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SSD Endurance

I previously wrote about the issue of swap potentially breaking SSD [1]. My conclusion was that swap wouldn’t be a problem as no normally operating systems that I run had swap using any significant fraction of total disk writes. In that post the most writes I could see was 128GB written per day on a […]

Some Ideas About Storage Reliability

Hard Drive Brands

When people ask for advice about what storage to use they often get answers like “use brand X, it works well for me and brand Y had a heap of returns a few years ago”. I’m not convinced there is any difference between the small number of manufacturers that are still in […]

SMART and SSDs

The Hetzner server that hosts my blog among other things has 2*256G SSDs for the root filesystem. The smartctl and smartd programs report both SSDs as in FAILING_NOW state for the Wear_Leveling_Count attribute. I don’t have a lot of faith in SMART. I run it because it would be stupid not to consider data about […]

Load Average Monitoring

For my ETBE-Mon [1] monitoring system I recently added a monitor for the Linux load average. The Unix load average isn’t a very good metric for monitoring system load, but it’s well known and easy to use. I’ve previously written about the Linux load average and how it’s apparently different from other Unix like OSs […]

Process Monitoring

Since forking the Mon project to etbemon [1] I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the monitor scripts. Actually monitoring something is usually quite easy, deciding what to monitor tends to be the hard part. The process monitoring script ps.monitor is the one I’m about to redesign.

Here are some of my ideas […]

Apache Mesos on Debian

I decided to try packaging Mesos for Debian/Stretch. I had a spare system with a i7-930 CPU, 48G of RAM, and SSDs to use for building. The i7-930 isn’t really fast by today’s standards, but 48G of RAM and SSD storage mean that overall it’s a decent build system – faster than most systems I […]

Monitoring of Monitoring

I was recently asked to get data from a computer that controlled security cameras after a crime had been committed. Due to the potential issues I refused to collect the computer and insisted on performing the work at the office of the company in question. Hard drives are vulnerable to damage from vibration and there […]

Basics of Backups

I’ve recently had some discussions about backups with people who aren’t computer experts, so I decided to blog about this for the benefit of everyone. Note that this post will deliberately avoid issues that require great knowledge of computers. I have written other posts that will benefit experts.

Essential Requirements

Everything that matters must be […]

BTRFS Training

Some years ago Barwon South Water gave LUV 3 old 1RU Sun servers for any use related to free software. We gave one of those servers to the Canberra makerlab and another is used as the server for the LUV mailing lists and web site and the 3rd server was put aside for training. The […]

RAID Pain

One of my clients has a NAS device. Last week they tried to do what should have been a routine RAID operation, they added a new larger disk as a hot-spare and told the RAID array to replace one of the active disks with the hot-spare. The aim was to replace the disks one at […]