IT Dribble

These posts were pretty popular when I used to do them so I’ll try keep them updated:

Download the full Adobe Acrobat Reader installer EXE here:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/ … beRdr11006_en_US.exe

No bloatware either!

Recently had a client with an unused Sharepoint instance and very little free disk space left.

A review of the file system show that xxxxxxxx was 51GB!! … The server had 17GB free disk space. I knew it was a SQL log that hadn’t been truncated. But with little free disk space left and the fact that it was unused sharepoint - I was happy to discard the logs without backing them up.

I used the following commands to do so:

BACKUP LOG [database] WITH NO_LOG;
GO

ALTER DATABASE [database] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE;
GO 

use [database];
GO

DBCC SHRINKFILE([database_log],2);
GO

ALTER DATABASE [database] SET RECOVERY FULL;
GO

Success 67GB Free!!!

So many times I need to measure the amount of IOPS on a Linux disk/storage system. While there are many tools for the jobs they just don’t seem to give you a ‘number’. For example Splunk indexers require 1200+ IOPS according to hardware recommendation guides but how do you find out if your any where close to that number? Use ‘bonnie++’, ‘iozone’ or perhaps ‘fio’? Well use any of those tools will create the type of read / write sequence you would like to replicate - but where the damn magic number???

Easiest two ways are:
Method #1:
run iozone -a (or bonnie++) in one screen then in another session / terminal use nmon, pressing D (capital D) to get disk stats and get the number from the Xfers column. This is your magic number (or IOPS reading)

┌nmon─14i─────────────────────Hostname=reddragon─────Refresh= 2secs ───19:51.57─
│ Disk I/O ──/proc/diskstats────mostly in KB/s─────Warning:contains duplicates─
│DiskName Busy    Read    Write       Xfers   Size  Peak%  Peak-RW    InFlight
│sda       99%    699.9     14.0KB/s  178.0   4.0KB  493%    3658.8KB/s   1   
│sda1       0%      0.0      0.0KB/s    0.0   0.0KB    0%       0.0KB/s   0   
│sda2      99%    699.9     14.0KB/s  178.0   4.0KB  493%    3658.8KB/s   1   
│dm-0       0%      0.0      0.0KB/s    0.0   0.0KB    0%       0.0KB/s   0   
│dm-1      99%    699.9     14.0KB/s  178.5   4.0KB  494%    3658.8KB/s   1   
│dm-2       0%      0.0      0.0KB/s    0.0   0.0KB   76%    2553.5KB/s   0   
│Totals Read-MB/s=2.1      Writes-MB/s=0.0      Transfers/sec=534.4 

In the above example I’m getting about 178 IOPS for my disk ’sda’

Method #2:
run fio with the correct workload (google how to use fio) and while it’s running it will actually tell you the IOPS.

[root@reddragon ~]# fio random-read-test.fio 
random-read: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.0.13
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r] [85.1% done] [736K/0K/0K /s] [184 /0 /0  iops] [eta 00m:28s]

In this example I am getting 184 IOPS. Also if you wait until fio finishes it run - you can the IOPS reading from there. Eg.

random-read: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.0.13
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r] [98.9% done] [2224K/0K/0K /s] [556 /0 /0  iops] [eta 00m:02s]
random-read: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=7239: Tue Feb 25 16:49:16 2014
  read : io=131072KB, bw=747406 B/s, iops=182 , runt=179578msec
    clat (usec): min=107 , max=117530 , avg=5473.62, stdev=4112.08
     lat (usec): min=107 , max=117531 , avg=5473.93, stdev=4112.08
    clat percentiles (usec):
     |  1.00th=[  245],  5.00th=[  302], 10.00th=[  370], 20.00th=[ 2480],
<SNIP>

As you can see: iops=182 - pretty consistent with the other results!

*** UPDATE September 2015 - This article has been updated with the correct syntax and confirmed working on Squid 3.3.8 ***

The doco for IGK is some what lacking for the ICAP settings but it does mention ” Refer to the documentation of the proxy for information on how to set it up”. That’s not very helpful so I contacted F-Secure technical support and asked them. This is the reply:

You will need to add these lines to Squid config file:

icap_enable on
icap_send_client_ip on
icap_service service_req reqmod_precache bypass=1 icap://[IP address of IGK]:1344/request
adaptation_access service_req allow all
icap_service service_resp respmod_precache bypass=0 icap://[IP address of IGK]:1344/response
adaptation_access service_resp allow all

Unfortunately that still doesn’t work for some unknown reason and I am only getting the error:

ErrPage: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD

I don’t have anymore time to spend on this, I guess I’ll just use the F-Secure HTTP proxy as a parent proxy for squid.

Hate Spam? Hate Puppet Spam in var/log/messages more? Quick buy now!

# Edit /etc/puppet/puppet.conf
# In the [agent] section add:
syslogfacility = local6

# Edit: vi /etc/rsyslog.conf 
# Do a quick to see if local6 is being used somewhere else first... 
# Add a line:
local6.*    /var/log/puppet/puppet.log

# Add setup the permissions and file
touch /var/log/puppet/puppet.log
chown puppet:puppet /var/log/puppet/puppet.log
chmod 640 /var/log/puppet/puppet.log
service rsyslog reload

And your done!