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Tuesday, May 15 2007, 6:26 AM

As described in my last few posts, I've recently acquired a good amount of new server hardware. Well, everything is in my posession now except a few sticks of RAM, and it's all set up at work. I ended up picking up the RAID enclosure I mentioned earlier, along with disks to fill it. It ended up being quite a bargain, with the enclosure, drive trays, and a external SCSI cable only costing around $50 plus shipping. Here's all the new gear mounted in a rack at work... My stuff is the white stuff in a sea of black servers.

I've got the RAID enclosure connected to the dual P3 1.0GHz machine I bought (furthest away on the bottom), and combined, there's 18 drive bays available to the SCSI system. I've got fifteen 36GB drives (plus one hot spare) in a RAID5 storage array and two 18GB drives in RAID1 for the OS installation. The RAID5 array weighs in at about 500GB, so I have plenty of room to keep stuff that I don't want to lose.

I'm currently seeing how well my Xen domains function with NFS root filesystems. So far it looks pretty good. I've got the domains that host my web site (among other things) and the mysql domain running off the RAID5 array via NFS, and I haven't noticed any slowdowns whatsoever. The only unexpected thing I've come across is a few weird incompatibilities with the Gentoo init scripts, specifically when it tries to bring up networking devices. It just hangs up when trying to initialize eth1, which is the interface that the NFS root filesystem is accessed through. My firewall script also kills things, but I should be able to fix that.

Having things running over NFS allows for live migration of running domains. I tried it out a few hours ago, and it's surprisingly painless, given that the appropriate functionality is enabled in the Xen daemon. One command sends a running domain between physical Xen hosts, which is pretty damned neat. I can see this being tremendously useful in a high-availabilty sort of environment. If a host machine needs maintenance, you can simply transfer the running child domain to another host, do your business, and transfer it back with only a fraction of a second of downtime.

gentoo linux nfs raid xen

Wednesday, September 06 2006, 11:13 AM

I had a good holiday weekend. I took it easy friday night, and just hung about in the apartment. Saturday afternoon I headed down to Andre's in Indianapolis. He was having a get-together for the holiday weekend, and probably his last before he bows out of bachelor-dom officially. We took it easy Saturday night and played some pool and watched football while enjoying some tasty cold keg-dispensed beverages.

Sunday was party day, and we didn't waste any time, from my perspective anyway. I woke up at my customary 11-something AM, and beers were being dispensed in the 1pm hour. People started showing up around 3pm, and much merryment ensued. Lawn games were played, food was grilled, and good times were had. Also, thanks to some drinking game horseplay and hijinks, I can now truthfully say that I've had a beer poured on my head by an attractive girl, if that's ever a good thing.

In other news, the Gentoo install on my workstation is complete for the most part. I've still got some configuration to dink with, but that's best done for times of boredom. The X configuration I had working flawlessly before the reinstall full-out hardware lockups with the new install, so I had to start fresh. Not a horrible thing, but annoying. I've yet to get all the fun hardware acceleration working, so I'm stuck with slow-rendering graphics for the time being.

I'm also thinking that I need to make some time to try to take apart The Bolt and do some maintenance on it. After a few years of playing, the finish I put on the neck has started to get tacky and it has been rubbing away when I play it. There's a pretty good hole in the finish down near the end of the neck. I guess that's what I get for using plain furniture-grade varnish. Thing is, I doubt I'll be able to strip the finish that's there properly, so I may end up having to buy a new neck altogether and starting the process anew. I also want to redo the electronics in the guitar as well. It's only been running with one pickup for a while now, and I'd like to remedy that. I like the feeling of the Bolt a lot more than I do my Strat, but its tone is very one-dimensional with only one pickup.

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Thursday, August 31 2006, 10:11 PM

One might think that since I've been offline at home for a few days, I must be dead. Well, I'm not. I started a new Gentoo install on my main workstation monday night, and I'm taking my own sweet time with it. The previous install on it was around 3 years old, and because of that, it had accumulated lots of extraneous junk and just needed to be purged. I should have it somewhat usable tonight, so you'll probably see me back online tonight, if you really care...

One of the reasons I've been taking my time is because I picked up a couple new games for my Nintendo DS - StarFox Command and Tetris DS. I consider the latter a staple for any portable Nintendo system. I had Tetris back on my Game Boy, and there's no way I could count how many hours I played Tetris. The former seems pretty cool. It has a turn-based strategy component, and a fly-around-and-shoot-stuff action component as well. The only thing I don't really like about it is that the whole control system is based on using the touchscreen with a stylus. My hands are too big to use that setup comfortably, so I would much prefer using the directional pad.

gentoo nintendods

Friday, May 05 2006, 4:49 PM

It is my recommendation to all system administrator types to NOT try a direct upgrade from mysql 4.0 to mysql 5.0. It's not a good idea, especially when your tables are still stored in a mysql 3.23.x format. I made the assumption that there would be some conversion utility that would upgrade tables easily. I didn't find one. Had I done a full SQL dump, I might have had an easier time. But no, I just made backups of the data files themselves.

All of this resulted in a large pain in my ass, as I did a full emerge of mysql 5.0 and php 4.4.2 only to find that mysql 5 didn't like my data. So I tried emerging back to 4.1, which worked somewhat, well enough to get things back to a read-only state, but it still didn't like the table format. In response to that, I copied my mysql data directory to another machine still running mysql 4.0, and did a full database dump, like I should have in the first place. I was able to import that dump successfully into mysql 4.1 since it actually blew away all the old tables and replaced them with the same data, only in the newer table format.

So if you happened to see that my website was down last night for around 9 hours last night, now you know why. Be ye not so stupid.

frustrations gentoo linux mysql php

Tuesday, December 02 2003, 3:22 AM

Yes, I finally have a day off... after 7 days of working the ass end of the day, I finally have a day where I didn't have to do anything. Sooo... I slept for 12 hours! Hah. And took an hour nap around 6pm! Hah! Ok. Yah. I'm still playing around with the laptop, mostly in the Gentoo area. I got MythTV going on it, and combined with the wireless, it rocks a lot. I can watch live or recorded TV anywhere that my wireless (or wired) LAN can take me. Pretty cool.

Speaking of wireless, I got it working in Gentoo, but with kind of a hack. I had to use DriverLoader, which is a program that allows you to use Windows drivers in linux where native linux drivers haven't been made yet. It's kind of handy, but I'd rather have a native open source driver. There have been a couple times where the connection has flaked out, but I don't know wether it was because of the hacked DriverLoader system, or just an anomaly in the wireless connection. Could be both, who knows.

The wired network card also has a little oddity going on it as well... When I try to mount a NFS share and send files to it, it's slow as freakin hell, but copying from the share is pretty damn fast. I was noticing that there are no transmit statistics being taken for that interface in ifconfig, so there maybe something goofy with the driver, or my installation of it. Whatever the problem is, it's really lame. I guess it could also be the cable... I don't think I've tried changing that out yet. I guess I'll try that soon.

driverloader gentoo linux mythtv nfs

Sunday, November 30 2003, 10:08 AM

Yes, the title says it all. I'm freakin exhausted. And once I finish this last godforsaken midnight shift, I get to drive down to my aunts house for Thanksgiving part deux. I probably won't get to sleep until like 9 or 10.... if anybody's counting, that's 27 hours of being awake, barring any naps or falling asleep at the wheel. Good thing I have monday and tuesday off - I'll probably wake up sometime tuesday once I get to bed tonight.

I've been working on the Gentoo install on my laptop over the past few hours... (it's probably the only thing keeping me awake!) I've made a bit of progress, but there are few things that I need to get working still before I'm happy. I've got sound, video, and the synaptics touchpad/usb mouse working right, but I still need to get the wireless ethernet working. There seems to be a couple open source projects that have drivers that are still in their infancy, but they don't seem to be very stable yet. There's also DriverLoader, but I don't have my WLAN drivers here at work and I couldn't find them on the web. Blah. Once I get wireless going I'll be happy, and can go onto other things, like installing MythTV on here and using it as a mobile frontend system... :-D

That's all for now... let's hope I don't pass out at the wheel or something.

driverloader family gentoo laptop linux mythtv work

Saturday, November 29 2003, 1:39 AM

After a bit of confusion, my laptop has arrived. I was spamming the UPS tracking site with requests to see where my laptop was. I saw it come into lansing around 6:40 this morning, but it didn't update after that. I stuck around work until 9:30 or something, hopeing it would show up. Well, it didn't, so I went home. I checked the status when I got home, and I noticed something - the ontime status changed to "Rescheduled" and the delivery date changed to Monday... I was quite pissed. I called up UPS customer service to see if there was any way to pick it up, and the lady said that it was probably still on a truck, so there was no way. I was mad, but I dealt with it and went it sleep. When I woke up, I was very suprised to see that there was a message from Steven saying that my laptop had arrived. That made me quite happy.

I've got XP installed on it, and my windows environment is pretty much moved over on to this machine. It's quite fast, although the 4200 RPM drive is noticeable. It takes a little while to access stuff from the hard disk. Otherwise, it rocks. I may start the Gentoo install tonight or tomorrow night, depends on how bored I am.

gentoo laptop linux windows

Thursday, November 27 2003, 1:15 AM

The title says it all. I'm here again, tired as hell. I only got about 3-4 hours of sleep today before I was woken up by the guys below us bumpin some lame ass dance/trance music. I was pissed, but it was 1pm, so I couldn't really be all that angry. I woke up for a while, then zonked back out around 6 and slept until 10ish. I guess I got my sleep for the day, but I don't feel rested, that's for damn sure. Night shifts suck like that. I can't wait until I'm back on days next week. I looked at myself in the mirror when I got home today, and the dark circles around my eyes made it look like I got punched or something.

Laptop Update: My laptop shipped last night, and is somewhere called 'OSHTEMO, MI'. Ever heard of it? Yah me neither. UPS says it'll be here friday. I'm geeked. I'm thinkin I may put Gentoo on it earlier than I was planning. I work two 12 hour shifts this weekend to finish off my week of midnight hell, so I'll have a lot of time to kill. Installing Gentoo would probably fill that time nicely. Or I'll just install some games on it and play around to keep myself occupied... :)

frustrations gentoo laptop linux work

Tuesday, November 25 2003, 4:24 AM

Yah, as much as I would have liked to sleep through it and pretend it didn't happen - it snowed today. Normally the first snow of the year doesn't really stick, but it did today. I used to like the winter, but then I got older. I used to be able to go outside and play in the snow, make snowforts, pelt annoying neighbor kids with snowballs, sled down hills, go ice skating.... the list goes on. Now winter is just an extended period of freakin cold weather where I have to bundle up all the time, freezing my butt off while my car warms up and accumulates a covering of salt from driving down the road. Or, in the case of the Camaro, I could just be driving and hit black ice, careen off the road at 60MPH and hit a tree. No thanks. Give me ice-free roads, a bright sun, warm air. Give me shorts and a T-shirt. Give me summer. I have no use for winter anymore.

I'm on the night shift again this week and so far it's been pretty uneventful. I set up a server yesterday for Zac... that's about the only non-boring thing that's happened. I updated my website a bit tonight. I could be working one of a couple of projects I'm involved with here at work, but my attention span is quite short from being so damn tired. There's a monster glass of Mountan Dew within an arms reach, and that's just about all that's keeping me awake right now.

One cool thing did happen today though... After literally years of unwavering patience (read: lack of money), I finally ordered myself a laptop today. I'm pumped. I can't wait for it to get here. Eventually I'll install Gentoo on it and join the Elite Liquid Web Gentoo Linux Laptop Club (ELWGLLC), but I'll probably just put Windows on it at the beginning until the novelty of having a laptop wears off. Then I'll install Gentoo and dual boot. It needs to get here soon, because I'm crazy patient like that.

camaro gentoo laptop winter work

Monday, October 13 2003, 6:44 AM

Well, here I am on another week of midnight shifts. I put myself in line for a hurtin' today... I woke up at a normal time and didn't take a nap or anything during the day. That pretty much means I'll be up for around 24 hours straight by the time it's all said and done. Oh well. I'll make it. Not too much going on recently... the biggest news is the apartment. Joe and I got approved, and we move in the 20th. We're both way pumped.

Tonight has been quite slow. All I've really been doing is watching my Gentoo boxes emerge Gnome 2.4. That's only marginally more exciting than watching paint dry or grass grow. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a pain in the ass... I've seen a good amount of talk on the Gentoo forums about people having various troubles with 2.4... Let's hope i'm not one of those folks, or I might have to put a mask on gnome 2.4 and stick with 2.2. That would mean a lot of wasted time, and I'd probably be mad.

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