Really removing CVS files from a module

Someone in my development team committed a huge intermediate file into our CVS repository (run as Client-Server configuration where I have no server-side access).

I have "cvs removed" the file, but the existence of this file seriously slows down working with that module.

The file was never needed, if I request that the FILENAME.EXT,v is deleted (e.g. the comma-V file on the server), would that be enough to wipe all existence of the file from the module?

I'm looking for a simple solution ideally not running the CVS tool as our IT department are unable to use it (and complex requests frequently get ignored).

From serverfault Ray Hayes

• If you request that file.txt,v is deleted from the filesystem, you should be ok - clients operating in that module may get strange errors if they didn't run 'cvs update' since the file was cvs rm'd.

  Either have your users remove the module and check out the module again or get them to edit CVS/Entries and remove any mention of the file in question.

  Ray Hayes : Thought so, thanks.
  From Alex Holst

OVF Tools error

Hello all,

I am trying to use OVF tools 1.0 to create an .ovf appliance split to 4gbs. When I run the following command:

ovftool --chunkSize=4gb vi://:@/?ds= e:\test\test.ovf

everything starts off fine. It will got for about 15-16% then I get this message:

"Error: unable to get NFC ticket for target disk".

I have looked online, but cannot find anything that matches this problem. I am using Windows 2k3 as the ovf creation server, and I'm in a ESX 3.5 environment. The ovf must be split into 4gb chunks (or less) so they can be put onto DVDs. Also, when it is done it deletes the files it started to create. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

From serverfault ToreTrygg

• The same problem is discussed here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1410880

  From FractalizeR

Vmware Server 2.02 on Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) - Performance problems with guest OS/servers!

Hello all,

Hope someone here can help out as I'm pulling out my hair trying to find a way to get some decent performance from my VM box. I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit with an AMD 4 Core (phenom) and 4Gb or RAM. I also have another system that is running Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit (a notebook) with 2Gb or RAM. I can run an image on the slower/older dual core notebook lightning fast and take that same image and run it on my VM server and it runs noticeably slower. To make matters worst, when I run 2 server images that I have (that I need to run with some decent performance level) they come up very slowly and can almost cause the host OS to come to a halt/run very slow. If I look at the Ubuntu perfomance monitor it doesn't show a huge load on the CPUs or more than 55-65% RAM usage but it still runs like it's about to die. So... Here are my questions:

1. Are there any know issues with the setup I have that would cause such bad performance?
2. Should I be running something other than VMware 2.02?
3. Should I be running some other host OS?
4. Is there any way to change/modify settings some place to fix this?

Thanks in advice.

From serverfault ToreTrygg

• I recently installed 2.01 on CentOS 5.3 and wasn't very happy with its stability and management capability. I upgraded the OS to 5.4 and it got worse. Upgradinging to 2.02 didn't help. It got to the point that guests would randomly crash and most of the time I couldn't start them. I went back to 1.10 (my standard is 1.09) and have had no trouble at all on the exact same hardware and OS.

  From Keith Stokes

• VMware Server 2 dumped its ability to be managed via the VMware Server Console application in favour of a Tomcat servlet, causing its disk space, CPU, and memory usage to balloon compared to version 1. Whether it's a plot to encourage users to shell out for VMware ESX or just poor judgement, I'd recommend reverting to VMware Server 1.10.

  From Eric3

Access mails on server after moving mail DNS

I've just moved mail for a domain over to Google Apps, from my web host. All is well, except for some mails in one account left on my host. I don't want to reverse all my dns changes just to retrieve these mails if I can get away without it.

My interface with my host is through Plesk, on a Virtuozzo instance. I'm asking here because I'm unable to contact my hosting provider.

From serverfault BradyKelly

• To switch all your traffic over to Google Apps, the only thing you need to do is update your MX records to point to their servers.

  I assume that this is what you did? Or did you update your A record for your existing MX records to point to the google server?

  If all you did was update your MX to point to the Google servers, then you should still be able to log into your old POP/IMAP server using the old settings.

  However if you updated your A records for your MX target (say, mail.example.com) to point to the Google IP address, then you've got a few options:

  1. Create a new A record (say, oldmail.example.com) to point to the IP address of the old mail server. Then connect to that.

  2. Point your mail client's POP settings to the IP address of old mail server (instead of mail.example.com, point it to x.x.x.x)

  From Farseeker

• Turns out this was quite easy. The old mail server, on my host, serves accounts for all domains, so I just changed the Outlook login to use the host domain name, not the old mail. subdomain, and I could download the mail.

  From BradyKelly

How can I optimize nginx? From benchmarking it seems Apache2 is faster for static delivery

On one of my vps servers I've setup both Apache2 and nginx, nginx on port 8080 and Apache2 on 80, and have created a static HTML file.

static HTML/Apache2:

meder@meder-desktop:~$ sudo ab -n 1000 -c 5 http://medero.org/index.html
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking medero.org (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Completed 400 requests
Completed 500 requests
Completed 600 requests
Completed 700 requests
Completed 800 requests
Completed 900 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Finished 1000 requests


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.9
Server Hostname:        medero.org
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        1014 bytes

Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   6.186 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      1334000 bytes
HTML transferred:       1014000 bytes
Requests per second:    161.67 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       30.928 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       6.186 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          210.61 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       12   15   2.1     14      35
Processing:    12   16   3.4     15      48
Waiting:       12   16   2.8     15      37
Total:         25   31   4.3     29      63

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     29
  66%     30
  75%     31
  80%     32
  90%     35
  95%     39
  98%     47
  99%     51
 100%     63 (longest request)

static HTML/Nginx:

meder@meder-desktop:~$ sudo ab -n 1000 -c 5 http://medero.org:8080/index.html
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking medero.org (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Completed 400 requests
Completed 500 requests
Completed 600 requests
Completed 700 requests
Completed 800 requests
Completed 900 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Finished 1000 requests


Server Software:        nginx/0.6.32
Server Hostname:        medero.org
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        1014 bytes

Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   6.424 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      1226000 bytes
HTML transferred:       1014000 bytes
Requests per second:    155.67 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       32.119 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       6.424 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          186.38 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       13   15   2.5     14      36
Processing:    12   17  11.0     15     184
Waiting:       11   16   9.6     14     171
Total:         25   32  11.4     30     200

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     30
  66%     31
  75%     33
  80%     33
  90%     35
  95%     38
  98%     45
  99%     50
 100%    200 (longest request)

I've done this numerous times and the results are pretty much the same, with Apache2 taking less time to process than Nginx.

Here's the config for nginx:

user www-data;
worker_processes  4;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

    gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

And Apache 2.2.9-10 (prefork - nonthreaded):

MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 15
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          5
    MinSpareServers       5
    MaxSpareServers      10
    MaxClients          150
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

Loaded modules:

meder@host:~$ sudo apache2ctl -t -D DUMP_MODULES
Loaded Modules:
 core_module (static)
 log_config_module (static)
 logio_module (static)
 mpm_prefork_module (static)
 http_module (static)
 so_module (static)
 alias_module (shared)
 auth_basic_module (shared)
 authn_file_module (shared)
 authz_default_module (shared)
 authz_groupfile_module (shared)
 authz_host_module (shared)
 authz_user_module (shared)
 autoindex_module (shared)
 cgi_module (shared)
 dir_module (shared)
 env_module (shared)
 mime_module (shared)
 negotiation_module (shared)
 php5_module (shared)
 rewrite_module (shared)
 setenvif_module (shared)
 status_module (shared)
 wsgi_module (shared)
Syntax OK

Server details:

Debian Lenny 5.0.3
32-bit Unmanaged VPS
384MB Ram

processor   : 7
vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model       : 23
model name  : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5405  @ 2.00GHz
stepping    : 6
cpu MHz     : 1995.006
cache size  : 6144 KB
physical id : 1
siblings    : 4
core id     : 3
cpu cores   : 4
apicid      : 7
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips    : 3990.03
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Memory info:

cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:       393216 kB
MemFree:        304828 kB
Buffers:             0 kB
Cached:              0 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:              0 kB
Inactive:            0 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       393216 kB
LowFree:        304828 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:           0 kB
Mapped:          88388 kB
Slab:                0 kB
PageTables:          0 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:         0 kB
Committed_AS:   354892 kB
VmallocTotal:        0 kB
VmallocUsed:         0 kB
VmallocChunk:        0 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB

It appears that mod_deflate isn't even enabled so I'm not even using gzip on Apache2, yet it serves the static HTML faster than nginx. I'm a bit puzzled, could it be that I need to just reconfigure the settings for nginx? Any advice appreciated.

Update #1 - I installed apache2-utils and ran dstat. I also changed the test file so it's now using a 9.7 mb html file, Apache2 and nginx are still pretty consistent. Perhaps I need to limit the amount of memory available or something to bottleneck it..

Here is the dstat running while I queried the 9.7 mb consecutive times:

sudo dstat
----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |   0     0 |   0     0 |   0  7230 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |6071B   20k|   0     0 |   0  5534 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 720B   21k|   0     0 |   0  4749 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 822B 4788B|   0     0 |   0  5487 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 288B  408B|   0     0 |   0  4625 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |5595B 4057B|   0     0 |   0  5966 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 957B 3710B|   0     0 |   0  4904 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 986B 5013B|   0     0 |   0  6906 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 872B 3636B|   0     0 |   0  5614 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  368B|   0     0 |   0  5506 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  660B|   0     0 |   0  4883 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |1604B 5105B|   0     0 |   0  5087 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 860B 3708B|   0     0 |   0    13k
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 909B 3619B|   0     0 |   0    11k
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  16k   44k|   0     0 |   0  5920 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 132B 3256B|   0     0 |   0  6946 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 184B 3589B|   0     0 |   0  5083 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 869B 3637B|   0     0 |   0  5528 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 917B 3576B|   0     0 |   0  5638 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 9.8k 2299B|   0     0 |   0  5255 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |6205B   11k|   0     0 |   0  7230 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |1712B   35k|   0     0 |   0  4863 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 243k   25M|   0     0 |   0  7432 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 337k   33M|   0     0 |   0  8716 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 297k   35M|   0     0 |   0  6786 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 349k   33M|   0     0 |   0  7655 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 338k   33M|   0     0 |   0  7605 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 324k   34M|   0     0 |   0  7967 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 320k   35M|   0     0 |   0  7235 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 333k   35M|   0     0 |   0  7062 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 355k   35M|   0     0 |   0  6209 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 299k   33M|   0     0 |   0  8732 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 369k   34M|   0     0 |   0  8610 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 352k   34M|   0     0 |   0  7635 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 331k   34M|   0     0 |   0  8087 
  0   1  99   0   0   0|   0     0 | 312k   35M|   0     0 |   0  6445 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  81k 7879k|   0     0 |   0  6131 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B 1848B|   0     0 |   0  5124 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 120B 6216B|   0     0 |   0  5426 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 120B 3256B|   0     0 |   0  4947 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  15k   43k|   0     0 |   0  5632 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 829B 8504B|   0     0 |   0  5913 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  92B  384B|   0     0 |   0  8680 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 926B  571B|   0     0 |   0  4843 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 795B  675B|   0     0 |   0  5479 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 280B 2048B|   0     0 |   0  4536 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 172B 1760B|   0     0 |   0  6334 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 120B  456B|   0     0 |   0  5710 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  408B|   0     0 |   0  6225 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 120B  368B|   0     0 |   0  6639 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 140B  328B|   0     0 |   0  5507 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |7487B 9697B|   0     0 |   0  7201 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 920B   37k|   0     0 |   0  6086 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 320B  536B|   0     0 |   0  5756 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  40B  384B|   0     0 |   0  7153 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  368B|   0     0 |   0  5227 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  408B|   0     0 |   0  6042 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 | 160B  368B|   0     0 |   0  6730 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  280B|   0     0 |   0  5424 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  336B|   0     0 |   0  8042 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  40B  384B|   0     0 |   0  5559 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  280B|   0     0 |   0  6266 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  296B|   0     0 |   0  6198 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  456B|   0     0 |   0  6499 
  0   0 100   0   0   0|   0     0 |  80B  368B|   0     0 |   0  7143 

From serverfault meder

• On a connection that isn't bandwidth-constrained (as I suspect your tiny little connections here are), gzip-compressed content will be slower to transfer than non-gzip-compressed content, because of the extra CPU involved. Compressing your content is usually faster because smaller chunks of data transfer faster, but with that little test it probably won't help. Try comparing apples with apples and see what you get.

  meder : Ok. I turned gzip off on nginx, ran `ab` again and got 7.766s, 6.270s, then 6.5s for those 1000 requests which is still slower than Apache2's 6.1s ( second test was 6.0s ). I did remember to restart nginx, and I'm querying the same exact static HTML content which is 1014 bytes.
  From womble

• Have you tried optimizing the performance by serving the files from a ramdisk? Some VPSes are notoriously bad for IOwait time, caused by contended access to the disk.

  Try running dstat on the server while the ab process is running, see whether the disks are taking a massive hit.

  meder : I installed `dstat`, edited my original post with some stats while doing the `ab` testing.
  From Tom O'Connor

• In order to get realistic results you must have realistic tests. It's completely feasible apache is faster for your test scenario, but are you really serving just a single one-kilobyte file?

  As you're using mpm-prefork, it's safe to say nginx will consume significantly less memory when there are several concurrent transfers. Concurrent transfers pile up easily if you have large files or your clients have slow internet connections. Nginx will win hands down when you have enough concurrent transfers for Apache to eat up all your memory.

  One can argue this is not really an issue as long as there's enough memory for Apache. However, this is not the whole truth. When less memory is consumed by http server, more content from file system will be cached, and every disk seek eliminated will be a small performance victory.

  meder : My server is already being used as a production server and hosts 4-5 sites, one of which gets ~1000ish unique hits per day but I guess that isn't really enough because it always has 300MB of ram available. So what you're saying is Apache2 will always win when there's enough available ram and less concurrent connections?

  womble : Whoa, a whole *1000* hits a day? Look out Twitter!

  meder : Not 1000 hits, 1000 uniques but probably a several thousand *hits*, of course I know that's nothing compared to the sites with millions/billions of hits per day, but I was just trying to say it isn't *completely* underutilized.

  af : Well, if you get a 100k hits a day, every request takes three seconds to serve and they are distributed evenly throughout the day, you'll have 10+X apache processes running with mpm-prefork, where X is you MinSpareServers setting. You'll have plenty of safety margin, so there's not much to optimize.
  From af

• Your test is flawed. -c 5 does not properly test either server. an event based server like nginx is best at handling thousands of concurrent, and possibly slow downloads at once. You tested 5 concurrent downloads. -n 20000 -c 1000 might start to show nginx performing better.

  Try running this tool against both servers, and see which one falls over first

  I bet it won't be nginx :-)

  meder : thanks, I was waiting for a response like this - I'll do more benchmarking and will update!
  From Justin

Apache redirect based on hostname

I have multiple hostnames resolving to a single machine, e.g.:

• build.mydomain.com
• www.mydomain.com
• jira.mydomain.com
• mydomain.com

Is it possible to setup apache in order to redirect requests to each different hostname?

e.g:

• build.mydomain.com -> build.mydomain.com:8111,
• www.mydomain.com -> www.mydomain.com:8080
• mydomain.com -> www.mydomain.com:8080

The DNS records are setup to all point to the same machine, i just want to redirect to the right port given the hostname.

Cheers,

Edit:

Machine is debian w/ Apache2

Edit2:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.mydomain.com
    ServerAlias mydomain.com
    redirect 301 / http://www.mydomain.com:8080/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName build.mydomain.com
    redirect 301 / http://build.mydomain.com:8111/
</VirtualHost>

From serverfault slappybag

• Are you running multiple instances of Apache, each listening on a different port? Why? Virtual hosts will take care of everything.

  http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/name-based.html

  slappybag : No, single instance of apache that I wanted to use to redirect requests. Got multiple instances of tomcat running, e.g. TeamCity on 8111, tomcat on 8080 and JIRA on 8081. I wanted to redirect to the respective port given the hostname.

  MidnighToker : how about mod-rewrite running on the apache:80 instance? possibly even apache as proxy but that sounds like far too much effort for a redirect.

  slappybag : I have it half working, using VirtualHost directive with a redirect 301 to the same hostname and different port. This should do for now. Cheers,
  From ynguldyn

• Actually, I doubt using redirect is winning strategy for what you're trying to do. I'd recommend using mod_proxy to create a reverse proxy which will hide the way you've built your system.

  And if I had the choice, I would use something more lightweight and more convenient to configure, like Perlbal.

  From af

Active Directory Group Policy: Script Errors

Hello all. Anyone having issues with AD group policy script errors when enabling VMware Fusion's "Sharing" feature? I've run into this problem in version 2.0 and 3.0. I have a logon script applied on an AD OU. It works fine on all Windows client workstations and in VMware Fusion only when the "Sharing" feature is NOT enabled. Any ideas would be much appreciated. Thanks.

From serverfault ToreTrygg

• Can you run the logon script manually once you log in? any error output ? What is failing about the script?

  My completely off the wall guess is that the sharing feature is mapping drives that your script then tries to map, causing it to fail.

  From Zypher