Apple recently announced the end of the Apple Xserve. The data center is a funny thing, and being such rack space is critical to most who spend a lot of time there. Many of the previous Xserve customers will continue to buy Mac Pro’s and use them in racks as tall Xserves. Others will purchase Mac Mini’s and use them for certain situations. But many will move on to using the same iron in the data center that they use for everything else, finding a way to duplicate or replace the functionality that was previously in the Xserve with something else. Server Admin is not going to run on Linux.…
-
-
Using the CrashPlan Pro REST API
CrashPlan Pro Server is a pretty cool tool with a lot of great features that can be used to back up client computers. There are a lot of things that CrashPlan Pro is good at out of the box, but there are also a lot of other things that CrashPlan Pro wasn’t intended for that it could be good at, given a little additional flexibility. The REST API that CrashPlan Pro uses provides a little flexibility and as with most APIs I would expect it to provide even more as time goes on. I often hear people run away screaming when REST comes up, thinking they’re going to have to…
-
Split the cat
Split can be used to split files into multiple files, making them easier to email or transfer. To split a file with the name of krypted into 100MB files, use the following command: split -b100m ~/Desktop/krypted krypted The files will then be called krypteda, kryptedb, kryptedc. To put Humpty Dumpty back together again use the cat command and > them into one file: cat krypteda kryptedb kryptedc > krypted
-
Replacing Xsan Metadata LUNs
Recently I’ve been noticing a trend where organizations with Xsan (and sometimes StorNext) are replacing older metadata LUNs with newer faster LUNs. This often involves replacing an Xserve RAID that sometimes has tens of thousands of hours of spin time on them with a Promise E-class or an ActiveRAID. The trend isn’t just with people I interact with though, as Duncan McCracken mentioned this at MacSysAdmin 2010 and Kuppusamy Ravindran (aka ravi) mentioned it back in 2008 in a post at Xsanity (he actually went way further and looked at actually splitting Metadata and Journaling, a post that is definitely worth a read). But as the pace seems to quicken…
-
bdb and netatalk
I’ve been finding recently that practically every netatalk implementation is using bdb instead of cdb (the default), due to the fact that cdb seems to be more susceptable to corruption. To make this change, you open the netatalk configuration file at /etc/default/netatalk. Here you will see the following options: ATALKD_RUN=no PAPD_RUN=no CNID_METAD_RUN=no AFPD_RUN=yes TIMELORD_RUN=no A2BOOT_RUN=no To switch from cdb to the dbd scheme change CNID_METAD_RUN = no to CNID_METAD_RUN = yes. Save the netatalk file and then restart using the ‘netatalk restart’ command (with sudo or as root): /etc/init.d/netatalk restart No further changes need to be made in AppleVolumes.default or afpd.conf, but do be sure to check that the users…
-
Goodbye OpenSolaris/OpenStorage, Hello OpenFiler/OpenDedup
I’ve read a number of reports over the past couple of days that indicate the demise of Project Wonderland and Open Solaris. As it is open source I would not be surprised to see the project continue, even if forked and retitled in some way. Oracle will continue selling Solaris, but “nothing is for free” is about to take on a whole new meaning. For now it seems that any plans around packaging services around the FOSS stack surrounding former Sun products should be put on hold until further official announcements are made. “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las…
-
Uniq Logs
Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of log files. And sorting through them can be a bit of a pain. However, there are some tools out there to help make this process a bit easier. The first of these is sort. If I have a log that has 1,000 lines, while I like to initially see any lines that are repeated numerous times so that I can see when servers are throwing a lot of errors, combing through them can get tedious. Sort will help to reduce the volume and organize them in a manner that makes sense. For example, to sort the logs and remove duplicate line entries…
-
Monitoring Amazon ec2 Instances
InterMapper has a solution for monitoring instances of the popular Amazon cloud solution, ec2. Using InterMapper’s Cloud Monitor, you can monitor up to 5 virtual machines that are running for free. If you are just getting started and find that you would like some visibility into the performance of your ec2 instances then this solution is one that will allow you to get into the testing and management without having to incur a large expenditure. And Cloud Monitor is build on top of Amazon’s Cloud Watch, meaning that it provides the most granular and up-to-date stats available for your instances, based on Amazon’s own tools. I’ve been finding that when…
-
Google Chrome OS Videos
-
VirtualBox 3.1 Out & Tested
The latest version of VirtualBox is out and it supports a whole slew of bug fixes. In fact, the latest VirtualBox fixes a very specific problem that I’ve been struggling with, which is the fact that iSCSI LUNs greater than 2 Terabytes would not mount (not that I have many LUNs greater than 2TB in my lab but occasionally it does come up). When running on Mac OS X, the following other bug fixes are also included: X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302) Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866) Mac OS X…