Techie
The dilemma – OS updates vs OS type
Aug 28th
For years I have been a FreeBSD bigot. I love FreeBSD, the stability, performance, ease of use, and steady progression.
But…
Updates are kind of a chore, there is no such thing as true incremental updates, you either do patch updates against RELEASE, or you do world updates against STABLE. I am a STABLE kind of admin so my updates take quite a few man hours to do. The number of security updates required for FreeBSD is quite minimal (the target is small).
The Ubuntu Linux distribution does do things incrementally, you can update whenever you wish as by default everything is distributed as binaries. The downside is the constant updates that are in the pipeline and no easy way to figure out which update is relevant to what type of thing you are updating for. The update mailing lists are high speed, high volume, and I don’t have enough time in my day to keep up. The number of security updates required for any Linux distribution is very large (the target is huge).
And this has nothing to do with package maintenance…
Storage, storage STORAGE!
Jun 10th
SInce last month, our Nexenta based storage cluster has been deployed and I have now moved production data onto it.
A bump and bruise occurred last weekend (I had done an announcement already) and yesterday things burped again.
The problem? Looks like an issue with the 2 mirrored boot drives of the first head unit (each head manages its own volumes and HA is used to make sure a single head failure doesn’t cause an outage) are … bad.
One drive has full on SMART failure via the BIOS. Interesting…so replace that drive with another from the shelf…and the other drive is showing something ‘odd’. Yank it out, replace it, and move it another machine for testing.
And it is failing as well! Four hard disks, 2 per head unit, and 2 fail in one head unit, what are the chances of that? (the second head unit does not exhibit any of the same symptoms)
A storage cluster is born
May 19th
It is time to add space to our VMware cluster for storage of VMs for our customers.
We started initially using Compellent SAN storage. Worked well, had a lot of space, but the performance was not what I was looking for (it is all SATA based), using F/C is far more complicated than we need for this project, and just plain expensive to upgrade (adding a shelf of 16 450GB SAS disks is more expensive than the solution presented here).
Spin forward a few months, I took one of our older NetApp FAS270c systems and ripped out the 73GB 10K disks, went to eBay and purchased 2 shelves of 300GB 10K F/C disks and after an afternoon of shuffling we had ourselves a cluster for storage. Performance is absolutely great (and predictable). Expanding it? Expensive, just like the Compellent, and I also wanted to investigate some of the new things that can be done with storage, like inline (and synchronous) compression and data deduplication.
History lesson: Years and years ago I did a lot with Solaris and I have kept my feet wet playing with OpenSolaris and ZFS. I won’t bore you with the great details of why ZFS is the shit (links at the bottom of the post) or why Solaris needs to live on forever (because no one can thread at the kernel level like Solaris), but I will tell you that using Solaris (or OpenSolaris) with ZFS is a combination that is very tough to beat. So last year I used the Sun Try-and-Buy program to test out a 7110 and I absolutely loved the interface, and the price drop that occurred while I had it! But someone within Sun decided that no, as a TaB customer the new pricing is not available. I was floored by this. I shipped back the 7110, and anyway, I really wanted a cluster, not a single head, single JBOD enclosure.
In the end I wanted a cluster!
That’s 2 heads, automatic failover, etherchannel/trunk/IPMP/LACP oh hell, I just wanted multiple ethernets bound together if possible, basic reporting (I can SNMP for the real stuff), and finally, a price tag that I can feel good about for storage of our customer data.
This is where NexentaStor comes in! They have the pieces all put together so I don’t have to self-engineer something. I have a vendor I can harass or ask questions of. I can focus on what makes my business work instead of working to make my business stable.
HOW-TO: Carpet your data center
Apr 1st
Earlier today we announced the changes to our data center – you can read about that here.
Now we are getting some feedback:
How did you do it?
Why did you do it?
Why not shag?
Those purple stripes clash with my servers, wtf?
So, onward we go, with help from an office mate who wishes to remain anonymous; let’s call him Nick.
Linux Distributions vs PHP
Mar 24th
The splintering of Linux distributions seems to be continuing!
This week, I have had requests for PHP versions 5.3 and 5.2 on both Red Hat EL 5 and CentOS 5 – though never distribution supports higher than 5.1.6 in the official repositories.
PHP 5.2 has been out quite a while. Ubuntu Hardy LTS has it and it is 2 years old. Ubuntu Lucid LTS is coming out in April has 5.3 by default. I bet Debian Lenny is at 5.2 or higher already. SUSE is at 5.3 (for version 11.x where X != 0)
“Why” seems to be the question of the day – why doesn’t RHEL do some updates to something people feel they ‘require’ for their PHP web applications? CentOS would then follow.
Even old/stodgy FreeBSD (my personal favorite) is all over the 5.2 camp for PHP since 6.x, and the *BSD people do not play the version of the day.
If I have to run Linux based systems, I choose Ubuntu. Not always the latest version but at least this distribution keeps up with customer wants (and sometimes…needs).
