Recently I started to run low on space so I decided to buy a new hard drive and although the speed increase from the faster drive was a nice bonus I still felt like something was missing, oh thats right an HD ACTIVITY LIGHT APPLE! I can see Steve Jobs making this call while saying something along the lines of it distracting from the cleanliness of the design and he probably called it an obsolete feature stating most disks are constantly active with modern search indexing and background tasks blah blah, I obviously don’t agree with this and many others don’t agree either. Even if I didn’t find this useful in OSX I do dual boot Windows and sometimes I find myself saying “what the hell is this thing doing”, its nice to know if it is doing something or if the OS is hung up on a task. Anyway enough ranting let’s get into the mod. I wanted to keep everything stock looking so I needed a place to put the LED where it
SAS/SATA LSI Hardware PCI-e RAID under $50
SAS/SATA LSI Hardware PCI-e RAID under $50, say what? Yes its true and I will show you how. Recently I was shopping for some Raid controllers for our Dell PowerEdge 2950′s at work which typically use a Dell PERC 5/i or you can outfit them with something better but I was looking for the OEM solution. I was hunting on eBay when I started to notice most of these cards where under $50, in fact I purchased 3 of them for $35 each. If you don’t know already a Dell PERC 5/i is nothing more than a re-branded LSI MegaRAID SAS 8480e utilizing an Intel IOP333 Processor. Intel makes some of the best and fastest RAID controller processors so any card with an Intel Processor is likely a good bet. I found this great article which details the Dell PERC 5/i, Dell PERC 6/i and goes into detail about reflashing the PERC 5/i with the MegaRAID 8480e firmware, there’s also a host of benchmarks including comparison to an onbaord Intel ICH9R. http://www.overclock.net/t/359025/perc-5-i-raid-card-tips-and-benchmarks So whats the catch?
Slow Disk to Disk File Transfers (Caching)
Recently I ran into an issue that I would like to share with you and it had to do with slow file transfers. To make a long story short I am upgrading my server which has a RAID 5 and I am replacing the onboard RAID with a hard controller. To do this I am going to need to back up all my data on the RAID Array but this is where I ran into an issue. When I would transfer files from the array to one of my non-array drives I would receive 40-50 MBps sustained writes on one drive while receiving 10-20 MBps sustained on another. I was getting very frustrated by this because the speeds would start out around 120 MBps but then dwindle down to nothing within 10-15 minutes. I did some searching but most of what I found led to what I already knew or only applied to IDE drives and not SATA drives. I checked and re-checked the settings in Device Manager which would be the cache settings for
MySQL Root Access Denied fix for Plesk
When you setup a Dedicated server with a host like 1and1 they setup an admin account for root access on MySQL but the password is a mystery and login from outside the localhost isn’t possible anyway. After tons of frustration and searching I finally found the fix for this. The reason this is so important is mainly for backups, there’s no other way to backup all of you databases quickly other than using an account which can access all of your databases. When running Plesk in the default Reseller mode access to databases is limited to each domain and one account cannot access another domain’s database. This is obviously like this for security and its great but we really need access to all DB’s as root. Another reason is then use if programs like MySQL workbench which requires a master account that can access all databases if you want to administer all databases. On with the fix, log into Plesk and navigate to “Tools & Settings \ Database Servers” now click on your database, select
Setup Dedicated (VPS) Virtual Private Server from the ground up (1and1 hosting specific)
By now you should already have your server purchased and ready to go, if not go watch a movie while its being “set up” and come back here, I’ll be here I promise. I know when I got my first dedicated server from 1and1 Web Hosting it took forever for them to “set it up” or whatever it is they do. I read on the website it normally takes about 24 hours but in my case it was closer to 4 days. I don’t want to knock them because maybe they were low on hardware and I did get double the amount of ram I signed up for so I can’t complain. Obviously since I have 1and1 hosting there will be many references to how they do things and to Parrales Plesk Panel, you can still follow along if you have another hosting company but there will be many things that don’t apply to your hosting situation. Hopefully the usefulness of this article is great enough that even with another hosting company everyone will be able to
