« Archives in March, 2009

Getting started with EC2 tutorial

I just start playing with EC2 today and these are some useful notes and observation. The small standard instance is quite slow, only scores 50 under Unixbench-WHT. Our quads E5405 are around 410+, Q9550 is at 650-750.

I also was confused about S3 versus EBS. The console management makes life much easier, but could be improved even further. This is what you do after attaching a EBS volume to an instance:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdx
mkdir /mnt/data-store
mount /dev/sdx /mnt/data-store

For CentOS AMI (ami-0459bc6d), you need to run this to be able to customize the AMI and build your own

depmod -a
modprobe loop

As for performance, it’s pretty disappointing indeed. I ran Unixbench WHT 4.1 and small instance only got 51 (CentOS 5 32-bit) and the large instance got 111 (CentOS 5 64-bit). If you run an instance 24/7, it’s much more expensive for the same performance of a dedicated server. Our quad core servers usually get 600+ on the same test. The price you pay for EC2 is “on-demand”, meaning that you need to automate it to the point scaling up during peak is seamlessly and not having to run a single or even multiple instances all the time.

Brother 5440CN Control Center in Mac OSX

If you turned off Control Center from starting up at boot, you can find it again in this folder. It took me a while trying to find it under Spotlight, /Applications without luck.

/Library/Printers/Brother/Utilities/

Adaptec RAID under CentOS

Download the Storage Manager RPM for your card model and architecture from their site http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/raid/

If you run /usr/StorMan/arcconf and get this error:

./arcconf: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Do this

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/StorMan/libstdc++.so.5

root@r StorMan]# ./arcconf 

  | UCLI |  Adaptec uniform command line interface
  | UCLI |  Version 5.30 (B17509)
  | UCLI |  (C) Adaptec 2003-2008
  | UCLI |  All Rights Reserved

 COPYBACK      | toggles controller copy back mode
 CREATE        | creates a logical device
 DATASCRUB     | toggles the controller background consistency check mode
 DELETE        | deletes one or more logical devices
 FAILOVER      | toggles the controller autotomatic failover mode
 SNAPSHOT      | creates a copy of a logical device
 GETCONFIG     | prints controller information
 GETLOGS       | gets controller log information
 GETSTATUS     | displays the status of running tasks
 GETVERSION    | prints version information for all controllers
 IDENTIFY      | blinks LEDS on device(s) connected to a controller
 KEY           | installs a Feature Key onto a controller
 MODIFY        | performs RAID Level Migration or Online Capacity Expansion
 RESCAN        | checks for new or removed drives
 ROMUPDATE     | updates controller firmware
 SETALARM      | controls the controller alarm, if present
 SETCONFIG     | restores the default configuration
 SETCACHE      | adjusts physical or logical device cache mode
 SETNAME       | renames a logical device given its logical device number
 SETPRIORITY   | changes specific or global task priority
 SETSTATE      | manually sets the state of a physical or logical device
 TASK          | performs a task such as build/verify on a physical or logical device

Get info

[root@r StorMan]# ./arcconf getconfig 1
Controllers found: 1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Controller information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Controller Status                        : Optimal
   Channel description                      : SAS/SATA
   Controller Model                         : Adaptec 3405
   Controller Serial Number                 : 7C2102FD
   Physical Slot                            : 3
   Temperature                              : 32 C/ 89 F (Normal)
   Installed memory                         : 128 MB
   Copyback                                 : Disabled
   Background consistency check             : Disabled
   Automatic Failover                       : Enabled
   Defunct disk drive count                 : 0
   Logical devices/Failed/Degraded          : 1/0/0
   --------------------------------------------------------
   Controller Version Information
   --------------------------------------------------------
   BIOS                                     : 5.2-0 (12379)
   Firmware                                 : 5.2-0 (12379)
   Driver                                   : 1.1-5 (2409)
   Boot Flash                               : 5.2-0 (12379)
   --------------------------------------------------------
   Controller Battery Information
   --------------------------------------------------------
   Status                                   : Optimal
   Over temperature                         : No
   Capacity remaining                       : 99 percent
   Time remaining (at current draw)         : 3 days, 1 hours, 11 minutes

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Logical device information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Logical device number 0
   Logical device name                      : raid 10
   RAID level                               : 10
   Status of logical device                 : Optimal
   Size                                     : 139798 MB
   Stripe-unit size                         : 256 KB
   Read-cache mode                          : Enabled
   Write-cache mode                         : Enabled (write-back)
   Write-cache setting                      : Enabled (write-back) when protected by battery
   Partitioned                              : Yes
   Protected by Hot-Spare                   : No
   Bootable                                 : Yes
   Failed stripes                           : No
   --------------------------------------------------------
   Logical device segment information
   --------------------------------------------------------
   Group 0, Segment 0                       : Present (0,0) 3LQ1330009747KV9
   Group 0, Segment 1                       : Present (0,1) 3LQ1SJ7009747KHQ
   Group 1, Segment 0                       : Present (0,2) 3LQ2TB3009746GYX
   Group 1, Segment 1                       : Present (0,3) 3L17LJ6009750G35


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Physical Device information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
      Device #0
         Device is a Hard drive
         State                              : Online
         Supported                          : Yes
         Transfer Speed                     : SAS 3.0 Gb/s
         Reported Channel,Device            : 0,0
         Reported Location                  : Connector 0, Device 0
         Vendor                             : SEAGATE
         Model                              : ST373455SS
         Firmware                           : 0002
         Serial number                      : 3LQ1323Y00009747KV9
         World-wide name                    : 5000C50004962A3
         Size                               : 70007 MB
         Write Cache                        : Enabled (write-back)
         FRU                                : None
         S.M.A.R.T.                         : No
      Device #1
         Device is a Hard drive
         State                              : Online
         Supported                          : Yes
         Transfer Speed                     : SAS 3.0 Gb/s
         Reported Channel,Device            : 0,1
         Reported Location                  : Connector 0, Device 1
         Vendor                             : SEAGATE
         Model                              : ST373455SS
         Firmware                           : 0002
         Serial number                      : 3LQ12SJ70747KHQ
         World-wide name                    : 5000C50004961D8
         Size                               : 70007 MB
         Write Cache                        : Enabled (write-back)
         FRU                                : None
         S.M.A.R.T.                         : No
      Device #2
         Device is a Hard drive
         State                              : Online
         Supported                          : Yes
         Transfer Speed                     : SAS 3.0 Gb/s
         Reported Channel,Device            : 0,2
         Reported Location                  : Connector 0, Device 2
         Vendor                             : SEAGATE
         Model                              : ST373455SS
         Firmware                           : 0002
         Serial number                      : 3LQ12T009746GYX
         World-wide name                    : 5000C500049604F
         Size                               : 70007 MB
         Write Cache                        : Enabled (write-back)
         FRU                                : None
         S.M.A.R.T.                         : No
      Device #3
         Device is a Hard drive
         State                              : Online
         Supported                          : Yes
         Transfer Speed                     : SAS 3.0 Gb/s
         Reported Channel,Device            : 0,3
         Reported Location                  : Connector 0, Device 3
         Vendor                             : SEAGATE
         Model                              : ST373455SS
         Firmware                           : 0002
         Serial number                      : 3LQ17LJ60000G35
         World-wide name                    : 5000C500049FE35
         Size                               : 70007 MB
         Write Cache                        : Enabled (write-back)
         FRU                                : None
         S.M.A.R.T.                         : No


Command completed successfully.