1/4     I want to test how my servers behave during a disk failure and
        a RAID reconstruction so I want to simulate a hardware failure.
        How can I do this in Linux without having to physically pull
        a drive? These disks are behind a RAID card and run Linux. -ausman
        \_ According to the Linux RAID wiki, you might be able to use mdadm
           to do this with something like the following:
	...

9/13    Thanks to Jordan, our disk server is no longer virtualized. Our long
        nightmare of poor IO performance should hopefully be over. Prepare for
        another long nightmare of poor hardware reliability!
        ...
        Just kidding! (I hope)
        In any case, this means that cooler was taken out back and shot, and
	...

2/18    Why does the system seem so sluggish lately?
        \_ Slow NFS is basically always the answer. --toulouse
        \_ Any truth to the rumor that soda will be decommissioned this summer?
           \_ Absolutely none. Soda might go down temporarily while disks are
              reorganized and stuff so soda doesn't suffer from such shitty
              performance nearly as much, but no, we've gotta maintain NFS and
	...

7/28    Does it make sense to defragment disks on VMWare? My 80GB disk
        on VMWare isn't really using 80GB, it just uses what it needs.
        Will defragment do anything to it?
        \_ If you want to speed up disk operation in your VM, it's best to
           defragment the disks in your VM, then defragment the disk on your
           host machine where the VM files are.
	...

5/10  I have large spare disks on several machines, all on same net.
      How can I combine them into one big visible network file system?
      \_ you want either a clustered file system (eww expensive) or look into
         smoething like a distributed file system (afs, global fs).
      \_ The startup I work for makes a distributed NAS product that's free
         for the first four terabytes if you'd like to try it.
	...

5/2     I have a 1Gbps switch. It is connected to a SANS RAID-1 with
        two WD Green 1T that takes 1Gbps connection, as well as a laptop
        that is also 1Gbps. Online benchmarks show *sustained* transfer
        rate of about 1/2 of 1Gbps with the WD Green... cool!!! But
        in practice, I'm only getting 68Mbps (read SANS->PC file transfer),
        far below what I expected. The switch says both devices are using
	...

12/9    Another idea for the CSUA that lets you spend money and maybe get some
    cool toys. Instead of buying a beefy server (like say, a massive server
    with 20 386DX processors), buy a few cheap machines (like the ones
    mentioned below) that have good disks and work on failover / load
    balancing. A netscaler or other piece of hardware is complete overkill,
    but maybe hacking an OpenBSD box could do the trick. The idea is that
	...

12/3    Are any of you CSUA alums working at Intel?  Is it possible that we
        might be able to hit Intel up for donated/partially donated (reduced
        price) Core i7 Xeons when they come out?  Who would be a good person
        to contact about something like that?  We're of course willing to put
        out for them - perhaps we'll tattoo an Intel logo on toulouse if that's
        what they want :-p  -- steven
	...

11/29   I'm experimenting with virtualization, and as a poor college student
        I'm wondering what the best alternatives for virtualization are, and
        how best to cut my teeth on messing with non-linux platforms (or I
        guess interesting stuff on Linux would work too). Right now I've got
        FreeBSD7 running on KVM on my home computer (on a Core 2 Quad), and am
        somewhat at a loss as to how to use it. (More details: bridged
	...

11/11   I want a home nas so my laptops aren't always running out of space,
        what's a good buy?
        \_ I did a bunch of research and ended up with Dlink DNS-321. It
           is newer than DNS-323 with less problems. It doesn't have as
           much buffer as DNS-323, but if you're transfer files bigger
           than 32 megs, the sustained rate for both are equivalent. I
	...