So my current hosted server is getting a bit old. It’s not got enough RAM, and the disk in it is failing (yes, I did have RAID, more on that later). So it’s about time to get a replacement in. The guys over at Netrino have just installed a new machine for me. I say new, but it’s not a …
Back in May I wrote about the performance problems we were having with our new NFS based user filestore. It’s been a while since then, and the problems have continued. We have noticed that it appears to be load related – not just the network, but also the machine. This suggests that our theories about IPsec causing the slow down …
In my last post about setting up a slimserver I said that I was having trouble getting slimp3slave working: Whilst it doesn’t appear to have any problems, I didn’t have much success with the players. mpg123 got confused by the stream, and madplay kept skipping the beginnings of tracks when I hit next on the server. This could be a …
This weekend I thought I’d have a go at setting up SlimServer, an application that streams music to various audio devices. It’s primarily design to work with the SqueezeBox, a hardware device that can wirelessly stream the music, but there are various bits of software that can use it too. The server itself was a doddle to set up. There …
Looks like summer is finally here, but for me that isn’t a good thing. The main reason I dislike the summer is hayfever. I get it quite badly which means I spend most of the summer bunged up, itchy, and miserable. Add to that the heat and dryness we get in Kent and I’m not a happy chappy. Thankfully I …
This week we’ve finally seen the end of some things I’ve been trying to sort out for some time now. The old storage arrays (Sun T3s and A1000s) are finally gone. The T3 arrays in particular have caused us endless grief over the past few years, so I’m more than happy to see them go. It also marks the end …
I’ve never got on well with software RAID systems on FreeBSD. I’ve tried gvinum (previously I used vinum), gmirror, and ataraid, all with varying degrees of success. The latest machine I built is using gmirror, and so far I’m happy. However, over the past few days I’ve been having problems with a system I built a couple of years ago. …
I’ve known about Google Bookmarks for a while, but until recently couldn’t really see how they’d be useful to me. A single set of bookmarks on the web is great, but if you have to go to a webpage to find them it rapidly becomes too much effort. Compare this to a single click within your browser’s menu. My Internet …
I’ve been playing a game called Entropia Universe (previously Project Entropia) recently, and I’m finding it quite addictive. It’s much like other MMORPGs at a first glance, but it boasts a “Real Cash Economy”. This means that there’s a direct exchange rate (fixed to the US dollar) and you can exchange money to and from the game currency just like you …
We’ve recently moved to having our filestore NFS exported from a cluster. This provides almost complete resilience from hardware failures, and moves us away from depending on individual end-user systems with locally attached filestore. Given the inherent insecurities with NFS we opted to use IPsec authentication (but not encryption) between the hosts involved. The NFS server only accepts connections from …