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 »
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 »