phaq

January 24, 2007

Goodbye rampart, welcome ph!

Posted by: admin : Category: Bits and Bytes

It’s been almost a year now since phunsites was relaunched after a rather long time of absence.

I remember writing my first post, which expressed my doubts that I would ever find enough time to create a unique web design.

However, after reflecting about phunsites and the achievements made so far, I finally decided to climb the mountain.
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January 17, 2007

How To Check DNS Blacklist Entries

Posted by: admin : Category: Bits and Bytes

In case you ever happen to be listed on a DNS blacklist you’ll propably find it useful checking for the actual DNS reply.
The point is that many popular blacklists usually provide information and database checks on their websites, however the latter one very often do not reflect current entries withint the blacklist.
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January 12, 2007

Master Password for Areca ARC-1210 Controller

Posted by: admin : Category: Bits and Bytes

In case you forget the password for an Areca ARC-1210 controller, the master password might be your friend
I’m not sure if I’m actually allowed to publish this here. However, I did never sign a NDA to get it, so I think it’s ok

Here it is (numbers are underlined for better readability):

MNO974315743924

According to one commentor, it might be needed to lower-case the letters:

mno974315743924

Also, it might be necessary to _not_ type the numbers on the numeric keyboard but on the regurlar number keys.

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January 10, 2007

Your Makefile has been rebuilt…

Posted by: admin : Category: Perl

One might asume building a port from source should be fast and straight forward.
Not in this case, however…
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January 08, 2007

FreeBSD software RAID comparison: Introduction

Posted by: admin : Category: FreeBSD

FreeBSD comes with support for multiple software RAID implementations to date.

ata, which is not really a RAID toolkit but the ata device driver itself.Nevertheless it provides sort of RAID functionality by also interfacing to popular low-end RAID controllers, sometimes also referred to as Fake-RAID controller (highpoint, promise and alike).
It has support for enabling RAID on non-RAID capable ata controllers, too.ata is IMHO the worst RAID solution out there, and as such should be avoided at any cost. Please read as I’m writing: I’m not telling you the ata driver is bad, but I think it shouldn’t tamper with RAID.
RAID should never be implemented by means of a device driver which does some scary magic inside. A real RAID controller (hardware RAID) or a volume manager (software RAID) should be used instead.
ccd, the concatenated disk driver, used to be a standalone framework in previous FreeBSD versions. It has been integrated with geom (geom_ccd) in FreeBSD 5 and IMHO seems only to exist for historical and backward compatibility reasons by today.
vinum was also a standalone RAID framework in previous FreeBSD versions. It too was merged into geom (geom_vinum) in FreeBSD 5.
geom, which is basically an I/O abstraction layer which serves as stackable framework to multiple subsystems like vinum volume manager (which does jbod, raid 0, raid 1, raid 5 and combinations thereof), mirror (which does raid1), stripe (raid0), and many others.geom provides both functionality and reliability in a proper implementation. I think it might outrun big players like Veritas Volume Manager one day.

So what I’m going to do is a performance comparison (benchmark) of the different geom classes providing RAID1 (mirroring), RAID0 (striping) and RAID10 functionality.
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January 06, 2007