March 24, 2012

RAID Levels, let's explain...

Nowadays we are hearing a lot about RAID and how to keep our data safe but a lot of people don't know what a RAID level means and its pro/cons so I'll try to explain it in a short and easy way.

March 8, 2012

Why Zfs is the best file system...

The universe of file systems is populated with an incredible amount of good and less-good ones but the best above all is certainly Zfs from Oracle. Maybe it isn't the fastest of the less CPU-expencive but if the most secure. Why? Everyone knows it combines a file system, a logical volume manager and two software raid levels (5 and 6, named raid-z and raid-z2) but it is the only one (as far I know) to implement a continuous data integrity verification against data corruption mode.

Let's explain with an example!

March 4, 2012

How-to: NIC bonding, more speed for your server!

It happens that you need more speed or fault tolerance on your network, in particular regarding your server or your nas.
The most simple solution is the nic bonding or nic teaming!

What nic bonding means?
It means that two or more ethernet adapters are aggregated to speed-up the transmission or to provide a fault tolerance solution.

With Debian Squeeze is very simple to do:

March 2, 2012

My very fast internet connection...

I'm living in a small town in the south of Brasil named Garibaldi. I love this town because it is clean, happy, quiet and with mannered people. The food is good and the beer is even better... but the internet connection is not as the same level!

How-to: clone an hard disk or grab an image with dd

It happens that you need to clone the content of an hard disk or you want to store the image of a pendrive; if you are a “pure Microsoft user” you must rely on closed source programs but if you are a Linux user (even occasionally) you can do it with a simple live distribution like Ubuntu or similar.
In the case the disks have the same geometry the solution is crazy simple; assuming the original drive is /dev/sdb and the new disk is /dev/sdc the command to parse is: