Platform: All Windows
As a system administrator (or frankly, power home user with big drives), one of the more tedious tasks is managing drive space. Now that we are in an era of half-terabyte drives, giant databases, media files, etc, it's often very difficult to figure out where all that space went. A very powerful visualization tool is the use of treemaps. A typical treemap application takes a data set and represents it graphically, with the size (or date) of data scaled relative to the other datasets. With a tool that does this based on drive space usage, you can quickly locate that 1GB memory.dmp file you forgot about after the last BSOD, or find that .iso image of Windows 2000 you no longer need, etc. A fantastic implementation of this is SequoiaView from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands. This free application is fabulous for graphically representing drive space usage on Windows.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Platform: All Hardware
Here's a trick I came up with a week ago. If you work in any sort of data center or high server density server room, it's always very difficult to identify a noise from a particular fan or hard drive. Last week our phone system had developed a drive with a head or bearing problem, but there were no log entries on the machine to identify the drive. Since the drives are hot swappable, it was no big deal to pull the drive out while the system is running. This system has high-availability requirements, too. The problem here was that the drives are closely packed together, and the high pitched sound coming from the bad drive was such that it made it very difficult to identify which drive was the problem one. One potential solution is a stethescope. I did not have one immediately available to me. Another solutions which I did have available was to use an inexpensive sound level meter. I have an older version of the Radio Shack model 33-4050 that I keep in my toolkit (I used to install car stereos and consider myself a home theater enthusiast as well). Using the sound meter on the A weighting, I could move the meter up and down across the array of drives and find the one making the loudest noise. That one was the bad one, and I was able to easily identify it where my ears failed me.
Here's a trick I came up with a week ago. If you work in any sort of data center or high server density server room, it's always very difficult to identify a noise from a particular fan or hard drive. Last week our phone system had developed a drive with a head or bearing problem, but there were no log entries on the machine to identify the drive. Since the drives are hot swappable, it was no big deal to pull the drive out while the system is running. This system has high-availability requirements, too. The problem here was that the drives are closely packed together, and the high pitched sound coming from the bad drive was such that it made it very difficult to identify which drive was the problem one. One potential solution is a stethescope. I did not have one immediately available to me. Another solutions which I did have available was to use an inexpensive sound level meter. I have an older version of the Radio Shack model 33-4050 that I keep in my toolkit (I used to install car stereos and consider myself a home theater enthusiast as well). Using the sound meter on the A weighting, I could move the meter up and down across the array of drives and find the one making the loudest noise. That one was the bad one, and I was able to easily identify it where my ears failed me.
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