Systems Administration

With 10gbps and faster network ports becoming more common all the time, it is becoming increasingly important to make sure that a server can actually use all of that bandwidth. At these high speeds, many things can go wrong that limit your performance to less than the maximum speed of the port. The most important

What RAID stripe size is ideal for an array of hard drives? What are the default settings for both raid stripe size and filesystem readahead? Are those defaults acceptable? How do these settings impact the performance of my server? In this post, we’ll go into detail as to what settings are ideal for a server

High IOWAIT can be a real problem in linux, making your server grind to a halt. The question is, how high is too high? When should I be concerned? Firstly, we’ll talk about what IOWAIT means, discuss related statistics and how to interpret them, and finally how to decide if IOWAIT is causing a problem.

Welcome to the Ninth installment of our monthly server price reporting for 2020. If you were following along, last year we’ve been tracking changing parts prices for RAM, SSDs, Hard Drives, CPUs, and a couple of GPUs. Typically this is done monthly, and then shared on our blog. Currently, all listed prices are from eBay,

Some of you may recall recently we posted a blog post about using checklists to help avoid workplace complacency and customer inconvenience.  If you missed it, you can go back and read it here:  https://ioflood.com/blog/check-one-two-three/ No matter how comprehensive your checklists may be, there will always be weak points that can cause confusion, concern, or