Featured articles

Returning to Rails in 2026: Building a modern application with the web framework that shook everything up in the early 2000s.

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD iostat monitoring with Cacti

I’ve been looking for ages for a tool to parse the output from "iostat" on Linux, and graph it in Cacti. I found a few scripts and templates that did some of what I was looking for (disk I/O etc.), but nothing that gave me the full set of statistics such as queue length, utilisation, service time etc. I finally got round to writing my own set of templates and a data gathering script to provide this information, and it seems to work very well. So that others can benefit, I’...

Blastwave is dead

Earlier on today, the main Blastwave website got replaced by this message :

Building a redundant iSCSI and NFS cluster with Debian - Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on building a redundant iSCSI and NFS SAN with Debian.

Building a redundant iSCSI and NFS cluster with Debian - Part 1

It’s been a while now since I last updated this blog with any decent material so I thought I’d dust off some of my notes on building a redundant iSCSI and NFS SAN using Debian Etch.

ZFS Replication

As I’ve been investigating ZFS for use on production systems, I’ve been making a great deal of notes, and jotting down little "cookbook recipies" for various tasks. One of the coolest systems I’ve created recently utilised the zfs send & receive commands, along with incremental snapshots to create a replicated ZFS environment across two different systems. True, all this is present in the zfs manual page, but sometimes a quick demonstration makes things easier to unders...