Recent Posts
Building a redundant iSCSI and NFS cluster with Debian - Part 1
It’s been a while now since I last updated this blog with any decent material (The Poo Truck notwithstanding, as honestly, that’s a classic) so I thought I’d dust off some of my notes on building a redundant iSCSI and NFS SAN using Debian Etch.
Poo
OK, I readily admit that this is really childish. I haven’t updated this site for ages; I know there are far better things that I could be writing about. At the age of nearly 30, I really shouldn’t be sniggering at naughty words like I’m back in primary school. But when I saw this unbelievably apt number plate on a sewage truck, I realised I had witnessed the stuff of playground legends. I present to you The Poo Truck in all it’s glory…
ZFS Replication
As I’ve been investigating ZFS for use on production systems, I’ve been making a great deal of notes, and jotting down little "cookbook recipies" for various tasks. One of the coolest systems I’ve created recently utilised the zfs send & receive commands, along with incremental snapshots to create a replicated ZFS environment across two different systems. True, all this is present in the zfs manual page, but sometimes a quick demonstration makes things easier to unders...
ZFS as a volume manager
While browsing the ZFS man page recently, I made an interesting discovery: ZFS can export block devices from a zpool, which means you can separate "ZFS the volume manager" from "ZFS the filesystem". This may well be old news to many; however I haven’t seen many references to this on the web, so thought I’d post a quick blog update.
ZFS and caching for performance
I’ve recently been experimenting with ZFS in a production environment, and have discovered some very interesting performance characteristics. I have seen many benchmarks indicating that for general usage, ZFS should be at least as fast if not faster than UFS (directio not withstanding - not that UFS directio itself is any faster, but anything that does it’s own memory management such as InnoDB or Oracle will suffer from the double-buffering effect unless ZFS has been tuned...