Category Archives: Sysadmin

Migrate MoinMoinWiki to Redmine

Posted on November 6, 2011 by ward

I had a few old MoinMoin installs that were due for an upgrade, and I wanted to migrate them to Redmine. I found a migration script at norwinter.com, which I improved a bit. It will handle wiki pages with full … Continue reading →

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grub rescue commands

Posted on August 28, 2011 by ward

I wasted some time on Friday trying to get a machine with grub 2 installed to boot. The machine booted into Grub’s rescue mode. Grub 2′s rescue mode is nice, but not exactly intuitive (no ‘help’ or ‘?’ command), and … Continue reading →

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disk, disk, disk

Posted on July 12, 2011 by ward

I started adding 165 TB of disk to one of our clusters today. This is what that looks like – 55 three TB disks: The packaging was not too great; while all disks were well packaged individually, the big boxes … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, Sysadmin | Leave a comment

idle power draw of modern Opteron CPUs

Posted on April 5, 2011 by ward

I’ve been curious for a while about how much power Opteron CPUs draw when idle, so I set aside a bit of time to do some measurements. I used a Supermicro 1U system with redundant power supply. The motherboard model … Continue reading →

Posted in Environment, Sysadmin | 3 Comments

compression

Posted on November 15, 2010 by ward

Before: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1.1G 2010-10-31 20:19 10125-127-2010-10.error After: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 11M 2010-10-31 20:19 10125-127-2010-10.error.bz2 Bzip2 reduced the file to 1% of its original size. Not bad!

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64K hours

Posted on October 17, 2010 by ward

Some disks last a long time. This is an old IBM IDE drive (IC35L040AVVA07-0). smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Self-test log structure revision … Continue reading →

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nagios, mdadm and snmp

Posted on November 9, 2009 by ward

I found this script while looking for a simple script to monitor mdadm arrays. The script is fine, but it has a subtle bug – it will never report an error because the –detail parameter is missing in the call … Continue reading →

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a new home server

Posted on September 6, 2009 by ward

I’ve been running an old Shuttle with a 2.4GHz celeron CPU, 512MB of ram and two 500GB disks in raid-1 as home server for the past 5 years or so. Well, I upgraded the disks in February 2008, before that … Continue reading →

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capistrano, svn and webserver timeouts

Posted on July 3, 2009 by ward

A customer reported problems with capistrany deploys that would just die like this: ** [XXX.XXX.XXX :: err] svn: REPORT request failed on ‘/!svn/vcc/default’ ** svn: REPORT of ‘/!svn/vcc/default’: Chunk delimiter was invalid (http://XXX.XXX.XXX) command finished After disabling gzip compression on … Continue reading →

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df and zettabytes

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ward

This is a very confused filesystem. But check it out – df supports zettabytes! # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md0 19G -64Z 22G 101% / Surprisingly, the machine is up and runs just fine.

Posted in Sysadmin | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments