Sunday, July 19, 2009

FreeBSD 7.x/ OpenSolaris 2009.06

I don't think this post is going to be very fluid, just going to post some notes on the two systems. I currently have 2 FreeBSD 7.2-ish load balanced web/smtp clients with a FreeBSD 7.2-ish NFS/SQL server in the back. Will be migrating that backend server to OpenSolaris. With any luck, I can hot replicate maildirs between the new and the old servers, allowing for a hot backup.

Solved FreeBSD + ZFS slowness issue. Archiving 100k emails every day into a single directory (per day) was the slowness issue. Others report that quantity of files without any performance issue, so it must be due to the quantity contained in each directory. Archive moved to OpenSolaris 2009.6

OpenSolaris 2009.6 fixed many of the quirks I posted earlier. Unfortunately my latest update of the system broke the Network GUI, and I can't save my correct configuration. Now I have 2 NICs because I was having problems with the mainboard NIC just dropping off the network under high load. And actually, the 3com 3c90x (best NIC in the world) was doing it as well. It appeasr I've manually fixed this by doing:
echo "msi_enable=0;" >> /kernel/drv/rge.conf
and rebooting. It seems 'PlugNPlay' bites us again. How many hours have we spent trying to fix stuff instead of just setting a freakin jumper?

OS2009.06 /home is part of automount, so you can't do anything under it. Remove auto_home from /etc/auto_home /etc/auto_master

OS2009.06 Just some whacked out paths/conventions. Unless you compile yourself, you're going to have to link things all over the place to /usr/bin, or /usr/local/bin or whathaveyou.

OS2009.06 NFS is whacked too. I used to have: -mapall=vpopmail -network 172.16.100.0 -mask 255.255.255.0 That no longer works, now I need to have: rw:mail,www,etc (mapall doesn't seem to work, but only vpopmail writes anyways) and add those hostnames to /etc/hosts.

FreeBSD 7.x I get random slowness from the filesystem that I need to reboot. No ZFS here, plain old UFS2. Two possible issues - some mail deliveries were 'hung', so I've changed udp mounts to tcp. Also there is a periodic find and purge that appears to be trying to traverse the NFS mounts. Next time I see it, I'll check out the parent process instead of just killing it. I've already disabled a couple other periodic's for just this reason.

FreeBSD 7.x Lighttpd + PHP - get the latest PHP, or your php-cgi's will crash and Lighttpd will throw random 500 errors to your clients. Unfortunately after a reboot I started getting warnings from Horde's memcache module that Horde:: could not be found. Since it's just logging and seems to only appear in the module, I commented out the lines.
Also - the reboot caused some oddities with imapproxyd. When Horde would try to connect to localhost, it would fail. It I did a telnet, it would try IPv6, fail, then fall to ipv4. I forced imapproxyd to bind to 127.0.0.1, and that seems to have fixed it. IMHO, the fix doesn't appear to reflect the problem, but whatever. FYI - /etc/hosts list localhost as IPV6 first, that's probably why the attempt is made there first. But I didn't tell horde to try IPv4, just left it at localhost. Weird.




I believe that is all.

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