Recently we purchased a Zotac ZBOX-CI321NANO to replace our existing pfSense PC which was in a much larger case. There are a few variations but ours has dual 1 Gbps NICs, many USB 3.0 ports, 2 GiB of RAM, a 32 GiB SSD and is powered by a Celeron 2961Y (1.10 GHz). It has plenty… Read more »
Poudriere “Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/pkg’ not found”
This was quite the random error I ran across this week and could not find anything similar or a solution. After years of faithfully building our FreeBSD pkg repository poudriere started reporting these weird errors and refused to build anything: ====>> Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/apxs’ not found. ====>> Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/pkg’ not… Read more »
Logentries (logentries.com) Under FreeBSD
Logentries is a SaaS service which lets you stream logs (and lots of other things) from multiple locations and servers for review and processing on their platform. They provide out-of-the-box installers and packages for a number of Linux and UNIX operating systems but don’t directly support FreeBSD (yet). However their agent consists of a few… Read more »
MySQL RBR (Row Based Replication) /w GTID halts with Error_code: 1032; handler error HA_ERR_END_OF_FILE
I want to start off by saying that there are a lot of causes for the error in the title of this article, most of which are easy to fix conditions centering around misconfiguration. However none of them applied to our situation here. After weeks/months of troubleshooting and isolating on a customer’s (unfortunately production) servers… Read more »
FreeBSD Hardware RAID vs. GMIRROR vs. ZFS
The ultimate storage shootout! With years of building and testing servers in various configurations we have always suspected hardware RAID was not all that it’s cracked up to be. FreeBSD’s GMIRROR and ZFS are great, but up until now it’s been a gut feeling combined with anecdotal evidence. Today, we change that. The Test Setup… Read more »
NginX Add Trailing Slash With 301 Redirect Without If Statements
We had a situation where a client using Joomla wanted to have trailing slashes added to URLs, not just processed behind the scenes as the ‘correct’ URL but 301ed to the resulting URL with the trailing slash. This makes sense from a SEO standpoint as you don’t want two URLs with the same content. Joomla… Read more »
ImageMagick Under PHP-FPM and Chroot
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 »