Category Archives: SysAdmin
A Lack of Organisation on Your Part Does Not Constitute an Emergency on Mine
When we discuss a piece of monitoring software that you would like writing and I tell you that we can collect any data that you want, but you have to tell me what you want reports on up-front so that … Continue reading
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Dealing With Stupid Programs That Think They Need X
The new compute cluster is beginning to feel like a production system. I’m currently run off my feet installing software for the stream of new users. Mostly this is fine, but occasionally I run into software that makes me want … Continue reading
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Ranger
http://blogs.sun.com/jonasdias/entry/tacc_ranger_tour A nice video of the new Ranger cluster at Texas ACC. Uses the same APC cooling system as the new Cardiff machine. Hopefully in the not too distant future I’ll be able to post some pretty pics of our … Continue reading
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Moving ZFS filesystems between pools
When I originally set up the ZFS on my development v880 I added the internal disks as a raidz together with two volumes off the external fibre-channel array. As is the way with these things the development box has gradually … Continue reading
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Sun x4600
I’ve been running some tests at work on a shiny new Sun x4600 with 8 dual-core Opteron processors. It’s very nicely put together. So far benchmarks have ranged between “That’s really quite fast” and “Is it powered by Hamsters?”. More … Continue reading
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new server
The newest addition to the racks at WeSC is a Dell 3250. Two Itanium processors, redundant power supplies and a proper lights-out management card. Total Cost? Less than 500 quid from ebay.
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One of those days
Due to a scarcity of meetings (a rare thing these days) I thought I might actually be able to get some work done today. What I actually ended up doing was trying to work out why my Solaris 10 V880 … Continue reading
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Big Disks?
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. … Continue reading
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It’s 2am: do you know where your ZFS pools are?
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 … Continue reading
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MySQL Backup Script – Updated
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 … Continue reading
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