We’re a big fan of PHP-FPM and chrooting, all of our deployments use this along with per-site UIDs to ensure complete isolation and resource control. This week we ran into an issue where a client needed the ImageMagick PECL module (and therefore the ImageMagick package) installed. After configuring the extension and reloading PHP-FPM we saw… Read more »
FreeBSD Compatible USB 3.0 PCIe Cards
While looking to add USB 3.0 ports to two servers which had no motherboard ports we tested out two different cards: Syba USB 3.0 PCIe x1 2.0 Card – 2-Port with internal 19 Pin USB 3.0 Header (Model SD-PEX20139) Insignia USB 3.0 PCIe x1 2.0 Card – 2-Port (Model NS-PCCUP53) Performance was both good and… Read more »
When To Switch From Cloud Servers to Dedicated Servers
Cloud servers provide a turn key solution to a lot of problems, however they can quickly become an expensive crutch that hides problems rather than solving them. A lot of companies start out with one or two cloud servers then increase resources on them or provision more as their product grows. Quickly this can turn… Read more »
Review: Velocity Solo x2 PCIe 2.0 x2 SATA 6 Gbps
Add an SSD to your already full 1U rackmount server! Recently A-Team Systems deployed a number of 1U rackmount servers with four hot-swap SATA bays, all of which we populated to give us maximum ZFS performance (and capacity) across as many spindles as possible. We also wanted to get the performance of SSDs for certain… Read more »
SOLVED: _openpam_check_error_code(): pam_sm_acct_mgmt(): unexpected return value 4
While diagnosing a server that I couldn’t SSH into using my LDAP account I ran into the below errors. I had seen it before but couldn’t remember what caused it: Jul 30 22:12:57 serverhost sshd[2195]: SSH: Server;Ltype: Version;Remote: 172.17.22.10-43231;Protocol: 2.0;Client: OpenSSH_5.8p2 FreeBSD-20110503 Jul 30 22:12:57 serverhost sshd[2195]: SSH: Server;Ltype: Kex;Remote: 172.17.22.10-43231;Enc: aes128-ctr;MAC: hmac-md5;Comp: none [preauth]… Read more »
Intranet Server Security & Maintenance
Do internal servers really need to be monitored, maintained and updated like a public facing Internet server? There are two aspects to this question, the first being maintenance and monitoring, and the second being internal server security (which is closely related to maintenance in that updates fix security issues). Internal Server Maintenance An internal (or… Read more »
SOLVED: Performance Issues With FreeBSD ZFS Backed ESXi Storage Over NFS
Update November 14th, 2016: This is an old article but my recommendation to hack the NFS file still stand even given how inexpensive small SSDs are. An SSD ZIL still delivers low performance with ESXi/NFS unfortunately. We have have a dual SSD ZIL setup on this file server, and without the NFS hack we still… Read more »
Goodbye MB/GB/TB, Hello MiB/GiB/TiB
Since the popular rise of the personal computer users have asked the time old question: “Why does my 100 gigabyte hard drive only give me 93 gigabytes when I format it?” The answer lies with the 2nd use of the word “gigabyte” in that sentence. In reality when we say “gigabyte” we don’t mean 1,000,000,000 bytes,… Read more »
Using powerd(8) To Increase FreeBSD Performance By Over 10%
Modern Intel CPUs employ a technology called TurboBoost which works in conjunction with Intel’s SpeedStep technology to temporarily overclock specific cores (sometimes at over 2x the advertised speed) when thermal and power limits allow. SpeedStep is the selective and rapid slowing down, idling and possibly even sleeping of cores which are not being used or… Read more »
HOWTO: FreeBSD Partition Alignment for RAID, SSDs & 4k Disk Drives
Last Updated January 21st, 2017. This article is really popular, I’ll do my best to keep it up to date! I’ve added notes about enabling TRIM support. Aligning Partitions Under FreeBSD for Optimum Performance with RAID Arrays, SSDs and 4k Disk Drives Note: These instructions have been verified to work for FreeBSD 9.1, FreeBSD 9.2,… Read more »