Monthly Archives: November 2013

Jconsole to remote servers, easily

At work I support a number of different Java applications. Sadly they’re not all well behaved and it’s sometimes necessary to have to connect to the JMX port with Jconsole and take a look at what’s going on. This is … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Adventures in I/O Hell

Earlier this year I had a disk fail in my NZ-based file & VM server. This isn’t something unexpected, the server has 12x hard disks, which are over 2 years old, some failures are to be expected over time. I … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Restoring LVM volumes

LVM is a fantastic technology that allows block devices on Linux to be sliced into volumes(partitions) and allows for easy resizing and changing of the volumes whilst running, in a much easier fashion than traditional MSDOS or GPT partition tables. … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Resize ext4 on RHEL/CentOS/EL

I use an ext4 filesystem for a couple large volumes on my virtual machines. I know that btrfs and ZFS are the new cool kids in town for filesystems, but when I’m already running RAID and LVM on the VM … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’m Jethro Carr, open source geek, and this is how I work

Lifehacker regularly features a segment where they interview famous people and ask them how they work. Rather than waiting for the e-mail that would never come has yet to come, my friend Jack Scott decided to answer this set of … Continue reading

Tagged | Leave a comment

Enterprise or Consumer Spinning Rust Platters?

I recently wrote about bad hard disks being responsible for impacting array performance negatively after having some consumer grade disks fail in a fashion that impacted performance, but didn’t result in the disk being marked as bad. Since then I’ve … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“OpsDev”

I recently did a talk at one of the regular Fairfax “Brown Bag” lunches about tools used by the operations team and how developers can use these tools to debug some of their systems and issues. It won’t be anything … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In Welly for Kiwicon

I’ll be in Wellington for Kiwicon from Fri 8th to Tue 12th. If you’re coming to the conference, track me down and we’ll catch up there. If you’re not at the conference, I’ll be around town, so just drop me … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Exposing name servers with Puppet Facts

Carrying on from the last post, I needed a good reliable way to point my Nginx configuration at a DNS server to use for resolving backends. The issue is that I wanted my Puppet module to be portable across various … Continue reading

Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Nginx, reverse proxies and DNS resolution

Nginx is a pretty awesome high performance web server and reverse proxy. It’s often used in conjunction with other HTTP servers such as Java/Tomcat and Ruby/Unicorn, as it allows static content to be served directly from disk by Nginx and … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments