_mxr blog » geekery http://blog.mxr.at unprocessed dumps of various kind Thu, 13 May 2010 21:39:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 HD speed comparison. http://blog.mxr.at/hd-speed-comparison/ http://blog.mxr.at/hd-speed-comparison/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:12:18 +0000 Christoph Tilley http://blog.mxr.at/?p=279 post which describes my backup workflow: I wanted to know how the different drive setups perform. Here is the read/write performance of following drive configurations: ]]> A quick follow-up to my post which describes my backup workflow: I wanted to know how the different drive setups perform. I grabbed a free application called Helios LAN test which originally was designed to test LAN performance, but lets you choose local drives as testing source. You can run various tests on the drive but I sticked to simple read/write tests with 300MB files.

Halios LAN test: Setup for the drive test. I just ran the read/write tests.

I tested following drive configurations: Apple software striped RAID (configured in disk utility with 32k and 128k blocks) with two 1,5TB 7200rpm internal SATA drives, internal VelociRaptor SAS drive with 10,000rpm and 300GB, internal SATA drive with 7200rpm and 1,5 TB, external SATA drive with 7200rpm and 1,0TB connected via eSATA over the Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P and an external SATA drive with 7200rpm and 1,0TB connected via USB 2.0. Here are the results:

Conclusion: A striped RAID is fast! Even the disk utility-software-configured RAID is. And eSATA is fast too. So my workflow is as following: Use the VelociRaptor for system files, use the one internal SATA for stock footage and stuff, use the striped RAID for daily work, but backup frequently to external SATA drives via eSATA.

]]> http://blog.mxr.at/hd-speed-comparison/feed/ 0 mrtg running on osx 10.5 http://blog.mxr.at/mrtg-running-on-osx-10-5/ http://blog.mxr.at/mrtg-running-on-osx-10-5/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:13:54 +0000 Christoph Tilley http://blog.tilley.at/?p=30 I am running a software-router with DHCP and NAT but without any statistics or monitoring functionality. But I can do SNMP polls so I decided to give the popular mrtg (multi-router-traffic-grapher) a shot.

Mrtg is written by Tobi Oetiker, the author of the rrd-graph tool, and makes use of it. From mrtg’s website a short description: You have a router, you want to know what it does all day long? Then MRTG is for you. It will monitor SNMP network devices and draw pretty pictures showing how much traffic has passed through each interface.

I installed mrtg using macports via: sudo port install mrtg
The configuration is a bit tricky then, but not a big deal. If you need help or assistance just post your worries in the comments.

As proof of concept here is my updated mrtg graph:

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