Servers
RAID or ZFS Storage Guide
It’s 2022 and you want to set up some local large disk storage. What should you use? I recommend using ZFS as a good general-purpose storage solution and I want to cover what it does well and what it doesn’t do great at. I’ve been running a small ZFS pool for a few years now and while I seen some issues, still recommend [...]
Setting Ubuntu SSH/CLI Prompt to have a user friendly server name
This is something I change on all new servers I setup, by default a lot of servers use their hostname as its IP, and if you are on a local static network, that might be meaningful to you. But if you get random IPs from cloud hosting like AWS, it isn’t too helpful. When I have multiple SSH terminals open, I want to make it clear [...]
Installing Ubuntu Linux on a PCIe NVMe drive
During my installation of Ubuntu 19.10 to a PCIe NVMe drive, you might run into a problem as soon as it starts copying data with an error like this: Current device storage tree: Shutdown Plan: Error: Could not stat device /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-eui.0100000000000000 Waiting on device path: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-eui.0100000000000000 An error [...]
UTC Conversion to United States Timezones
Setting CRON jobs on servers can be painful to wrap your head around the shift of UTC to your timezone. Especially thanks to daylight savings times where a UTC-6 becomes a UTC-5 for a few months of the year. CST ⇒ Central Standard TimeCDT ⇒ Central Daylight Time 2018 daylight savings start March 11, 2018 2AM to Nov 4, 20182019 daylight [...]
Dell RPS-720 Cable Pinout
If you own a Dell Redundant Power Supply unit (e.g. RPS-600 or RPS-720), hopefully you have the original 4 cables it came with because they are very difficult to find and you can’t even order them from Dell. There are not many details about these cords online which adds to the mystery of them. Interestingly, they are not as [...]
Increasing EBS disk space to a running EC2 instance
One of the best parts of running a cloud solution is the ability to make some “hardware” level changes without even a reboot. First, in the AWS Console, go to the EBS Volume Screen and hopefully you have labelled your EBS volumes with human readable labels (or you will have to click on each volume and see what instance it is [...]
AWS T2 vs T3 vs T3a Performance
Amazon just came out with the new 3rd generation of burst-able EC2 servers and to keep things short, you should shut down your t2 servers and restart them as t3. What is the difference between AWS t2 and t3 and t3a series? Burstable Series t2.micro 1 Core from an Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40Ghz (released 2013)1GB Memory3227 Geekbench 4 [...]