Category Archives: FreeBSD

A big PostgreSQL upgrade

Posted on 2022-01-11 by Garrett Wollman

I don’t write here very often about stuff I do at work, but I just finished a project that was a hassle all out of scale with the actual utility, and I wanted to document it for posterity, in the … Continue reading →

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Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1

Posted on 2020-01-13 by Garrett Wollman

Now here’s something more like what I was originally expecting the content on this blog to look like. I’m in the process of moving all of our FreeBSD servers (about 30 in total) from 11.3 to 12.1. We have our … Continue reading →

Posted in FreeBSD, ZFS | Tagged , | 9 Comments

One more day in 2016 for charitable giving

Posted on 2016-12-30 by Garrett Wollman

If, like many people in the United States and elsewhere, you give money to charities at the end of the year, you have only a few hours left. (Note that for tax purposes, a gift made using a payment card … Continue reading →

Posted in Broadcasting & Media, FreeBSD, Law & Society | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Some notes on our new generation of ZFS-based file servers

Posted on 2016-07-09 by Garrett Wollman

Consistently among the most popular posts on this blog are a series I wrote very early on about our architecture (at work) for big file servers based on commodity hardware, FreeBSD, and ZFS (part 1, part 2). We are in … Continue reading →

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From the pages of Stupid Software Design Quarterly…

Posted on 2014-09-01 by Garrett Wollman

About a month ago, printing stopped working on my machine. I had a clunky workaround, so I didn’t worry too much about it. I had just upgraded the cups package, which manages printing, on the print server, and it seemed … Continue reading →

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In the previous installment, I posted a script that will output a series of lines that look like this: multipath/s33d7: 417.3 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d22: 682.9 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s29d5: 699.2 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d4: 1449.1 ms … Continue reading →

Posted on 2013-10-31 by Garrett Wollman | Comments Off on An addendum to the findslowdisks DTrace hack

My first (well, ok, third) DTrace hack

Posted on 2013-10-29 by Garrett Wollman

We have a storage server with a bunch of marginal disks in it. They aren’t bad enough to return read errors, and of course the SMART data claims they’re just fine, but the built-in error-recovery takes much too long (sometimes … Continue reading →

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Building big NFS servers with FreeBSD/ZFS (2 of 2)

Posted on 2013-09-24 by Garrett Wollman

At CSAIL, we support two distributed file systems: AFS, which has a sensible security model (if somewhat dated in its implementation), but is slow and limited in storage capacity, and NFS, for people who don’t want security and do need … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD, ZFS | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Building big NFS servers with FreeBSD/ZFS (1 of 2)

Posted on 2013-09-24 by Garrett Wollman

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the chance to build a number of big file servers for work. Back in January, I wrote a description of the server hardware we used and some of the software configuration that … Continue reading →

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