Today I was doing some work on one of our database servers (each of them has 4 SAS disks in RAID10 on an Adaptec controller) and it required huge multi-thread I/O-bound read load. Basically it was a set of parallel full-scan reads from a 300Gb compressed innodb table (yes, we use innodb plugin). Looking at the iostat I saw pretty expected results: 90-100% disk utilization and lots of read operations per second. Then I decided to play around with linux I/O schedulers and try to increase disk subsystem throughput. Here are the results:
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This will be one of those posts I’d like to publish primarily to be able to coma back later and check it out instead of reading docs again 🙂
So, we have a server with two (or more) network interfaces are we need to be able to use more than one interface in our VDS machines. How do we set it up?
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Today I was working on one small consulting task and our client asked for an upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1. It was pretty easy and task was successfully finished and reported to the customer… But few hours after my report I’ve got an email from customer with something like “WTF? Where is my 5.1?!”. I was shocked when I saw happily running 5.0 on their server w/o anything related to my 5.1 installation…
After some short investigation I’ve found out, that it was cpanel (dumb software for dumb system administrators) – it noticed, that installed mysql version (5.1) is not the same as it thought it should be (5.0), so without any warnings or notices it removed all 5.1 rpms and installed “brand new” 5.0.
Here I’d like to say GREAT THANKS to mysql team for such a great software which did not screwed up user’s data in such situation. But what idiots in cpanel development team decided, that is it appropriate and acceptable to perform such operations?! As an administrator and as a software developer I do not understand them – I just can’t understand such approach….
So, enough complaining – here is a piece of useful information for my readers: If you’re so unlucky to have cpanel installed on your server and you’d like to upgrade your mysql manually, then you can perform following operations:
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| # touch /etc/mysqlupdisable
# chattr +i /etc/mysqlupdisable
# service cpanel restart |
After these small changes your cpanel will forget about mysql upgrades and you’ll be able to do what you want and not what some dumb developers decided you should do.
Recently I had one customer for consulting and aside from mysql optimization, etc they asked me for cacti installation/setup to monitor their pretty generic LAMP application. I’ve started setting up all this stuff and I’ve never thought it could be so painful… lots of different templates for the same tasks, all of them are incompatible with recent cacti releases, etc, etc… So, this post is generally a list of used templates with a fixes I’ve made to make them work on recent cacti release.
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This weekend I was doing some development for one of our projects and we needed to make screenshots of a web pages (see my next posts about this task). I’ve managed to develop small piece of code which uses GtkMozEmbed component (Mozilla Gecko-based renderer for web pages) to create screenshots of any page, but there was some problem… The problem was a following: GTK+ library can’t work w/o fully-functional X server running on your machine. Obviously I didn’t want to run such software (no monitor/keyboard/mouse, dumb graphics adapter on the server, etc, etc) so I’ve tried to find some solution… And in this tiny article I’ll describe the method I’ve managed to find.
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