Hlynes.com

We’re probably going to need a large amount of disk space shortly. It’s basically somewhere to back things up so it doesn’t need to be terribly fast. I’ve been having a look around and I’ve come up with two possibilities.

Sun X4500

• 24TB SATA
• 4U
• Software RAID (ZFS)
• well engineered
• Sun support
• 20k with academic pricing

DNUK Teravault

• 27TB SATA
• 6U
• Hardware RAID (Areca 110)
• DNUK rails are usually horrid
• 13k full price

The x4500 is smaller and I know it will be less hassle to physically install. But the DNUK box is a lot cheaper and has more storage. From looking at the hardware specs I think that the x4500 is the superior product but I’ve no reason to believe the Teravault won’t get the job done.

If anyone has had hands-on experience of either box I would really like to here about it.

Filed by huw at 9:42 pm under SysAdmin, Tech
6 Comments

No, no I don’t.

wesc21-comsc# zpool list
no pools available
wesc21-comsc# df -h
Abort (core dumped)


Bollocks. I’m beginning to think this machine is cursed. The mounted ZFS filesystems are still there and apear to be functioning so I guess I can fix this tomorrow. I don’t really want to interrupt the MySQL database that’s indexing 40GB of data.

Strangely googling for “Where the hell did my ZFS go?” doesn’t return any usefull results.

Filed by huw at 2:02 am under SysAdmin
2 Comments

I had to move data from a large MySQL database (where large == 8GB tables). So I updated my trusty mysql backup script to backup tables inividually. The creation of 20+ GB files always seems like a bad idea.

The updated script can be found here.

Filed by huw at 3:52 pm under SysAdmin
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I’ve been playing around with Solaris 10 on my development V880 at work and generally enjoying it. ZFS is a thing of beauty and Zones have turned out to be very helpful. It’s not unusual for a researcher to come along needing to set up gigabytes of database temporarily while they try out some things. Being able to throw a zone up and give them full access to it without worrying about them messing up your server is very handy.

Of course the patching system on Solaris leaves something to be desired. The pretty GUI tools that Sun reccomends don’t work if you have zones running on your machine. So I’ve resorted to using PCA which works but is horribly slow.

Anyway on thursday I get a call from Information Services telling me they have been informed by JANET that hostx is aggressively scanning the network. So they have disconnected the network port it lives on. hostx happens to be a Solaris 10 zone on the afore-mentioned V880. So I wander into the machine room log into the console and halt the zone. A quick look through the filesystem reveals the traces of the Solaris Telnet Worm. Great. In six years the only machine I’ve had hacked.

Eventually I work out what happened. When the advisory about the telnet vulnerability came out I disabled telnet on the Solaris 10 machines and voiced my displeasure that telnet was enabled by default. However for reasons that I can’t explain I didn’t actually patch the machine.

A month later I set up a new zone for one of the researchers. And it turns on telnet again. Because that’s the sensible thing to do. Zone gets rooted, I look like a moron.

I’m going to go away and put PCA into a cron job like I should have done originally.

Filed by huw at 1:55 pm under SysAdmin
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RealCLimate.org wins the prize for most educational April Fools joke with their post on the Sheep Albedo Feedback. Of course this isn’t a million miles away from DaisyWorld.

Filed by huw at 3:22 pm under Science
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