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.
ssl-admin: revoking a certificate Read More »
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
Automating that regression testing Read More »
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
smartctl: Toshiba HDD serial numbers are only 9 characters Read More »
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
dhclient: sending a host identifier to the DHCP server Read More »
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
Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD Read More »
I was looking around for warranty checking pages. I found these for my HDD: Western Digital Toshiba Seagate and Maxtor
HDD warranty checks Read More »
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
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:
The hardware is ready. What tests to run? Read More »
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
Testing the benchmark scripts – 1 Read More »
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
New benchmarks coming Read More »