Comments for thinking sysadmin

Comment on Automatic ZFS Snapshot Rotation on FreeBSD by Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:27:53 +0000

@Ertug – Thanks! the current version of zfsonlinux also lacks the .zfs directory. You just saved me a lot of time.

Comment on A quick walk through Fishworks configuration by Bob

Bob — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:41:44 +0000

Hi Andy,

I have a Sun Storadge 7410 system with new (no software ) disk drive. How can i install Fishworks appliance on it. What packets do i need?

Thanks B

Comment on Installing the F5 FirePass VPN Client on Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64 by Kalyan

Kalyan — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:27:46 +0000

Worked awesome on ubuntu 11.10 firefox 3.6 version! Thanks for the helpful guide.

Comment on Stop, NetApp, You’re Killing Me by Goid

Goid — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:57:51 +0000

Here we are in 2011, the FAS2020, the price point box Netapp was selling last year, can’t be upgraded to 64-bit ONTAP, thus we still have the limitation of 1 TB A-SIS.

I suggest for anyone considering Netapp as their new storage vendor, really look into the product. Don’t trust the reseller or Netapp, you have to do your own work. 2 months in to our Netapp fiasco I realized I should have Googled “limitations of the Netapp FAS2020″. I found about this after the reseller told me it was a limitation of the OS that will never change, because the box can’t support the 64-bit OS. I never saw a single document indicating this. I read of limitations, but none indicated the FAS2020 wouldn’t support ONTAP 8 (64-BIT). We wouldn’t have purchased this piece of crap knowing this. And the best part is, our Netapp rep said they could do a convenient buy-back option on the 2020 for one of the newer models. The funny thing is this device is 1 year old and they wanted to slap a 75% depreciation on it. They would offer us 25% off the new array if we swapped it.

It’s funny too, cause for several weeks our Netapp rep kept asking why we weren’t upgrading to ONTAP 8, when I told him the 2020A doesn’t support it, he stopped asking about it. So sales doesn’t even know about this. This is the low-end model, so they don’t care about it, just get it out the door.

I like the Netapp product and I do see value in it, however any potential ROI on this product is negated by the training required to administer the product and the disk space you lose to Netapp “features”.

I guess as long as you have money to burn and don’t buy their lowest option, Netapp is a great product.

If you are looking at Netapp, research everything before you even let them know you are looking.

And I will say this, Tier 1 support blows, you might as well just use Google. Unless your system is down, they are useless.

If you read Dave Hitz’ book, you would realize that from the very beginning Netapp was all about sales. It is apparent the companies philosophy was Sell it, no matter how limited the product is.

I suggest reading “How to Castrate a Bull” to get the real Netapp story.

Comment on NetApp FAS 2020 Sizing by karlochacon

karlochacon — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:50:36 +0000

sorry for continue asking

6 and 6 disk for each controller suing RAID 4 and 1 spare for aggregate is OK?

thanks a lot

Comment on NetApp FAS 2020 Sizing by karlochacon

karlochacon — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:00:35 +0000

hi guys

I was reading this how can I adjust this that you’re talking about? any command line?

This is before aggregate and volume snap reserves, which you can adjust to fit your needs, but are configured by default to be five and twenty percent, respectively.

thanks a lot

Comment on Deploying Ubuntu on Rackspace using Fog and Cloud-Init by Andy

Andy — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:14:24 +0000

I actually opened a ticket about this; apparently it’s a “known issue that has been occuring since [Rackspace's] recent deployment [of] Xen Server technology” but they consider it “an infrastructural problem that isn’t necessarily a show-stopper” with no official estimate of resolution. (I was told it might be “solved or worked-around before January.”)

Comment on Deploying Ubuntu on Rackspace using Fog and Cloud-Init by Mike Conigliaro

Mike Conigliaro — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:04:06 +0000

Have you tried this with Lucid? After installing cloud-init on my base image, it takes 20 minutes or more to provision a new instance.

Comment on Duplicity to Amazon S3 on FreeBSD: Building on the work of others by Simon

Simon — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:32:05 +0000

After looking through the duplicity code, I noticed this error was caused by gnupg package not being installed on my Cygwin system.

Installing it fixed the problem.

Comment on Using an OpenLDAP Proxy to Work Around Solaris/Active Directory Issues by Kamil Choudhury

Kamil Choudhury — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:09:05 +0000

Kickass! Just did this at home, works like a charm.