Technical Exhaustion

I’ve always found CPAN modules troubling. CPAN is a great, easy way to quickly get a Perl module onto the system. But unless you’re lucky and that module is available elsewhere using the native systems package manager (i.e rpm, ports or similar) then the CPAN installs become divorced from the system perl as time goes [...]

I’ve previously discussed how to recover from a disk failure in gmirror. It’s probably a good idea to describe how to set up a new mirror from scratch. Rather handily this can be done on a live system, remotely via ssh in the space of a few minutes. One reboot is required but other than [...]

I came across a known bug in the FreeBSD installer for the first time today. During the text network install (using the netboot iso) I had problems resolving the hostname of my chosen FTP mirror. The installer hung for an age trying to connect. Assuming I had a made a typo in the network config, [...]

First a caveat : the following steps worked well on a lightly used mySQL server in production (~5 queries per second average, heavily biased to select’s – spread over around 30 individual databases) but your experience may vary on more heavily loaded servers. This also uses the ports build and the portupgrade tool. mySQL 5 [...]

Running software RAID-1 using gmirror under FreeBSD can save some headaches. Sometimes a disk literally fails leaving you running on a spare, sometimes you just have a ‘blip’ during a busy period of the server which causes gmirror to drop the disk from the array. This happened today and from dmesg we can see : [...]