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Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Benefits of a RAID configuration

We unfortunately suffered a hard disk failure over the weekend, which meant that a replacement was required.  We had been watching the ’Reallocated sector count’ rising on the specific disk for some time and it was in range of 2000 so were not totally surprised by the turn of events. One can run with a small number of reallocated sectors as the bad sectors will have been replaced with spares. Their Logical Block Addresses (LBA) having been reallocated to other physical sectors.  It is only when the number of spare physical sectors run out that one runs into real problems.   We also note that a couple of the other drives have a few reallocated sectors but these are in the low numbers and are not increasing so there is no need for concern at the moment.

Fortunately the disk was part of a RAID 6 configuration which meant that no data was lost and we could run in a degraded mode until such time as we could replace the disk.  We could even have survived a further failure, but fortunately that was not necessary.

The disk duly arrive and we plugged it in and restarted our QNAP system.  The drive was accepted and a RAID rebuilt immediately started.   It was as simple as that. No reconfiguration of need to do anything at all, just wait for the rebuilt to complete.  Simplicity itself.

This all helps justify our original decision, several years ago to purchase a QNAP system, and this is the first drive that we have had to replace, so it has paid for itself over the years.

In that time the drive technology has moved on, and our replacement drive, a Seagate Constellation ES,  whilst not being identical to the original, it being a later and ‘faster’ model, was a perfect match, and we note runs slightly cooler.

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High CPU usage MSE and QNAP QGet

We have noticed a problem since we installed KB2754296, which is an update to Microsoft Security Essentials where our CPU usage continually peaks at 100% usage.

Investigation reveals that the high usage is caused by process NisSrv.exe which is the Microsoft Network Realtime Inspection Service.

We use QNAP network devices and there is a small program called QGet which is used to contact the QNAP Download manager.  QGet runs on the PC and communicates with the QNAP process, and is used to provide the QNAP service with instruction as to what files to download.  When the QGet process is running the NisSRV.exe usage goes through the roof,slowing down the PC to a point where its is virtually unusable.

The version of QGet does not seem to matter and we have tested versions 2.1.5.0702 and 3.0.5.1009 and the result is the same.

The version of MSE is 4.1.5220 and in our installed version there is no way in which the Network inspection service can be disabled.

The only conclusion we can draw is that the two programs are incompatible.  We have disabled the QGet program, since it is not really used much anyway, but MSE should never cause the problem in the first place in our opinion.

Possibly we should consider an alternative security program over MSE!

See: QNAP Forum

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MySQL logs and QNAP systems

 

All (most) company development and testing making use of MySQL databases locates the databases upon QNAP systems.  The default MySQL installing being by the QNAP installation itself.  Recently there has been some interest in the space being consumed.  Looking at the database settings in the /etc/my.cnf file it can be seen that it is not optimum.
The main areas of interest are the log files.  It is noted that the binlog format is set to STATEMENT which is why the messages about log format have been seen.  [It is not known how many systems are set to the default so it is sensible perhaps to leave the setting alone.  In this way we have a 'worse' case scenario for when we distribute software and have to include session settings to enable the software to install and/or function.]

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