Open Source

ezjail – renaming, moving, and renumbering

ezjail is my tool of choice for managing jails. I’ve been using it since 2008. Today, I want to do something which ezjail won’t do for me, but will allow me to do. I created a bunch of jails for a Bacula tutorial at BSDCan. Now that I have that server safely home again, I need to add more services to this jail server. My main development machine is acting up. It is […]

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Restricting IP addresses to specific databases

Sometimes, you don’t want just anyone talking to your database. In fact, sometimes, you don’t want anyone accessing your database except very specific applications. In this case, I am setting up about 20 databases, each one dedicated to a specific use, and to be accessed only from one IP address each. In this post, I’ll talk about how I first set this up with pg_hba.conf, and then how I altered it to be

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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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Creating a ZFS-only box – the first look

I’m about to start setting up a ZFS-only box using FreeBSD 8.2. There will be no UFS volumes in this system. Every previous server I have set up has always booted from a gmirror’d UFS system first, then mounted a ZFS array. This time, everything will be on ZFS. I’ve described this server previously when I first chose the parts back in January. Now, the push is on to get this system installed

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Even bonnie++ shows the 50% performance hit

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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Deleting old Bacula Volumes

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

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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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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