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June 10th, 2008
08:51 pm - World's best datacenter tech.
http://tapespace.com/view/Don_t_Drop_That_Server
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/happy.gif) amused
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May 15th, 2008
10:23 am - Long past time.
CNN headline: California Supreme Court strikes down the state's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.
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April 18th, 2008
10:00 pm - More madness.
This is why I never seem to get anything useful done on weekends. I just spent two hours locating a high-quality copy of a song from the long out-of-production soundtrack of the 80s Chipmunks movie.
I'm pretty sure I'm insane.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/confused.gif) confused
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March 24th, 2008
05:04 pm - Idiots.
http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/24/budget-woes-at-nasa-to-impact-mars-rovers/
Complete and utter stupidity. The MERs are a perfect throwback to a time when NASA launched appropriately over-engineered vehicles that actually worked, and now they're going to cut funding.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/angry.gif) angry
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February 21st, 2008
01:14 am - Note to self
Consumption of a chocolate orange completely eliminates the drowsy effects of diphenhydramine.
This is all well and good if one wants it for allergies. Not so much if one wants it so that one goes to sleep before 0300.
Current Mood: annoyed
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January 18th, 2008
12:11 pm - überpills
This doctor doesn't screw around. I was just after the same ten-day course of amoxicillin they gave me last time. Instead I have a five-day course of azithromycin. I should stop coughing my lungs out relatively soon.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/sad.gif) sick
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05:13 am - More amoxicillin, please.
That two-week cold I didn't have last year is back.
EDIT: Oh, and I get on a plane to Pennsylvania Monday morning.
Current Mood: sick
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November 26th, 2007
05:01 am - Overkill? What's that?
Yes, that's two four-drive RAID 1 arrays (md1 is /boot, md3 is /), as well as two 4GB RAID 1s for swap (effectively creating an 8GB RAID10 for swap).
I get a little crazy when I'm tired.
Speaking of which, I think I'll get two hours' sleep before I have to go to work...
[root@book ~]# swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/md3 partition 4192888 0 0
/dev/md13 partition 4192888 0 0
[root@book ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md14 : active raid1 sdd4[1] sdb4[0]
473604160 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[>....................] resync = 0.3% (1593088/473604160) finish=113.5min speed=69264K/sec
md13 : active raid1 sdd3[1] sdb3[0]
4192896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 sdd1[2] sdb1[3] sdc1[1] sda1[0]
104320 blocks [4/4] [UUUU]
md3 : active raid1 sdc3[1] sda3[0]
4192896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md4 : active raid1 sdc4[1] sda4[0]
230331840 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md2 : active raid1 sdd2[2] sdb2[3] sdc2[1] sda2[0]
10482304 blocks [4/4] [UUUU]
unused devices:
[root@book ~]#
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Pat Benatar - Invincible
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04:36 am - SoftLayer rocks.
From the upgrade ticket: We had no 250's in stock, so you were upgraded to 2x500 free of charge. Your server is back online responding to ssh with the disks installed
Naturally not everything went entirely smoothly... This was the first time the box was rebooted since I brought it up and configured it.
* IP forwarding did not get enabled on boot, so all the VMs were inaccessible.
* MySQL did not restart on boot.
* The dbmail daemon triumvirate did not restart on boot.
* The www.runawaynet.com VM had a weird error when it booted up trying to connect the network link. Manually connecting it (literally by going VM->Removable Devices->Ethernet->Connect in the vmware server console) worked perfectly. Wtf?
The first three are just me being stupid and forgetting to configure things to start on boot. The last is just weird.
But, anyway, 750GB of total usable space! I don't think we'll have a storage problem for a little while.
I also added 8 more IPs yesterday (for a total of 13), so that won't be an issue soon, either.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/energetic.gif) bouncy
Current Music: Elton John - Tiny Dancer
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November 25th, 2007
01:43 am - Madness.
Hrm...
I was going to add a second pair of 250GB HDDs to the new server at $20/ea. Then I figured I might as well just get a pair of 500s at $30/ea. Of course, 750s are $40, and 1TBs are $50. And at this point I'm wondering if I'll just get a second identical $214/month server. Though if I'm going to do that, I kinda want to wait for SoftLayer to get their new Seattle datacentre up... Geographic redundancy would be nice...
So maybe we're back to a pair of 250GB HDDs for the moment...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/thoughtful.gif) contemplative
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October 30th, 2007
08:58 pm - There is no earthquake.
You see, my grandparents and I were in a moving vehicle, just pulling up to my place. We walked in and MLD is walking down the hall yelling "That was an earthquake!" and I'm standing there going "huh?", 'cause we didn't feel a thing.
So, yeah, despite rumours to the contrary that have begun pervading the media, I felt no earthquake, therefore there was no earthquake.
Current Location: Earthquake Central without the earthquakes
Current Mood: tired
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October 21st, 2007
12:55 pm - DNS: Check
ns1.runawaynet.com is now a dedicated virtual machine on the new xeon box (the new box is, incidentally, dubbed "book"). Serenity is running as a slave at ns2.runawaynet.com for the time being.
I'm locking down _everything_ on book (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eirias_valar called it "a closed book"... he has been flogged). Most of the little "service" VMs like ns1 won't even be accessible from the outside world except on the ports their services are on. You'd have to be on book to even SSH into them.
My iptables ruleset is going to be a nightmare...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/working.gif) accomplished
Current Music: Nightwish - Nemo
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October 20th, 2007
04:15 pm - "Hot" and/or Remote conversion to RAID 1, RHEL/CentOS 5 edition.
I've got a new box to replace Serenity up with SoftLayer. Unfortunately their provisioning system has no option for installing with a software RAID setup. I could've taken advantage of the KVM-over-IP and the ability to boot from an ISO image held in the 1GB network storage lockbox SoftLayer includes with all servers to just do an install from scratch, but what fun is that? Besides, I figured the hot migration would take less time. As it turns out, I was wrong, but only because I didn't get it right the first few times. Oops.
This write-up is extremely rough and I'm not that great at documenting and explaining things, but someone with enough related experience should be able to work out what I did...
IMPORTANT: This procedure makes various assumptions regarding device names, kernel versions, etc., and should not be used unmodified. Also, by its nature, this procedure is _extremely dangerous_ and should not be attempted by anyone uncertain of their Linux skills and understanding of RAID.
Additionally, I did this on a server where I had KVM-over-IP and remote power-cycle access, so I don't address safety mechanisms like grub's ability to change the default boot option for a single boot, and reboot automatically after a kernel panic. If you try this remotely without KVM-over-IP or some sort of good serial console and remote power control, you're crazier than I am, and should read up on the safety mechanisms available.
Oh yeah, and backup your data (not that I did... of course, this was a fresh server).
This procedure takes a great deal of knowledge from the extremely helpful "Remote Conversion to Linux Software RAID-1 for Crazy Sysadmins HOWTO", along with my own experiences with Linux software RAID w/mdadm, including a couple hot conversions at my previous employer.
( Several pages of procedure under cut. )
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Def Leppard - Animal
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October 8th, 2007
06:07 pm - I didn't know those frequencies existed.
So, yeah, I got tired of having my primary means of music-listening being crappy speakers and crappy headphones and ordered a $70 pair of headphones that came highly recommended (Sennheiser HD280 Pro). Just got them a few minutes ago. I was unaware of a good number of the frequencies I'm now finding in my music collection.
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October 6th, 2007
September 9th, 2007
07:24 pm - New plan:
Script the whole bloody thing so I can do test runs over and over with minimal hassle until I get it right.
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01:36 pm - mail01 plan. (WIP)
* Substantially lower the TTLs for the apporpriate domains. (Done)
* Contact everyone using serenity for mail to warn them to make sure their mail server is set to "mail.runawaynet.com".
* Run db maintenance on serenity.
* Install fresh RHEL5 box, mail01.runawaynet.com.
* Install EPEL:
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm
* Update:
yum -y update
* Install necessary packages:
yum -y install dbmail dbmail-mysql mysql mysql-server postfix cyrus-sasl
* Remove unnecessary packages:
yum remove sendmail
* Put "new" dbmail.conf on mail01.
* Create dbmail MySQL user and database.
* Copy postfix configuration off Serenity, modifying IPs appropriately. (Need to remember SASL configuration.)
* Shut down postfix on serenity.
* Shut down dbmail on serenity.
* Change mail to point to same IP as mail01.
* Do a dbmail database dump:
mysqldump -u root -p -q --single-transaction dbmail | gzip -1 -c > dbmail.dump.mysql.gz
* Copy database dump to new box and restore:
zcat dbmail.dump.mysql.gz > dbmail.dump.mysql
printf "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;\n" > /tmp/fkc0
printf "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;\n" > /tmp/fkc1
cat /tmp/fkc0 dbmail.dump.mysql /tmp/fkc1 | mysql -u dbmail dbmail -p
* Run the dbmail 2.0->2.2 migration script:
cat /usr/share/doc/dbmail-mysql-2.2.5/migrate_from_2.0_to_2.2.mysql | mysql -u dbmail dbmail -p
* Fix the database (this will take... some time...):
dbmail-util -by
* Start dbmail-imapd, test, discover it's broken, fix problems.
service dbmail-imapd start
*
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September 8th, 2007
07:01 pm - IPv6 Spelling
I just realized IPv6's address space can be (ab)used to spell things.
On a VM I just brought up, VMware decided to generate the MAC "00:0C:29:A6:BA:D1". Since standard practice is that IPv6 addresses are automatically derived from the MAC, the VM was left with the last digit group of its IPv6 address being "BAD1".
I need to figure out what I want to put on DEAD:BEEF.
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September 3rd, 2007
07:55 pm - I can has winter please?
My bathroom, of all places, seems to be experiencing a minor ant invasion. I have no idea why -- there's no food source anywhere near the bathroom for them. I even eat on the opposite side of my bedroom from where the bathroom is.
Wonder if MLD has ant traps around somewhere... I know there's Raid around but I'd rather go with something less irritating to me. Too bad I don't have any orange peel extract...
Current Mood: annoyed
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04:38 pm - This is stupid.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6976173.stm
I don't really care to what degree this doctor is culpable. What I care about is this: You don't give someone a two-litre bottle of water and say "this is two litres" and then give them a two-litre bottle of lemonade and say "this is 4.2 pints"!
The medical community really needs to come up with a better way of handling this.
Current Mood: irritated
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