Pipe viewer

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Adam Thorn

I’ve been moving many terabytes of data between servers this week, and have been using a lot of piped tar commands to help out. Now it’s often useful to have a progress indicator when dong any sort of lengthy operation, and a few minutes on Google led me to a fantastic little tool: pv (pipe viewer). It does exactly what it says on the tin; you just add it your pipeline (e.g. tar -C /src/ cf – * | pv | tar -C /dst/ xf -) and you have an instant progress indicator.

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Thermal paste

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Catherine E. Pitt

We spent a lot of Monday tracking down a problem on one of the servers which hosts several important services, including the department’s remote access services. When the server failed at the weekend the services automatically failed over to another machine, but now we need to fix the original hardware. It looks like the problem is the connection between the CPU and the heatsink, so perhaps a little thermal paste is all that’s needed.

Posted in Hardware, Server rooms | Comments Off on Thermal paste