I have a new disk that uses 4kb sectors. Unfortunately, on the system it's installed in, none of the partitioning tools deal with this automatically, leading to near-guaranteed misalignment and slower performance, or so says the Googled results (JFGI yourself... I'm too lazy to paste the links here). So, here's what I did:
A while back, I posted about detecting virtualization on Linux from a shell, using various tricks. Around that time, I also implemented those tricks as a perl script for internal use at work with the intent of eventually cleaning it up for public consumption. I finally got around to doing it, and the result is Sys::Detect::Virtualization availabe from CPAN, or from GitHub.
Currently, it can only handle Linux, and is only tested on a small number of virtualization hosts. Patches are welcome.
I recently moved our automated testing systems from a KVM+Qemu setup to Linux-VServer. We didn't need the overhead of a full virtual environment, even one as lightweight as KVM. However, there was a little snag -- 127.0.0.1 didn't work correctly.
At my job we have need of a high-performance hash lookup database in our antispam product. It's used to store Bayes tokens for quick lookups on individual scanning systems, and is read-only in the fast path (mail scanning) with updates taking place in another process. For the last few years, we've been using a plain old BerkeleyDB hash database via Perl's DB_File, but with all the hype about Tokyo Cabinet and its benchmark results I figured it was time to take a look.
A while ago, I blogged the chrooting of bind9 on Debian, so I wouldn't forget how to do it. Things have changed slightly for Lenny, so here's the update.
At work we use git, and have an extensive suite of tests for our code, and a set of scripts we use to kick them off manually. Unfortunately, we don't have a nice way to run them automatically.
Here's what I want, described here so I don't forget it. Tomorrow, I'll start looking for something that meets these needs, or can be hacked to do so. Maybe I'll have to implement it all, maybe not.
Every now and then, I move my nameserver to a new machine, and I have to google for the recipe for chrooting it on Debian. So, this time, I'm documenting it here.
Update: You may be interested in the perl module implementing these tricks.
Frequently, our customers want to install our software in a virtual machine. This can be OK, but frequently they hit a CPU, memory, or IO limit caused by running in a constrained virtual environment. When this happens, we really like to know if they're running under virtualization when we try to support them. Here's some tricks to detect, from a shell, if the system is virtualized.