My Wushu Blog

We bought a stack of Dell servers off of eBay for work. The price was great, I think it was about $3K for 20 1U Dell servers. 8GB RAM, Dual Xeon, and 4 SATA drives in each one. They even have a MegaRAID on board, how perfect is that? I installed FreeBSD 9.1 on two of them, used ZFS, and they are both running nicely. We then decided to stand one up as a Windows 2003 R2 server, because everything was going over so well.

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I’ve pretty much transitioned off of Apache and PHP in favor of Nginx and Passenger to run my Rails and Python applications. Except Even this WordPress based blog. I don’t even host it anymore, my good friend Christopher has allowed me to run it on his Colo server. Where I currently live, there are a lot of trees and power outages, so I cannot reliably run a server there. BUT, for the few sites that I really don’t care about uptime, I’ve been working on the following:

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While managing a Bacula environment, I occasionally found it useful to find savesets that were still on the Storage Node beyond the life of our retention policy. Since Bacula does not actually erase old volumes if the client next contacts the server again, they hang around and it usually requires manual intervention. find . -mtime +30d -print | xargs du | awk '{ sum += $1;count++ }END{print (sum/1024/1024),count}'

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Gitorious has some documentation on a local install for Ubuntu, RHEL, and Debian, which turned out to be slightly outdated. Now that they have leveraged the Bundler GEM manager, the installation process is much simpler. FreeBSD is by far my platform of choice when it comes to flexible and complex open source applications, and it was a cinch to reuse the Linux documentation. Aside from having to re-write the init scripts, the entire process was very easy, and I got to try out a few different web servers for the heck of it.

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Since I/we (the family) have made a fairly drastic change in our lives, I thought I would give the “Year One” run down. In pictures only. todo My first day at work, and the last time I showed up before 8am! todo The room I rented while the family was in antioch was a real gem. The manager of the home ripped the bathroom out after he cashed my first check.

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I’m pretty happy with the Bacula environment I’ve created. It has gone through a few iterations, and I’ve learned a lot since I started using it a few years ago. I think its only appropriate to share the evolution of my environment with as many people as possible, and I hope it can help save new bacula administrators some time. Enough of the preamble, here is my github project page: https://github.

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Atlassian has a wonderful set of tools. I’ve been using Jira with Fisheye for the last few months, but I recently came across Stash. Stash is a nice git repository and project manager than provides easy access to creating new Git repo’s with User and Group access controls. I’m considering phasing out FishEye in favor of Stash. I only wanted FishEye as a source code browser, that integrated issues tracking. Stash has that, and allows me to manage many projects and repositories.

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LinkedIn’s users database was leaked, and while passwords were not stored in plain text, they were hashed with the MD5 algorithm. Not salted, just hashed. MD5 is no longer as secure as it once was, not with all of these GPU’s lying around. Well, the FreeBSD community has not let this go unnoticed. First off, FreeBSD has defaulted to MD5 for a while, but it has had support for Blow-Fish, and (this is new to me) SHA-256 and SHA-512.

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If you have google’d for smb.conf settings to max your 1Gb (or 10Gb) ethernet based network and you still cannot seem to get beyond 30MB/sec, make sure you have this option: socket options = SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 Either commented it out, or set the buffer size to 128K (131072). Or larger. I was helping a friend of mine troubleshoot his ZFS + Samba environment. He was running FreeBSD 9.0 and Samba 3.

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I’ve been using ZFS on FreeBSD since it was first made available in 7.0, and it was not until FreeBSD 8.2 when NFSv4 ACL’s were implemented. At $oldJob, I had a list of “To do’s”, really cool things like: “Integrate Puppet into CMDB”, “Rewrite the Bacula addClient script”, “Build a MooseFS Cluster”… At the top though, I had: Implement ACL’s on ZFS/Samba fileserver Anyway my $newJob always has a high demand for storage and sharing data.

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