The ESXi server uses self-signed ssl certificates by default. As you know, this isn’t really what I prefer, especially since I am working with CAcert certificates. But sadly there is no nice GUI solution for replacing those certs and so I was forced to take a dive into the console world of vmware once again, looking for the […]
Rebooting IT
My old server machines are too noisy – which is an undeniable fact and the reason for consolidating machines. It was a decision which didn’t make me happy, but logic told me to do so and offered a new challenge to me. The main problem was separating services in a way they don’t bite each other. My solution […]
Check XFS fragmentation
Using XFS means, that you have to deal with fragmentation of your files. Disregarding fragmentation, XFS is a wonderful filesystem which never caused any problems here. To check fragmentation, we use the xfs-debug tool in read-only mode: xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/sdX# At my server it would look like that: stargazer ~ # xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/sda7 […]
Bad RAM
I guess there are many ways to drive a sysadmin crazy – I even experienced a few by now; But the most effective one of all seems to be bad memory. Let me tell you: Nowadays most systems that I get to look at are Windows boxes which are acting weird in a not really reproducible way.
Windows Registry broken
Today I got an unpleasant surprise – an emergency call due to a broken computer running Windows 2000. Pretty ancient, I agree. The cause for the disaster was power loss and it refused to boot anymore, asking for a reinstall. So the first thing I was considering was updating to a more recent version of Windows – but […]
BlackCheck Stats
It’s been quite a while since I started to work with some statistics about what my plugin does, observing the kind of spam being blocked and it’s been quite cool to see: