Encrypted MySQL connections (for client and replication)

[Reposted from my work blog.] There are four basic things you need to do when attempting to set up encrypted MySQL connections. Make sure your MySQL installation is configured with SSL. Create a set of certificates for your master, your slave, and your client(s). Configure your master and slave my.cnf with the correct ssl-* options….

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Auditors

Someone on #lopsa recently asked what he should tell an auditor who wants the root account completely disabled on a Unix system. The analogy I could come up with is: Disabling root would be akin to cutting the master key to a building in half and making parts of the building unusable at certain times….

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Out of Band Management slides

In June, I gave a presentation to LOPSA Austin of various out of band management technologies that I’ve experienced and used in my day to day work. As promised, here are the slides if anyone else is interested. This a high-level overview of IPMI, ILO, ILOM, and some third party addons and management tools. -edit-…

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ZFS configurations on Sun x4500

Example ZFS configurations for a Sun x4500 with 24TB of raw disk. Two disks are held for OS, leaving 46 available disks for ZFS. One 45 disk raidz2 zvol across 6 controllers. Most disk, but very slow performance. ~21TB space. zpool create -f thumper raidz2 c0t1d0 c1t1d0 c4t1d0 c5t1d0 c6t1d0 c7t1d0 c0t2d0 c1t2d0 c4t2d0 c5t2d0…

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Austin Solaris User Group — first meetup report

Last night Sun held it’s first Austin Solaris User Group meeting at Painter Hall on the UT campus. The event was reasonably well attended with ~15-20 people from various companies and academia around Austin. The meeting was broken up into two parts: a presentation about new features in Solaris 10 release 11/06 and a discussion…

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Datacenters in a Box

Recently, Sun announced an initiative called Project Blackbox. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s something they call a “virtual data center”. But, it’s real and physical. You can touch it, hear it, move it, and … as the Sun guy said, taste it if you like. (Personally, I wouldn’t, I don’t know where that…

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