Why AWS Core Backup (Snapshots) Suck

Slow EBS Recovery only 1.2TB to go

AWS Core Backup Technology Sucks

EC2 HA data storage backup solution EBS snapshots are an incredibly valuable tool if you can wait. But if you have  any significant amount of data you need to restore you may be disappointed with the 4 megabytes per second recovery speed.

 

 

Scenarios in Which AWS EBS Snapshots Will Kill You

  • Resizing a EBS Volume — You are generating tons of space and you realized you need a ton more.
  • Restoring In a disaster recovery situation

Dell OEM Samsung PM830 vs Retail 830 SSD

I recently purchased a Dell M6600  that came with a 512GB SSD Samsung PM830.  Apparently the OEM version of these drives are not supported by Samsung and it appears to not support firmware updates, or they just are simply not released.  I ran a bench mark for performance for a database class I am in and I found a staggering difference between the retail Samsung 830 128GB SSD and the Dell OEM Samsung PM830 SSD both support trim and are sata-3. The difference is mostly just on the 4k random write test.

For the two 830 4k random write results

  • 512GB PM830:  8.49MB/s 2,173iops
  • 128GB 830: 53.75MB/s 13,761 iops

This is a huge difference. The moral for me is don’t buy the OEM upgrade SSD drive. If you can’t update the firmware on SSD you in for trouble.

For the comparison I used the AS SSD Benchmark 1.6.4237

I compared the two drives and my QNAP TS-669 Pro with 6×1.5TB in raid-6 over iscsi on 1gb ethernet

Installing Project Mono on OpenSuse 11.4

Put together a short tutorial for a Lab for school about install mono on linux machines to enable installation of .net applications and aspx sites.

Installed the following packages seemed to do the trick.

yast2 –install apache2 nano  xsp apache2-mod_mono mono-complete

Got the xsp site code from a old distrubution of xsp. I assuming many of the links did not work because the version of mono and everything else was a much newer version.

http://download.mono-project.com/sources/xsp-if/xsp-1.0.6.1.tar.gz

Used this tool to generate a apache host file for the mono test app folder.

http://go-mono.com/config-mod-mono/Default.aspx

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Bj3zRVHP0[/youtube]

VMWare workstation 8 Virtual Machine sharing

After failing to talk my school into registering for a free vmware school account so I could score VMware workstation 8 I decided to purchase it.  I primarily wanted the feature that they somewhat promoted that allows you to share your virtual machine with other people.

It sounded like a really awesome idea however I couldn’t seem to find any video on the internet that would demo it so I put together a short demo of the sharing feature and how it works.  Overall, I was pretty impressed. It would be a great function for school or having a shared machine on the job where developer could debug code at the same time or share the experience more seemlessly then a go to meeting.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBR6MxL8UQo[/youtube]

The entire virtual machine is copied to the sharing folder in order to share it. The level of granularity on the permissions for shares was pretty impressive.

Making Windows 7 Search Useful

By default Winodows 7 does not Index a whole lot of files that one could actually find to be useful. It also does not search by the content of those files which makes searching not useful.

This is  a short tutorial to enable indexing and search of all your favorite filetypes and locations with all  your programming code.

First thing to do is ensure that the Windows 7 search service is running

Search for Service (Note: there is a old version of Windows Indexing service.. That is not it. That is for legacy support older windows.)

Next, ensure the Windows Search service starts automatically.


I am not sure what the performance impact of pumping up the indexes on Windows 7 has on non-ssd drives, but so far it actually seems to be running pretty great.

Example search from start menu “mysql_close(”

Search for “Indexing Options”

This is the initial area where you set the folders to monitor for indexing.

Next, select the file types under “Advanced”

For each of your favorite programming extensions select “Index Properties and Content”

Switching Default Folder Search Behavior

Open the start menu search for “Folder”

Select

  • Always search file names and contents

Folder search option

That’s it. After a couple of hours everything should be indexed.

Remote Linux GUI Apps using Putty

Put together a quick video tutorial on setting up X Forwarding through putty to execute linux GUI apps remotely.
This is a different approach then using VNC
It uses putty to forward X11 (linux GUI) commands to a local Windows X server called Xming
Only change on Ubuntu required change to
/etc/ssh/ssh_config
Change lines
# ForwardX11 no
to
ForwardX11 yes

Adding Ubuntu 11 to Windows 2008 R2 Domain

I found this video on youtube that had a great tutorial that made adding a ubuntu machine to 2008 domain a snap.

Step 1: install likewise add to domain

From the Ubuntu terminal perform the following tasks. Note replace ad.joznet.com with your domain name.

  • sudo apt-get install likewise-open5
  • sudo domainjoin-cli join ad.joznet.com administrator
  • sudo reboot

From there you can verify the machine is part of the domain by in to the domain controller and checking under computers (Figure 1)

Step 2: Modify samba to allow domain login

  • sudo apt-get install samba (not sure if this is required)
  • sudo nano /etc/samba/lwiauthd.conf
      • winbind use default domain = yes
  • sudo reboot
Samba authentication

Step 3: Modify super user doer file

  • sudo nano /etc/sudoers
  • add the under under ‘#Allow members of group sudo to execute any command’
    • %ad.joznet.com\domain^admins ALL=(ALL) ALL

Step 4: Login as domain user now

  • “Other user”
    • administrator@ad.joznet.com

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwdlhrqy33Y[/youtube]

Microsoft sure can kill a good thing FolderShare

So, for years I have used the FolderShare applications a P2P program that can securely sync folders across  the internet.  It has some limitations but is still worked great. Then, Microsoft purchased and everyone was worried that they were going to kill the program. Luckily they did not kill it– at least not right away. They renamed the stupid thing about 3 maybe 4 times.

  • FolderShare
  • Live FolderShare
  • Live Sync
  • Live Mesh
  • (hope I didn’t miss one)

Each time they changed the name of the software you had to reinstall the software which was rather annoying.

Now they removed support for various operating system like Windows XP and some other server based operating system.

I logged into the program and was reviewing the new interface which forces you to use their cloud based storage service for the files that you want to share.  Which again, kinda sucks because it ruins the whole p2p aspect of the program.  On top of that it appears it did no migrate any of my old folders share were being shared from the last version of sync. This again, also sucks.

One more thing, they bundle the application with a ton of other crap, like messenger, photo  gallery, bing bar, writer, and some email client.  And even though you uncheck all the boxes that say don’t install this other stuff. It still installs all the crap anyways.  [rant] None of this stupid shit has anything to do with why you want this sharing application. Why not just bundle it in a windows update if you want it installed on everyones machine so bad. I already have outlook that I don’t use; why do I need another shitty email client? [/end rant]

It kinda sucks now that I can share documents with my friends that still are on windows XP for whatever reason.  Luckily there is other competition out there ready to take it’s place.

I ended up uninstalling the mesh and installed DropBox which appears to mimic many of the features without killing off support for your legacy users.

https://www.dropbox.com