Using smartd on Solaris systems to proactively find disk drive problems
In my article Out S.M.A.R.T your hard drive, I talked about how smartctl can be used to monitor the SMART attributes in modern disk drives. One item I didn’t cover was smartd. This nifty little daemon...
View ArticleAdding SMART support to FreeBSD
I first ran across smartmontools about a year ago, and like to install it on all of the systems I manage. This helps me understand the current health of the hard drives in the servers and desktops I...
View ArticleSmartmontools saves the day!
While booting up my x86 laptop this week, I noticed the following errors on the console: Feb 26 18:16:54 zebox smartd[492]: Device: /dev/ad0, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Feb 26 18:16:54...
View ArticleGetting around smartmontools linker errors
I posted a blog entry a while back that showed how to setup smartd on a Solaris system. Two individuals left comments indicating that smartmontools wouldn’t build, and one individual (Peter) received...
View ArticleSolaris needs SMART support! Please help!
While attempting to run the smartctl utility a few weeks back on an x86 Solaris 10 host with IDE disk drives, I received the following error: $ smartctl -a /dev/dsk/c1d0s0 smartctl version 5.36...
View ArticleSMART utilities for your favorite operating system
While perusing the web a few weeks back, I came across SMARTReporter. SMARTReporter is a wicked cool software package that can be used to monitor hard drive SMART data under OS X, and it is 100% free...
View ArticleA nice graphical interface for smartmontools
In my article out SMART your hard drive, I discussed smartmontools and the smartctl comand line utility in detail. The article shows how to view SMART data on a hard drive, conduct self-tests and shows...
View ArticleNotes from episode 28 of TGIK: Exploring CockroachDB on Kubernetes
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an amazing technology for deploying and scaling containers though it comes with a cost....
View ArticleNotes from episode 12 of TGIK: Exploring serverless with Kubeless
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an amazing technology for deploying and scaling containers though it comes with a cost....
View ArticleNotes from episode 13 of TGIK: Serverless with Fission
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an amazing technology for deploying and scaling containers though it comes with a cost....
View ArticleNotes from episode 14 of TGIK: Serverless with OpenFaaS
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an amazing technology for deploying and scaling containers though it comes with a cost....
View Articleatexit() stage right. Or how my Python program leaked file descriptors.
A year and a half ago I started using prometheus and grafana to graph metric data. This combination is incredibly powerful and I have been absolutely blown away by the amount of actionable intelligence...
View ArticleTiming out and killing Linux commands if they don't complete in a certain...
This past weekend I was working on a software project and needed to kill a job if it didn’t complete in a certain amount of time. The coreutils package ships with the timeout utility which is ideal for...
View ArticleHow to easily create a JSON file from a YAML file
If you work with with modern orchestration and configuration management systems you are most likely dealing with YAML and JSON on a daily basis. During testing, it is periodically useful to convert...
View ArticleCreating multi-node Kubernetes test clusters with KIND (Kubernetes In Docker)
The Kubernetes ecosystem is rapidly evolving, which means tools, frameworks and ways to approach running Kubernetes in production are constantly changing. To keep up with these changes I used to use a...
View ArticleUnderstanding the network plumbing that makes Kubernetes pods and services work
This morning I wanted to better understand how requests to ClusterIPs get routed to Kubernetes pods. Properly functioning networking is critical to Kubernetes and having a solid understanding of what...
View ArticleThe beginners guide to creating Kubernetes manifests
As a long time Kubernetes user the question I hear most often is “how do I create manifests (the file that describes how to create and manage resources in a cluster)?” When I ask the person posing the...
View ArticleNotes from episode 79 of TGIK: YTT and Kapp
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an amazing technology for deploying and scaling containers though it comes with a cost....
View ArticleNotes from episode 45 of TGIK: Calico
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to learn everything there is to know about Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an amazing technology for deploying and scaling containers though it comes with a cost....
View ArticleCreating a set of random numbers from the command line
This past weekend I was doing some database testing and needed to generate some random numbers to populate a table. My typical go-to utility for generating one random number is head piped to od and tr:...
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