May 2013

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Cacti and rrdtool

Cacti is a great tool. I use it for collecting and graphing all kinds of data about my servers and networks. But after using it for so many years, I’ve learned its weaknesses. It is quite easy to make a mistake setting up Cacti that you later come to regret – and cannot fix. Before using Cacti to graph real data, you need to understand how it works.

This is the first in a series of related blog posts about Cacti.

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Enable swap on Nas4Free

I recently built a storage server (SAN/NAS/whatever) with Nas4Free on a Supermicro 6037R-E1R16N. If you’ve ever built a SAN, you’ve seen one of these. Lots of disks in a ZFS array, with a filesystem exported via NFS or a volume exported via iSCSI. After almost a month of operation, I discovered that Nas4Free defaults to having no swap space. And this means your storage server will not be stable.

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