Anduin.net

Just spent the better part of the day upgrading packages on anduin.net ... Still not done.

This years mountain trip is planned for the 21st to 23rd of August. Anyone who haven't received an invitation on the mailing list, let me know in a comment and I'll make sure you're added.

 Yesterday, immediately following the release announcement, I upgraded Anduin.net and all the jails to 7.0. This should give somewhat better performance, especially when under load. Not to mention it's the latest and greatest, which gives a certain satisfaction in knowing.

 Port rebuilds will follow shortly. Unfortunately, being a time-consuming process, the possibility exists that some services may be rendered unavailable or unpredictable for short (couple of hours at most) periods of time. I usually let the updates run while I sleep, and it might (will) happen that something either needs my input or breaks in some way. 

 Technically, I'm not on 7.0, but on 7-STABLE. I have decided to follow RELENG_7 instead of RELENG_7_0, as I expect some fairly important and relevant updates to hit that tree soonish, and I'd like to catch them when that happens. 

 One of the most interesting new features in the 7 series of FreeBSD is ZFS - the first real revolution in file system technology in decades (discuss!). The list of features it offers is very long, but the most relevant to Anduin would be filesystem quotas, excellent small-file performance, fast snapshots, error resilience. I've already started planning the move to ZFS, and any input from you users would be welcome. In particular, I want to move all jails to a ZFS filesystem as soon as possible, having very good experience with that on other systems.

Take care!

/Eirik

Hi all,

I've been looking for a better way to back up home directories, mail, etc. I think I've found it: Duplicity.

As of last week, therefore, all home directories and virtual mail domains are backed up daily, with 2 weeks retention. In other words, if you manage to lose something, let me know, and I might be able to help you ..

Let's hope it won't be necessary, though.

/Eirik

Hi all,

you might have noticed some degree of downtime on Anduin.net lately. I sincerely apologise for that.

After having upgraded to FreeBSD 7.0-PRERELEASE, I wanted to try to make use of the gigabit ethernet interfaces in the server, which have been unused so far due to a lack of gigabit connectivity. Now all switches and routers in the datacentre have been upgraded, and I wanted to take advantage of that. I have also acquired a NAS unit (network attached storage) for backup purposes, and having gigabit connectivity would be a major advantage and time-saver.

Unfortunately, Broadcom generally produces crap equipment, and the onboard ethernet controller in anduin.net is no exception. Since day one (2005) it has caused me nothing but headaches. I had hoped FreeBSD 7 would work better (work has been done on the driver to work around even more hardware quirks), but alas.

So, I'm back to square one. Back on 100mbit (but stable at least), and awaiting the delivery of an Intel PRO/1000 server adapter which should work a lot better.

I've also secured a pair of new CPUs, and will upgrade them at the same time as I install the new ethernet adapter. This should bring some much-needed extra performance - going from 2x 1.6GHz to 2x 2.8GHz CPUs.

Until then, I expect the box to be stable again (though I'll need to reboot it once more later tonight in order to get rid of some debugging code in the kernel).

/Eirik