CentOS5 and a recent kernel.

CentOS 6 is just around the corner. But for those of us who have CentOS 5 deployed just about everywhere, the wait for a better kernel is annoying. While wasting time in some unsavoury corner of the Internet, I came across vserver, which is a clever way of sharing a kernel between separate OS instances. Think of it as VM writ small.

But even if you don't want or need multiple OSes, vserver installs a RHEL 6 kernel. And it works with CentOS 5. Say you need ATA TRIM? You got it. Having trouble getting WiFi working? Bingo. Card reader on your Laptop not working? It does now.

EDIT: the catch is that sound is no longer working. While this is OK for the laptop, it isn't for my desktop. Ah well.

However, I can TRIM corey's SSD by booting with the vserver kernel, then doing

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/very-large

rm /tmp/very-large

The first command is going to fill any remaining space on the disk with zeros, so don't be doing anything important at the same time. When the disk fills up, it will exit and the second command will free the space.

You could also do the same thing with any boot CD that has TRIM support.

Silence!

Newegg.ca sent me email yesterday with a tracking number. Click on it and BUH "we have no information about this package." Yes, you are idiots.

But this morning, I try again at 8h00. And BUH PACKAGE ON TRUCK IN SHERBROOKE!

So I don't go back to bed, wait impatiently for the truck to show up. Three cheers for eCommerce!

SSDs are not ready

The drive on Corey is/was in the process of dieing. It is going on 7 years old, has been spinning at 7200rpm every hour of most days for those 7 years. I don't begrudge it failing. It did mean I had to spend 2-3 days reconfiguring my daily use computer. Annoying. More details later.

I bought a Western Digital Green 1.5TB drive. 100 CAD! Cheap! It's only 5400rpm in the hopes it will make less noise. But it's still to noisy. Not so much rotation whine but an annoying click every 4-5 seconds. Something I had back in the day with SCSI drives, but I don't think the old IDE drive had this problem. So either I get an SSD or a fit-pc2 to put it in. Or boot LTSP from the basement.

Also, Jean-Phillipp brought up that maybe we should look into moving our clients' MySQL DBs to SSD. Even at the high prices of SSD, it would cost less then what we are currently doing, which is throwing RAM at the problem. Also, there's only so much RAM that a server can hold. And with datasets getting larger then 33 GB, that approach has reached its limit. However, it turns out that SSD, along with being expensive aren't quite ready for prime-time.