Archive
Posts from 2010
Why the ext3 fsck's after X days or Y mounts?
Reading through my RSS feeds, I cameacross the following blog post describing one Linux administrator using tune2fs to disable the "please run fsck on this file system after X days or Y mounts." I've got to admit, this is kind of annoying. I've taken production critical Linux boxes down for some maintenance, only to have the downtime extended +15-30 minutes because the file system was configured to run a fsck. Google searching this topic even shows other administrators trying other stupid tactics to avoid the fsck on reboot. Is there really any value on having fsck run after some period of time…
$ read more →Anatomy of Linux Kernel Shared Memory
Slashdot covered a post from IBM developerworks that I thought was relevant to pass along here. The Linux 2.6.32 Kernel performs memory de-duplication a.k.a. KSM (kernel shared memory). Its a great read if you're interested in the advancements of Linux Virtualization…
$ read more →Slides from my CentOS cluster server presentation
The fine folks at ALE invited me back this month to give a presentation on CentOS cluster server. I had a blast presenting, and want to thank everyone for coming out. The slide deck I used is now up on my website, and I will post links to the cluster configuration file I discussed later this week.
$ read more →Converting time since the epoch to a human readable string
I was parsing some Netbackup logs today, and needed a way to convert the time since the epoch into a human readable string. A while back I read about the various forms of input that can be passed to the GNU date's "-d" option, one of these being the time since the epoch: This solved my issue, though unfortunately it's not super portable. Food for thought.
$ read more →Solaris reporting multiple devices sharing IRQ assignments
One of my co-workers this week was fighting disk failure on a Solaris 10 x86 host. I was checking /var/adm/messages and came across something interesting. Weird. So, x86 hardware assigns different IRQ assignments to devices…
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