hardware

Adding two new drives (SSD) to an existing ZFS system

I haven’t tested this yet, but I’ve installed the hardware. The real test will come after a reboot and actual use of the new drives. NOTE: Although this claims to be creating a new ZIL (SLOG) do not believe it. In fact, stop reading right here. There is nothing of use below. What will they be used for? These drives are intended for ZIL (the ZFS Intent Log). This can speed up writes. […]

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slocum

This post has been replaced by a newer one. For reference, the previous post on this server is still available. For future reference, this is the slocum server, which I use for various jails and services. This data was gathered adding increasing the RAM from 16GB to 32GB and adding two SSD to the previous configuration. This is my first ZFS system with more than one pool. Merry Christmas The filesystems, well, some

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Upgrade or replace?

I have this server (I don’t actually have it; I haven’t seen it since 2006) which has started to be restrictive in what I can do with it. It’s running FreeBSD 9.2 and I’d love to start making more use of jails and ZFS. The server has 8x 50G Raptor drives, all on a 3Ware 9550SX-8LP, and 8GB of RAM. The RAM has been giving these types of messages for a few years

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ZFS: raidz2 with 8 or 10 disks?

The traditional thoughts on ZFS are to have arrays which are a power-of-2 when it comes to number of disks. That means 2, 4, 8, etc. But for raidz1, that would be 3, 5, 9. For my choice of raidz2, it would be 4, 6, and 10. In the system I’m building up now, I have an 8-port LSI SATA/SAS 9211-8i 6Gb/s card. I can add two more HDD by attaching them to

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smartctl: FAILING_NOW

I noticed this in my logs today: May 22 14:04:39 bast smartd[1577]: Device: /dev/ad0, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 9 Power_On_Hours. Oh. Really? I looked at the output of smartctl and found: This HDD is part of a gmirror: $ gmirror status Name Status Components mirror/gm0 COMPLETE ad0 ad2 How’s ad2 doing? That seems OK. Regardless of the status, I can do nothing for a week. I’m out of town. I do have several

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The Bacula Tutorial jail server

One of the challenges of providing hands-on demonstrations is giving everyone their own sandbox to play in. I don’t want people to spend time on installing software. I want people to learn about the software in question, specifically Bacula. With this in mind, I’ve been building up a solution based on FreeBSD 9.1, ZFS, and jails. My solution is pretty nifty, but I don’t think it’s anything special. The key is simplicity. The

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