The server which among other things holds my email runs Debian/Wheezy for the
Dom0 and most DomUs. It's running Xen for virtualisation and ZFS for data
storage.
Currently I have some problems, the hardware is defective and has started
spontaneously rebooting. This is really bad but a combination of ECC RAM and
ZFS means that the risk of data loss is low, but uptime isn't good. The
server needs to be replaced so now is a good time to consider other changes.
ZFS is not well supported on Linux due to license issues. There are two
aspects of this which are particularly important to me, one is that I've found
ZFS to cause the kernel to OOM in situations where I think it shouldn't (EG a
server with 4G of RAM doing a light Samba load). The other is that ZFS
doesn't always start properly on boot so I need to hack the init scripts to
make sure it's mounted before starting daemons that depend on it (which
doesn't always work, see my message about MySQL).
I believe that my coding skills are up to the task of making ZFS work as I
desire. But no-one is going to pay me to do that and I don't feel inclined to
waste hobby time on work that won't benefit the FOSS community.
For reliable data storage on Linux the options are ZFS and BTRFS. The down-
side of BTRFS is that it is new and most distributions don't support it as
well as one wants for production code. But Oracle apparently support it well.
Oracle are also really into Xen and should be able to give better MySQL
support than anyone else.
The options I'm considering at the moment are using Oracle Linux for the Dom0
and using Debian for the Dom0 with an Oracle kernel. Both of those should be
good for running BTRFS and Xen. Debian with an Oracle kernel will make kernel
upgrades a little painful but it means I don't have to change the rest of the
OS configuration (I've run Debian systems with CentOS kernels before). A
complete Oracle OS will work well together but it means I have to change
everything to a different OS, admittedly that won't be so hard as the Dom0
does little other than managing DomUs and running MySQL.
Any suggestions?
--
My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
I was just looking at the options available on a Dell PowerEdge T110 which has
a base price of $749 (it's a nice system, I just bought one for my home).
A recent addition to the customisation page (which as far as I recall wasn't
there last week when ordering my system) is a huge range of Red Hat and SUSE
options. It's nice that Linux options are available, but it's a pity that
they don't offer the cheap ones. The T110 makes a nice little
workstation/server so one of the desktop licenses for RHEL might be a more
useful option.
It's rather surprising to see RHEL options going up to well over 20* the base
hardware price and SUSE options going up to over 10* the base hardware price.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, 1 Guest, 1 yr Red Hat
Network, FI [add $1,393.70 or $23/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, 1 Guest, 3 yr Red Hat
Network, FI [add $3,971.00 or $50/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, 1 Guest, 5 yr Red Hat
Network, FI [add $6,618.70 or $77/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, 4 Guest, 1 yr Red Hat
Network, FI [add $2,091.10 or $30/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, 4 Guest, 3 yr Red Hat
Network, FI [add $5,958.70 or $70/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, 4 Guest, 5 yr Red Hat
Network, FI [add $9,930.80 or $111/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, Unlimited Guest, 1 yr Red
Hat Network, FI [add $3,485.90 or $45/week-1]
Red Hat Enterprise Linux v6.4, x86_64, 1-2 Sockets, Unlimited Guest, 5 yr Red
Hat Network, FI [add $16,556.10 or $179/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise 11 SP2,1-2SKT,1yr Support With Media(DIB),Physical [add
$1,708.30 or $26/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise 11 SP2,1-2SKT,3yr Support With Media(DIB),Physical [add
$4,495.70 or $55/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise 11 SP2,1-2SKT,5yr Support With Media(DIB),Physical [add
$6,725.40 or $78/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise 11 SP2,1-2SKT,1yr Support With Media(DIB),Unlimited
Virtual Licenses [add $2,153.80 or $31/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise 11 SP2,1-2SKT,3yr Support With Media(DIB),Unlimited
Virtual Licenses [add $5,833.30 or $69/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise 11 SP2,1-2SKT,5yr Support With Media(DIB),Unlimited
Virtual Licenses [add $8,620.70 or $98/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2,1-2SKT,1yr Support With Media(FI),Physical
[add $1,708.30 or $26/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2,1-2SKT,3yr Support With Media(FI),Physical
[add $4,495.70 or $55/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2,1-2SKT,5yr Support With Media(FI),Physical
[add $6,725.40 or $78/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2,1-2SKT,1yr Support With
Media(FI),Unlimited Virtual Licenses [add $2,153.80 or $31/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2,1-2SKT,3yr Support With
Media(FI),Unlimited Virtual Licenses [add $5,833.30 or $69/week-1]
SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2,1-2SKT,5yr Support With
Media(FI),Unlimited Virtual Licenses [add $8,620.70 or $98/week-1]
Red Hat Virtualization (DIB) add $0.00
--
My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
Hi All,
Would any of you be willing to briefly meet me face-to-face in the
Melbourne CBD, before tomorrow's (Tuesday's) LUV meeting?
I'd love to attend the meet, but have a more pressing engagement at the
same time.
But I've also got a frustrating problem with my laptop's plug-in mic.
(Works in some contexts, not in others. Have spent much time reading
various sources, all without resolution.)
Am certain that someone with strong Linux skills would quickly notice
what the issue is.
If so, please contact me directly by text or email, to arrange a time
and location.
Thanks VERY much.
Carl Turney
Far out in the Eastern suburbs
Mobile 0427 024 735
Hi all.
Things with Suse 12.2 were fine as far as suspend and shutdown were
concerned on both my desktop and notebook computers. The arrival of
12.3 heralded a less than satisfactory behaviour. I have put up with
this for some time, but enough! is enough!
I have done some reading and discover that suspend writes everything to
Ram and then keeps the ram powered up to retain it all, a meagre power
demand. Hibernate writes everything open to the swap partition and then
on reboot should resume very quickly.
Hibernate works for me for 5 minutes but not 8 hours, suspend is also
flaky in that the recovery tends to hang with no display.
Shutdown hangs on exit unless the previous command was suspend in which
case it works as expected.
Is this a case of ACPI not being consistent with the BIOS? Should I add
"no_acpi" to the grub file?
A new release of Suse is only 18 days away, should I see what the
upgrade brings?
I would be grateful for advice in this,
Many thanks
Andrew Greig
For the sake of "completeness", I put up the following.......
As an experiment I issued the command "pdnsd-ctl empty-cache", this clears
pdnsd's cache and resets any local rules. interestingly this cured the
problem. It also sped up the internet access a good bit. I believe given
what has happened that this would be worth while to do say on a yearly
basis.
When I first installed pdnsd, I remember the time reduction accessing
almost all web pages was very much reduced. I felt over time that this
reduction appeared to largly dissapear. I asssumed it did not have as much
effect on the 3g broadband, this assumption does not appear to be correct.
It seems the longer pdnsd runs the more bogged down it gets, or possibly
the more rubbish entries ends up in the cache.
It's nice to know my initial diagnosis of a name server problem was correct.
Lindsay
It's always a sign of low code quality when a daemon has a wrapper script to
restart it when it crashes. Squid used to have such a script but for many
years has been considered to be reliable enough not to need it.
MySQL seems to be the only commonly used daemon with such a script. I had
been wondering if the script was even needed, I would have hoped that mysqld
was reliable many years ago. But I checked the logs of a RHEL4 system I run
and found 19 log messages about mysqld getting signal 11 since 2006 of which
the last one was 4 days ago.
One problem with such scripts seems to be the issue of reliably shutting down
the server. I have a ZFS system that doesn't always mount the filesystems on
boot so I use /etc/rc.local to restart mysqld. That usually works apart from
the time when I ended up with two copies of mysqld running at once. However
mysqld uses file locking and it seems that you don't get data loss when you
have two copies of it running at the same time (try not to test this theory on
production networks).
While it was handy that mysqld was restarted 19 times, it wasn't good that I
was unaware of the problems.
Is that script being used in the MySQL successors such as Drizzle?
--
My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On Thu, November 7, 2013 6:44 pm, Lev Lafayette wrote:
>
> On Thu, November 7, 2013 3:20 pm, Steve Roylance wrote:
>> there are some browser games at this site, at least one works in firefox
>> on fedora 19. Free to play with some micro-transactions, which are
>> mostly avoidable.
>>
>> http://en.gameforge.com/browser-games
>
> Great collection Steve, thanks for that. The first post for LUV's "month
> of games"!
>
> I promise to get my talk on the website by tomorrow morning...
As promised, MMORPGs and Linux available here:
http://levlafayette.com/files/2013-luv-mmorpg.pdf
... and here:
https://luv.asn.au/files/2013-luv-mmorpg.pdf
Also changed to luv-main, because it is relevant to Linux :)
All the best,
--
Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GCertPM, MBA
mobile: 0432 255 208
RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt
I am getting an error on one of my internet access points, if you try and
access a web page using say iceweasel one gets a delay of around 3 or 4
seconds then an error message is displayed saying something like
"Iceweasel has detected the request being redireted to many times and its
not likely to succeed, problem could be cured by enabling or disabling
cookies or it could be a server error". Anything else such as an ftp
transfer simple gets no response.
Now I have a small network here one of the machines acting as the internet
access point and firewall. The fire wall is just a small script enacting a
"don't speak until spoken to" firewall, the script only acting on a single
interface ppp0. There are two access points the first is a 3g mobile
broadband modem using Virgin, the second a telephone line dial up
modem. This is kept as a backup as the the 3g __CANNOT__ be relied on.
Both of these are accessed via the "pon" command, only one is ever used at
a time, hence only ppp0 is used.
The problem __ONLY__ occurs on the 3g broadband access, the land line
being quite OK.
Anyone have any ideas on this, it would seem to me that virgin network is
doing something strange.
Lindsay
Hi I am looking for a bit of recent motherboard experience here.
I have figured out the cause of the crash's of the Nvidia closed src
drivers during my recent i386 V AMD64 experimnents. The problem almpst
certainly being a buggy motherboard. The board concerend is a Gigabyte
GA-X79-UD5. Its always given a little bit of trouble including problems
with the hardrives and one particular graphics card (Radeon HD7870) will
not work in text mode, graphics mode though being OK. In both cases the
equipment concerned has worked OK on other MB's. Search's on the net also
said the some of the early X79 chipsets had some problems.
Now I have decided after some thought to replace the MB and have narrowed
the search down to 2 examples the first is a Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4, this
being an almost perfect direct dropin replacement. The second is an ASUS
P9X79 Pro. The reasons for considering the ASUS are firstly I am slightly
gun shy of Gigabyte boards due to current problem, second I have two other
systems that use ASUS P6X58 pro MB's, these being the previous generation
of the X79 boards and these boards have given no trouble and been
excellent performers. Third the ASUS boad is slightly more "future proof".
Now the question is only minor, the ASUS webs site says the board is only
rated for windows 7 and latter although the site does provide drivers for
Windows XP. The System has (of course) Linux installed, currently this is
Debian Sid i386, with the NVidia closed src driver installed and working
OK. Windows XP is also installed, Now the question (finally???) is is
there likely to be any problem's installing XP on this newer board. Its
not a real great tragedy if one cannot install it but it would be nice to
have.
I would normaly search the net for the answers for this kind of
problem but the dial up line though make this far to slow these days as
the net currently expects everyone to have highspeed broadband (my high
speed access currently being out of service).
Using Linux for now over 20 years,
Lindsay
I have a server that has an iscsi connection that should have been disabled, and the volume group is enabled on it. I noticed the volume group after I had disconnected the iscsi connection, and am trying not to add the iscsi back, or to reboot the server.
lvscan gave a billion errors but I used dmsetup to manually remove the entries for the lv's. Now I just have the volume group that something seems to know about as when I do vgchange I get:
# vgchange -a n vg-drbd
/dev/mapper/mpathd: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 3900547923968: Input/output error
/dev/mapper/mpathd: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 3900547981312: Input/output error
/dev/mapper/mpathd: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 0: Input/output error
/dev/mapper/mpathd: read failed after 0 of 4096 at 4096: Input/output error
Volume group "vg-drbd" not found
I want to tell the kernel to forget that vg-drbd exists altogether as it is no longer reachable and shouldn't be on that machine anyway.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
James
