phaq

After my recent article about FreeBSD GEOM mirroring on Sparc64 I was asked how to boot from a degraded array if the primary hard disk had failed.
The point was how to prevent the admin to interact with OpenBoot in that case.
I’m sure this will only apply to people not very familiar with Sun’s OpenBoot, as most other people will surely know about this.
Read more…

Courier IMAP Login Exec (abbreviated ‘cile’) is a small patch against the popular Courier IMAP server.

It basically adds a ‘execute script on login’ feature to both pop3d and imapd.
Read more…

**** Article Obsoleted ****

This article has been obsoleted by the final release of VMware Server 1.0.
It is left here as a reference only.

**** Article Obsoleted ****

One thing I noticed when test driving VMware Server beta was the performance drop compared to the more mature ESX and GSX versions.

Of course there is nothing wrong about that considering the product still being in beta stage. It is however very hard to get an idea of the speed to be expected by the final product.
Read more…

The initial version of this article was written in spring 2006 to cover installing VMware Server on Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (sarge).

In the meanwhile, Debian 4.0 (etch) has been released, making it worth to review the procedure with the current VMware Server and Debian releases.
Read more…

Actually my experience in GEOM disk mirroring on Alpha dates back to FreeBSD 5.3, though it seems to work out perfectly after upgrading to FreeBSD 6.0.

Again, the concept is similar to setting up a mirror on intel boxes, though – again – there are some minor differences which may cause some headaches!
Read more…

As I promised earlier I will have a look at setting up a GEOM mirror on Sparc64 using FreeBSD 6.

Though it is quiet similar to the Intel world, there are some minor differences which I’m going to show you.
Read more…

It was already the 5.x branch of FreeBSD which included the GEOM driver for creating RAID arrays of any kind.

As Ralf S. Engelschall pointed out in his famous howto, GEOM was eventually to replace ATA, CCD and good old vinum.

It may not always make sense to put a full-featured RAID controller into a box when it serves only some “minor” purpose or performance is not an issue (costs may also be a consideration), so a software RAID solution may sometimes be good enough.
Read more…