November, 2010

I came across the EHT Graphviz plugin for WordPress and, whilst useful, it has a very clumsy shortcode parser, is not well documented and only supports a subset of the Graphviz functionality. Now Graphviz is not exactly a standard for clear documentation but it is a useful tool for flow or organisational diagramming.

So I wrote my own WordPress plugin, which is demonstrated here. (more…)

Errata for RAID gone Green

I noted in RAID gone Green that my read speed was lower than write speeds and provided some commentary on why that might be. I have a further explanation to add to this – the stripe size of the RAID array. (more…)

I sometimes wonder if cmd.exe will ever get the -h treatment a lot of unixy tools have received… dir is definitely still living in the MS-DOS era. For example: (more…)

VMware ESXi is a very popular hypervisor and the underpinning of the vSphere virtualisation suite which caters for enthusiasts up to large scale datacenter operations for enterprise and service providers. VMware offers a variety of software to achieve virtualisation, Workstation, Server, ESX and ESXi being the main flavors with very different focusses: Desktop use, existing server, with a Linux console and without. ESXi is the variant with the smallest footprint and is ideal if you don’t need to implement a bunch of monitoring or other scripting on the host, are going to do all that management stuff elsewhere, or just don’t need to do any. As with the trusty old VMware Server, ESX and ESXi are available with a free license that gives you lots of room to play with but removes some of the more advanced features (like being able to move VM’s between hosts whilst running). (more…)

Western Digital RE4-GP

Western Digital released their lower-power “Enterprise” RAID Edition (The RE-GP series) Serial ATA (SATA) drives some time ago, and the 1.5 and 2TB versions (RE4-GP series) last year. They were found to have an issue with certain RAID controllers and received much bad press as a result.

It’s now more than a year on and they have newer firmware, which has been generally well received. I also was toying with reducing the energy footprint of my home-business mass storage needs (not to mention to improve its reliability and performance) so I decided to give them a whirl in my newest server build (more…)