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Posts in Storage
Making sense of the various NAS hardware and software solutions
This past weekend I realized I had a sufficient need at home for some type of centralized storage solution. Ideally this solution would allow me access my data from all of my machines via NFS, CIFS and iSCSI, and have some capabilities to stream music and videos across my wireless network. The number of NAS solutions I found astounded me, and I have been digging through reviews to see what is good. During my research, I came across a slew of hardware and software solutions…
$ read more →A nice graphical interface for smartmontools
In my article out SMART your hard drive, I discussed smartmontools and the smartctl comand line utility in detail. The article shows how to view SMART data on a hard drive, conduct self-tests and shows how to configure smartmontools to generate alerts when a drive is about to or has failed. Recently I learned about GSmartControl, which is a graphical front-end to smartmontools. While I've only played with it a bit, it looks like a pretty solid piece of software…
$ read more →Locating physical disk drives in Solaris
On "enterprise" Sun hardware, you can do nifty tricks like blink LED lights on disks to identify where logical disk names like c8t2d0 resides as Matty pointed out in the blog post here. But what if you're stuck on crufty (cheaper) regular SATA drives without the sexy LED support? How do you find c8t2d0 amongst a ton of other disks? Using cfgadm -alv, you can print out the serial number of the drive…
$ read more →Cool blog post about aligning partitions for performance
I came across a link to Dave Lutz's Partition Alignment Guidelines for Unified Storage blog post while catching up on zfs-discuss today. Aligning partitions correctly can make a HUGE performance difference, and it's amazing how many people are unaware of the consequences of not laying out their partitions to align with the storage they are using (this includes segment size and partition alignment). If you are new to this topic, you should definitely read through Dave's post!
$ read more →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…
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