Tonight I spent two hours banging on an EC2 instance that suddenly went awry. I was adding SSL to a couple of internal applications we host on this instance when my “apache2ctl configtest” command hung. I tried all sorts of things and finally noticed there were tons of entries in /var/log/messages referencing “4gb seg fixup” like this:
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As I mentioned in the last post, I’m working on hosting email accounts on Amazon EC2. I am experimenting with mounting /var on an EBS volume so my database, logs, etc. will survive the failure of an instance. The idea is to be able to start a new instance, attach the EBS volume containing the /var partition, and keep going where the previous instance left off.
The first time I tried to bundle the volume I noticed it was taking a very long time. I had incorrectly assumed that ec2-bundle-vol would automatically exclude any EBS volumes. Instead, it only excludes a static list of directories, so I had to add the EBS volume (/mail) to the exclusion list.
I’m working on setting up a server to host email accounts on Amazon EC2 using the newly released Elastic Block Storage. My benchmarking has shown XFS to be better than ReiserFS for this task - and presumably EXT3, but I ran out of patience.
Since I will need to grow the filesystem in the future, I am using LVM. This also allows me to break up the logical volume into separate EBS volumes, which should increase random access performance. (more…)