Monthly Archives: December 2014

Linux

Nas4Free Smartctl

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Running 9.2.0.1 – Shigawire (revision 972) on some supermicro server with an Intel Xeon.

Noticed that I wasn’t receiving my weekly status emails so I finally got around to checking it out (system is running as a backup of a backup for my personal files, so not the end of the world if it doesn’t work right).

Logged in via the web interface and didn’t notice anything really going on except that out of the 4 available cores on the processor 2 were maxing out at 100%. Process listing showed smartctl was the culprit. Went into the ZFS settings (forgot no smart settings in there), and then tried to load up the Disk > Management area. No go – spinning and spinning.

Logged in using SSH to restart the web services
/etc/rc.d/lighttpd restart

Back in business, but then the Disk > Management area was once again crashing it out.

Issued a kill -s HUP thePIDhere. They came right back.

Rebooted the server. Smartctl was still coming up eating all of my available CPU time for reports.

I ended up renaming the smartctl bin file and then killing the processes.
It’s located /usr/local/sbin, then mv smartctl to smartctl.old or something

From there I could load the Disk > Management page again and disable smart monitoring.

And yes, the disks have all checked OK.

Microsoft

MS SQL 2008 Space

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So we were getting alerts that our SQL server was running out of space. It was chewing through ~150GB a month.

Looking into it, we found out that our CRM (MS CRM 4.0) database was the primary culprit.

crm1
* Highlighted portion from another technician

I finally noticed something a little bit off; the Last Database Log Backup was listed as 9/24/2014.
In the SQL Server Management Studio, under Databases, I right-click and choose properties of the CRM database
I then selected the Files page (left side)
The PRIMARY rows data mdf was 56GB
The Log ldf was ~185GB

That might explain it!

So we went back and looked through the notes regarding this server. We had changed the Recovery Model to Full (same location under the Options page) in order to export a copy for our development environment. And this was never changed back.

Change this setting back to Simple and hit OK.
Then Right-click on the same database and choose Tasks, Shrink, Files
File type change to Log

In my case it showed available freespace of 99%. I clicked OK and the data usage went down to 1.25GB. Pretty big savings if you ask me.