Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Docker in FreeNAS 9.10

As some may know, Docker is being added to FreeNAS 10, but it is still in beta and not for production use. However, if you have upgraded to FreeNAS 9.10, you can use Docker. It’s just not integrated into the UI and you must do everything from the command-line. IOHyve First iohyve must be setup. FreeNAS 9.10 comes with iohyve already but it must be configured. As root, run: iohyve setup pool=<storage pool> kmod=1 net=<NIC> In my case I set storage pool to my main pool and NIC to my primary NIC (igb0).

FreeBSD with ZFS root

It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been busy with a new job, new house, and a bunch of other things. One of these things was setting up my new file server. This is something that’s been in the works for a long time, as can be seen from the various posts on ZFS. I spent a long time researching this, and finally came up with my solution:

Trac.fcgi Memory Usage

I’ve been slowly transitioning to using nginx as the web front-end in an effort to reduce Apache’s memory usage. In keeping with this task, I’m moving more and more off of Apache. One piece I recently moved was trac, transitioning to using it directly by nginx by running it in fast-cgi mode where as previously it was running as cgi though Apache. While fast-cgi is faster, it has inherent issues, such as any memory leak can result in ever growing memory usage, which is exactly why Apache has a setting for each child to serve a limited number of requests before exiting.

Thrashing Server

Well, last Sunday, we released a new version of Perian. It didn’t occur to me at the the time that this would mean a large number of people would be visiting the site. Anyway, Monday morning I noticed that the web server was very slow, which began my fun. I decided that the best course of action was to increase the number of servers. The system had CPU to spare as well as memory, so this is the natural choice.

Firewall Ban Activated

Well, shortly after my last post, the Chinese spammer struck again. I just blocked a bit over half a million addresses in China in response. I have no tolerance for such things, I don’t trust anyone in China to care enough to do anything about this guy; so blocking is really the best recourse.