I need to transfer about 40TB from one zfs box to another box because of a problem of initial setup in box 1 that left it without redundant raid and it now has a failing disk. ZFS points this out quite nicely, but we have to get all that data off before the disk fails…
Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What are IOPS? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone…
I thought I would write a little about Office 2010. I realize this isn’t about Windows, but Office is important too. I really think that Microsoft messed up the user interface on 2007, and I know a lot of people that feel the same way. Granted, they were looking to improve the user experience, and…
Business, people, and technology: When we put them together, what works? What doesn’t? What explodes? ACM CHIMIT ’10 – Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology November 12-13, 2010, San Jose, CA (co-located with USENIX LISA, in San Jose) IT management is hard – in the enterprise, in small business, and even in the home….
I am really excited that I am going to go to PICC (http://picconf.org). The organizers have put together some great short videos of some of the speakers. I like this one: http://www.youtube.com/user/lopsavideo#p/u/12/oK4cg7R3_88 Tom Limoncelli interviews Eben Haber, PICC keynote speaker, about his research, his keynote topic, and why he is excited to come to the…
In my [last post|https://lopsa.org/node/1903] I gave some first impressions using [bcfg2|http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2]. We ended up selecting bcfg2 as our configuration management system for a new project. I’m going to start with the “bad” and get that out of the way. ===The bad=== The biggest problem so far is getting the entire team up to speed on…
2010 ACM Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology (CHIMIT ’10) http://chimit10.org November 12-13, 2010 San Jose, CA USA Co-located with the 24th USENIX Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA ’10) http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/ Since 2007, CHIMIT has been the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business,…
I picked up a couple of the new WD Green 1.5TB drives recently. I needed some new storage, and these drives have a lot going for them: – 64MB cache – low power usage – 4K sector size I knew going into this that the 4K sector size was proving problematic in some circumstances. In…
Anyone who has ever administered a Cisco Unified Communications Manager (AKA Call Manager, or CM) system learns very quickly that there are approximately 17 billion different configuration settings in CM. All of those configuration dials have to be maintained in the right ways to get the system to do what you want.
I’ve taken several Cisco training courses on CM, and I felt like the thing that was missing was a real-world case study of how you setup all the pieces to interact with each other and why. There was no real “best practices” in the classes, just a lot of “this setting does X or Y” without any explanation of why you would choose to do X vs Y.
Read on for exactly that information from documentation I’ve been working on for the CM environment at my job.
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