i’ve received for testing a new dell r630. before buying few of those i wanted to make sure that debian wheezy has kernel including all the needed drivers. it seems that it has.

i have MySQL that is run on arrays of increasing size: i remembered that the query optimizer will not be able to use existing indices for lastModified columns but.. the query execution time was acceptable, so i did not bother. recently much more data was added and query above, repeated quite often, caused a lot ... Read More

i’ve bought 2x Dell PowerEdge t20 – they’ll serve as HA pair of routers/vpn endpoints/file servers for a new office. it was the first time i played with intel amt. it’s not bad but neither perfect.

at work we’ll soon make use of dns-based geo load balancing to have users in americas / asia ‘talk’ with north am site and rest of the world – with the european site. we preferred to avoid modifying the client application so the dns based solution seemed reasonable. below – quick overview of the setup ... Read More

while rescuing data from server having problems with either disk or raid controller i had to clone data from 2x 1TB RAID1 to 4x 500GB RAID10. as it turned out the space available on the destination server was 1GB less than on the source machine. shrinking the source drive with gparted-live and dd’ing over the ... Read More

below – a description of somewhat convoluted backup system that so far have been serving me pretty well.

in branch offices i tend to install two identical pcs running linux and working in active – hot-spare setup. things evolved over time – one location has both routers running under vmware esxi on two different hosts, another – hardware raid, other – desktop-class pcs with single hard drives. hardware raids are good as long ... Read More

wd [and other vendors] sell green drives; they are reasonably cheap but have annoying tendency to spin down very very quickly. i bought recently 2x WD20NPVT-00Z2TT0 with intention of using them [in very unprofessional fashion] in PERC6 RAID1 array.