) is not the whole serial number. I am not sure why. I discovered this when I went to check the warranty information for a drive. The drive is fine; I just wanted to check. Using smartctl, I got this: Right there, on line 7, you can see the serial number. Count it. It’s 9 characters. Now visit the Toshiba

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