Rate Limiting Baiduspider Using nginx

The Baidu search engine has a voracious appetite for content and crawls one of my sites aggressively. It’s bad enough having to deal with load generated by bots from large technology companies with vast resources, but it’s another thing entirely when those bots crawl from dozens of IP addresses simultaneously and routinely browse thousands of […]

Troubleshooting GlusterFS performance issues

I’m in the middle of a new GlusterFS deployment for our research computing infrastructure (storage of Bioinformatics and GIS data). At first I was just happy to see the huge size of my /home partition when I did df -h, but I quickly found that performance wasn’t quite what I was expecting and I started […]

Got an SSD… w00t?

In addition to copious amounts of Swiss chocolate and a basking platform for my turtles, I bought a solid-state disk while I was in Europe. It was cheap enough and I think the underlying technology has advanced enough to be less scary, so I bought it. They’re still not THAT cheap, but the price was […]