My Wushu Blog

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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I like Nginx a lot. Not because I’m some sort of hipster sysadmin either. I like it because it is small, fast, and as a FreeBSD port, it compiles and updates quickly. What I also like is the separation of services and processes. For example, if I want to run a PHP script, I don’t load “mod_php” like you would with Apache. Instead, you have a PHP processor, like php-fpm, running (on localhost, or, another server that only processes PHP scripts).

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todo Owen and Caralyne playing at the beach I always felt very proud that this site was “free” to everyone. I think its great when you can go to a site that isn’t laden with advertisements or pop-ups that try to sell you more things you don’t need. Sort of like how the internet used to be. I regret to say, I’m going to compromise my ideology and give Google Adsense a try.

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Glenn and I have kept up with our Tuesday nights band practice. Every Tuesday with rare exceptions, which is usually some form of vehicular issue on my end. Both Michele and I have had a slew of minor vehicle issues, mostly dead batteries. Our motivation has not been the more difficult part, nor has our muse left us ( The two of us have been able to work out some really fun segments ).

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My previous experience with a large virtual “enterprise” environment was with VMWare’s ESXi and vSphere. Performance wise, I was always fairly happy with ESXi knowing that it was a virtual machine of course. There were a few issues I recall: silent data corruption (fsck’ing Linux and FreeBSD volumes would reveal inconsistent filesystem information, but there were never any errors reported to the VM) Live migrations were not always stable. In fact, most of the time it would result in an unexpected shutdown I doubt it was solely VMWares fault, as it could have been a series of mis-configurations and poor implementation descisions.

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Over the past year or so, Caralyne has become increasingly interested in scientastical things like computers, Minecraft, Robots, Mythbusters, and specifically, Mythbusters! I’ve been using our TV for my own nefarious deeds, unbeknownst to Caralyne, as an educational tool in science and skepticism. Between Good Eats, Mythbusters and a few PBS clips of Neil Degrasse Tyson being awesome, something was bound to stick. Also, as a daughter and child of mine, she is constantly seeking my affection and approval… which I am not above exploiting these features she no doubt got from me, so I give her a LOT of positive feedback and attention when we are watching these shows.

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