The Writings of a Freelance Infrastructure Consultant
I’ve found plenty of articles out there explaining how to use KVM with graphical GUI tools. On most of the CentOS servers I administer, however, I use Kickstart to create a customised and minimal GUI-free install to keep things as simple and efficient as possible. Here, therefore, are some guidelines for how to set up [...]
(This post assumes a PostgreSQL installation located at /var/lib/pgsql on a Red Hat-type Linux system such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS. If your system differs from this, you may need to modify some of the paths accordingly.) In PostgreSQL, sorts larger than a certain size will get performed on disk instead of in [...]
Despite certain frustrations with our Apple Xserve G5s, I’ve found that they make decent Linux servers, especially considering their age. Recently I wanted to repurpose one as a development server, and in that role I really wanted disk redundancy for added protection of the data. Unfortunately there’s no RAID controller in these servers, so software [...]
For some time I’ve been having problems monitoring disk and RAID hardware in CentOS 5 Linux on our HP ProLiant DL360 G5 servers. To begin with, I discovered that hpasm, the main monitoring agent provided by HP, does not actually give any information about the disks or the RAID controller, even though it does seem [...]
Firstly, for a while I’ve been having a problem with Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro in which it runs incredibly slowly every so often. It seems as if this revolves around Safari and/or Flash. In the forums I discovered that there are many other people having similar problems with Snow Leopard, mainly apparently relating [...]
The time has come to sort out our Apple Xserve G5s in an effort to make them useful. Given the experiences I’ve had with OS X Server, and given that Leopard Server doesn’t even seem to be usable in an office environment, I’m certainly not going to consider trying to use that in a hosting [...]