At home I have an (admittedly small) ZFS array set up to experiment with this neat newish raid technology. I think it has been around long enough that it can be used in production, but I’m still getting used to the little bugs/features, and here is one that I just found.

After figuring out that I had 2 out of 3 of my 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives fail, I had to give the array up for a loss and test out my backup strategy. Fortunately it worked and there was no data loss. After receiving the replacement drives in from RMA, I rebuilt the ZFS array (using raidz again) and went along my merry way. After 6 months or so, I started getting some funky results from my other drive. Thinking it might have some issue as with the others, I removed the drive and ran Seatools on it (by the way, Seatools doesn’t offer a 64-bit Windows version – what year is this?).

The drive didn’t show any signs of failure, so I decided to wipe it and add it back into the array to see what happens. That, of course, is easier said than done.

According to “official” system administrator rules and guidelines you shouldn’t be adding so-called vain scripts to the login prompt – only utilities that will add something useful to the system (for example, current system load, memory and disk usage, etc). However I have some systems that I frequently connect to and thought it would be [...]

I manage a server which has a sole purpose: serving DNS requests. We use PowerDNS, which has been great. It is a DNS server whose backend is SQL, making administration of large numbers of records very easy. It is also fast, easy to use, open source and did I mention it is free?

The server has been humming along for years now. The traffic graphs don’t show a lot of data moving through it because it only serves DNS requests (plus MySQL replication) in the form of tiny UDP packets.

Read on to follow my story of how I fixed this tricky problem. No kittens were harmed in the writing of this post.

We received a tip from blog readers Christian and Michael for alternatives to the command to delete all directories older than a certain period of time. These both work in bash and can be used in scripts to clean up old backup directories or any situation where you need to delete old directories from the [...]

The Bash command environment, which is the namesake of this blog, is very flexible in that it allows you to manipulate the filesystem in many ways. Awk and sed are very powerful tools that allow you to do this rename with a simple one line command. This post will walk you through doing this with [...]