Monthly Archives: May 2014

How to secure wipe file system

Before you cancel rented dedicated server, it`s good practice to secure wipe disc drives. Reboot to recovery console, and:
Use shred, Luke!

shred -n 0 -f -v -z /dev/sda

ext4 perfomance tuning

I use following mount options.
In some projects it gives significant performance boost.

errors=remount-ro – need for hardware problem case. Because if disc remains mounted, further writing attempts can deadly damage file system. And one more case – easy monitoring. Just check via zabbix or nagios that you have no ro file system.

noatime, nodiratime – not fix access time. Double check that your applications doesn`t need this.

discard – use trim for SSD drive. In case SATA or SAS this option ignored by system.
commit, nobarrier – dangerous in case of power outage. But for my infrastructure o.k.

ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,nodiratime,commit=100,discard,nobarrier

And SED for fstab fixing (I use puppet, chef, fabric).

sed -r -i 's/ext4\s+defaults/ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,nodiratime,commit=100,discard,nobarrier/' /etc/fstab