Systems Administration
13 Feb 2015
Troubleshooting backup problems with Idera R1soft under Centos (part 1)
Everyone knows it’s a good idea to keep backups, but it can be difficult to get them up and running, and even harder to keep them staying that way. On top of that, the backup process can make your server slow to a crawl if you have typical hard drives instead of SSDs. R1Soft is a
07 Feb 2015
Installing BOINC / World Community Grid on Ubuntu (not Centos)
Installing BOINC Some of you may have read our previous article on world community grid, saying why it is a good idea to donate your spare cpu time. We recommended this for desktop computers mostly, but also servers if they are completely idle. If you want, you can also join team IOFLOOD on world community grid.
01 Feb 2015
How should I protect my dedicated server – backups, or RAID?
In the rush to get by with daily life, often we don’t think much about how our data is stored. But as anyone who has experienced a hard drive failure can tell you, once you’ve lost your data, you wish you had done something to keep it safe to begin with. So often times, we
27 Dec 2014
Troubleshooting high linecard CPU use / exhaustion on Brocade MLX and MLXe routers
Today we’re going to be talking about a poor design decision in the Brocade MLX and MLXe series routers that can lead to CPU exhaustion on your router line cards. Overall we’re very happy with the Brocade MLX. After all, every routing platform has its quirks, so one small problem that is easily solved is
20 Dec 2014
CloudFlare agrees: Disk performance is improved when you get rid of hardware raid
I know this article is a little old, but I wanted to bring it up as it raises an interesting point. We’ve had a few articles here about hardware raid, detailing when we think it’s a good idea, and when it’s a waste of money (or worse). In general, if you’re looking for “big DD
18 Dec 2014
Dell C6100 BMC / IPMI Mac address all zeros after update? 00:00:00:00:00:00 — Script fix solution
Some of you may have noticed the Dell C6100 on ebay for a pretty cheap price. 4 servers in a single 2u chassis for as little as $800. Great deal right? I had a lot of trouble getting the IPMI / BMC firmware updated on these in the first place. After getting it upgraded, the
28 Nov 2014
e1000e NIC link failure / x9scm / x9scl / patch fix for Centos
If you’ve had problems with the nic driver failing on x9 / x10 supermicro motherboards with the intel e1000e NIC, we have a fix for you. Centos 6 on X9 motherboards (x9scl / x9scm) seems to have the most problems, but other motherboards and OS’s are potentially affected as well. There are a lot of
04 Jun 2013
Update: Hardware vs Software RAID: The great debate.
Hi Everyone, If you recall our previous article Hardware raid or software raid? Our take on the great religious debate, we made the case that hardware raid served virtually no purpose, and software raid was better in all important ways. Although we still find most of the information in that article to be true, we are
30 Aug 2012
How to Edit Ram Allocation on a Xen VPS under Solusvm When SolusVM Won’t Update Configuration File
Hi Everyone, If you’re like me, you’ve had problems in the past with SolusVM running Xen, and some of them can be a little irritating and difficult to track down. There’s one particularly confusing problem whose solution I would like to share with you today. Who is affected? Anyone who wants to change the amount
28 Jun 2012
Hardware raid or software raid? Our take on the great religious debate
I get asked this question a lot: “Do I need hardware raid, or is software raid good enough?” You may have noticed I/O FLOOD only offers software raid, so it will come as no surprise to you that we think software raid is “good enough”. What might surprise you however, is that we believe that