Archive
Posts from 2012
A great introduction to ZFS de-duplication
I've been looking into deploying ZFS de-duplication, and I have one application in particular (backup staging) that would greatly benefit from it. George Wilson did an awesome introduction to ZFS de-duplication video, and it's a great place to get started. I'm planning to start testing out de-duplication as soon as my SSDs are ordered, and hopefully I will have some positive results to report!
$ read more →Using MySQL query logs to debug authentication issues
I recently installed LogAnalyzer, and after the install completed I noticed that nothing was being displayed in the web interface. I figured I fat fingered something, but needed a way to verify this. Luckily for me I was using MySQL, so I enabled MySQL query logging and low and behold I proved my hypothesis: To fix this I logged into the database and changed the password for the rsyslog user: Everything began working once the application could authenticate, and I was able to start playing around with LogAnalyzer. Noting this here in case I fat finger another password in the future…
$ read more →An interesting way of looking at file system versioning (ZFS feature flags)
I got a chance to catch up with a bunch of stuff in my "need to read" / "need to watch" folder this past weekend. One of the videos I watched talked about ZFS feature flags, and how they will be used by the Illumos community to add new features to ZFS. ZFS feature flags make a lot of sense, and will definitely be invaluable once ZFS is extended by more than one organization. Cool video, and well worth the ten minutes it takes to watch it.
$ read more →How I saved $80 a month on my cable and Internet bill
I was reviewing my cable bill last month and was floored that I was spending $120 a month for a DVR, cable and Internet access. This blew my mind, and I set out on a quest to lower my bill without losing access to quality content (I like to watch educational shows and documentaries). I had a couple of requirements prior to heading down this road: I needed to be able to view shows on the major TV networks. Internet bandwidth needed to be sufficient to stream movies from Hulu, Netflix or Apple…
$ read more →How to get around the PHP strftime() It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings warning
When I was playing around with the LogAnalyzer Statistics page I received the following error in each of the display boxes: In the error message it provides two solutions to address this issue: Use the date.timezone php.ini entry. Call date_default_timezone_set() to set the timezone. I went with #1 and set date.timezone to the following: I restarted Apache and everything is now working. I like easy fixes…
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