I attended a few of the talks at PGCon 2013 last month. One talk, for which I took several notes and made a few choice tweets. The main one I’m following up on is using the -Fc option on pg_dump. It was during Magnus Haganders’ talk on PostgreSQL Backup Strategies that I posted that tweet. […]
Using compression with PostgreSQL’s pg_dump Read More »
I’ve been moving some services around lately. A server is dying and I need to move stuff off it. Today I managed to move Bacula and Nagios onto a new server. After a short bit of struggle, I had just one service check that was failing: check_ping. Here’s the example: $ /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_ping -H bast.example.org -w
nagios – check_ping CRITICAL – You need more args!!! Could not open pipe: Read More »
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
ezjail – renaming, moving, and renumbering Read More »
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
Restricting IP addresses to specific databases Read More »
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
Creating a ZFS-only box – the first look Read More »
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
The hardware is ready. What tests to run? Read More »
This is the third in a series of posts about building a new server. What’s happened since? My main development server is acting up again. One of the two HDD in the gmirror has gone off line. Also, I recently read an article about an interesting scam which introduced me to the phrase ruthlessly eradicate
Designing a new server, part III Read More »
People often talk about security. There are many different types of security. Personal security. Security theater. Physical security. In this post, we’ll talk about securing communications channels so that others cannot listen in, and so that others cannot connect. In this article, I’ll talk about using a toolkit, ssl-admin, to create a certificate authority, create
I use Bacula for my backups. Most of my backups are done to disk, then copied to tape. I have long liked the idea of having multiple backups on different media. On a regular basis, I move the FULL backup tapes to an offsite location. This is standard practice and highly recommended if you can
Adding Nagios checks for tape drives / libraries Read More »
This article talks about FreeBSD 8.2 and how device names might change when you add new devices to an existing system. The other day, when I was telling you about the new tape library, one of the important bits was the device names. The existing tape drive was sa0. The new one was sa1. That’s
Hardcoding device names Read More »