Author Archive

Installing and configuring Graphite with Collectd on FreeBSD

Using Graphite for a smidgen blog like mine is definitely an overkill and Munin fits much better but I wasn’t able to confront my curiosity. So that’s why this post. Before I start, I’d like to mention that even if I’ll be speaking about my endeavor with Graphite on a system running FreeBSD 10.0-RC5, the […]

Posted on January 25, 2014 at 2:43 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: FreeBSD

Another web server powered by FreeBSD

During the last couple of days I’ve been migrating data and various configurations from my old Ubuntu server to a new one which is running FreeBSD 10.0-RC5 now.

Posted on January 10, 2014 at 12:45 am by sergeyt · Permalink · One Comment
In: FreeBSD

Upgrading FreeBSD 9.2 to 10.0-RC4 on Rackpsace’s instance

In reality it turned out to be a fairly straightforward procedure: This is crucial. You must save XENHVM config before the upgrade otherwise you won’t be able to re-build the kernel which is required to bring the network up. # cp /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/XENHVM /root/amd64_XENHVM # cp /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/XENHVM /root/i386_XENHVM Perform the upgrade as usual and just follow […]

Posted on January 9, 2014 at 9:14 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · One Comment
In: FreeBSD

Grow root ZFS pool online under FreeBSD 9.2 using Rackspace’s instance

If you opted for a FreeBSD instance on Rackspace and chose standard configuration then you’ll end up with 512MB of RAM and 20GB of space. That’s ok for the starter but eventually you’d need more one day and will upgrade RAM to 1GB for example. With this upgrade your disk will grow upto 40GB but […]

Posted on January 6, 2014 at 10:21 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · 6 Comments
In: FreeBSD

Never make plans but I’ll try

From New Year’s Resolutions for SysAdmins presented by USENIX I have picked just three for myself: “Gather more metrics and become a data driven IT team.” “I will not ever again work for a cheapskate business owner who cannot, or will not, pay me a fair rate.” “Learn to be a better coder.” The latter […]

Posted on January 3, 2014 at 8:43 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Life

How to say “yes” to pkgrm

If you got bored pressing “y” every time you delete a package and pkgrm asks its “Do you want to remove this package? [y,n,?,q]” question, there is a very easy solution: # yes | pkgrm package1 package2 … package3 Has saved me a lot of time.

Posted on December 7, 2013 at 11:03 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Solaris

ruBSD 2013 Conference

Just noticed that the registration for ruBSD 2013 Conference (translated) has been closed. So happy I applied earlier and will have a chance to listen to Theo de Raadt, Konstantin Belousov, Henning Brauer and other BSD starts in person.

Posted on November 30, 2013 at 1:01 am by sergeyt · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: FreeBSD

Why doesn’t Solaris SMF aware service start on boot?

A quick hint on how to find a possible root cause why a newly imported service doesn’t auto start on system reboot. So… You’ve just imported service’s manifest, rebooted the system and noticed the service is still in the offline state: svccfg import service_manifest.xml init 6 svcs service_name STATE STIME FMRI offline 15:55:52 svc:service_name:default A […]

Posted on November 7, 2013 at 10:46 am by sergeyt · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Solaris

Back to school with Coursera

There are two courses that have been recently relaunched at coursera.org: Machine Learning Game Theory Both are very interesting and highly recommended to attend. So don’t think twice and join the class whilst they are in their first week only. Hopefully I will have enough time to complete both of them.

Posted on October 17, 2013 at 2:44 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · 5 Comments
In: Life

Matching Oracle ASM disks names with the physical devices

Quite often it’s required to find a physical device which backs up ASM disk. The easiest way a Linux administrator could accomplish that is by using oracleasm command (of course, if ASMlib was used to create them): # oracleasm listdisks ASMARCHIVE1 ASMARCHIVE2 ASMARCHIVE3 ASMDATA1 ASMDATA2 ASMDATA3 OCR1 OCR2 VOTEDISK1 VOTEDISK2 VOTEDISK3 # oracleasm querydisk -p […]

Posted on October 8, 2013 at 11:40 pm by sergeyt · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Linux