Darkavich's Daily Ramblings

I downloaded and installed splunk today. For those sys-admins out there not using it, what are you waiting for…

After installing the software and adding all my DNS logs, I notices some pretty interesting items. The first was my log files are huge! Mostly because of IPv6 queries. Apparently, somewhere down the road, ISC bind started answering IPv6 type requests even if there are no IPv6 interfaces on the box. There is a new (to me) option “-4” that tells DNS to only handle IPv4 addresses. Now this would be pretty easy to add “If I ran any operating system other than Solaris!”. I love solaris, but they make is seriously hard to add a simple start-up option to a service. After MUCH google searching I found the answer:

svccfg -s network/dns/server:default setprop start/exec = “/usr/local/sbin/named -4”
svcadm refresh dns/server

This has significantly reduced the amount of logs that are generated. I also noticed a lot of errors from lame-delegations or invalid zones, so I added the following to my logging section:

category lame-servers {null;};

I am receiving almost no errors in my log files now.

So I have not posted in a while because somewhere over the holidays I lost my Yubikey. Fortunately, wordpress is so well designed that all I had to do was login and rename the yubikey plug-in and it automatically reverted back to normal authentication.

Kudos developers.

The data sync finally finished. A total of 6 days to transfer 845 gigs of data. Not really speedy, but at least it’s all back online. Most of what I was copying was Time Machine vaults, so I was not too concerned. I was able to point the mac clients at the new vaults and all the history was there. Hurray for small wonders.

Now I will work on creating my secondary data syncs so that it will be easier the next time. I will perform some speed tests to try and find out why the Drobo’s can’t get full speed.

The sync’s are almost done. I am only getting 5-8MB/s. The max is supposed to be 25MB/s. Clearly there is something wrong with one end or the other. At this point, I don’t really care until the sync is finished, then I will run some I/O tests to see if I can figure out where the bottleneck is. During the 1st sync, I ran out of disk space and had to add a third drive to the ReadyNAS. This drive was larger than the 1st two. I expected it to add it like the Drobo, but what Netgear calls X-Raid vs what Drobo calls X-Raid are two completely different animals.

On the Drobo, when you add a new drive, larger or smaller it will level the drives so that you get the max-possible space available. On the Netgear, it will level the drives so that they equal the same size as the smallest drive in the array. What this means is you have to have all the drives be the same size in the array if you want to use the max space. The good thing though is that once all the drives are the same, it will level them up to the max size again.

I am looking forward to putting this behind me and getting some real work done.