Great what you can do with commodity hardware these days: storage-mc:/data# dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img bs=1M count=102400 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 698.145 seconds, 154 MB/s 4 x WD 500GB RE2 disks in RAID1+0. With a 4-port Areca 1210 hardware raid card. Sure beats Linux software RAID1 with performance. Nothing [...]

We recently experienced some performance problems with an Ubuntu machine with software raid1. To localize it a bit further I ran some tests on different setups. For comparison I also included a setup with hardware raid and a setup with software raid on CentOS, I will also post the specs of the machines in question [...]

Since the Xen PV drivers for Windows only work on the commercial/closed source Xen versions I ended up doing a test run of Xen Express. Its a bit nasty as you can expect but its much better then I expected. The installation You boot up the Xen Express install disk, pass a simplified text based [...]

We had a night of computer terror: A terrible badly supported intel mainbord (dg965ot). Basicly its chips are not supported in Linux and it just won’t boot. http://dev.osso.nl/peter/blog/2006/12/28/why-intel-dg965ot-sucks-balls/, nice specs, but just buy another board (at least for now). Besides that fedora core 6 x86_64 doesn’t seem to work well with software raid1, it sucks [...]