Well,.. all the machines are behind the firewall, and so far I only have a couple minor problems to be worked out. It was much less painful than I expected. Anyhow, It’s late. I must get some sleep.
Category: Hardware
Well,.. I made it into work in 35 minutes door to door. This weekend was good, just went by way too fast (dont they always). Saturday night, Steph, Rudy, and I went out to thai lemon grass for dinner. Food was great, I miss that place. Afterwards, Rudy and I got started on the new firewall config. I stayed up till about 4am workin on it, then finally forced myself to go to bed. Woke up around 11 yesterday, and got right back on it. I put my laptop behind the firewall, and had no problems, so I decided to put Steph’s powerbook behind to test. Her powerbook is connected to the net via an airport. For those of you not familiar with what an airport actually does, it’s basicly a router for a wireless network. Unfortunately because of this, it must have it’s own arp table that you can’t get to, because it was being a bitch everytime I’d make a change. I spent the entire day fighting with her stupid mac hardware, which would just randomly stop communicating with the router. Finally around 9pm, a friend gave me the idea of putting it on a separate hub off of the switch, to see if it would clean up. That did the trick, it was workin great, even figured out a way to get Steph’s irc program through the firewall. So tonight, I will put the servers behind and pray that all is good. Today we start the d00gie obedience classes. It’s an 8 week class that meets every monday. It should be fun. All for now.
Bah!
Another weekend gone, Another Monday is here. Friday night, my computer decided it was not gonna run anymore, and took the night off. I tried to tech it for a while, but it kept crashing after like 2 minutes, so I decided to give up, and let it have the night off. Saturday I installed my AEM CAI in my car. VROOOOM!!! When I cam home, I started in on the computer again, I looked into the bios, and found my CPU temp at 175 degrees an rising fast! I rebooted it with the case open, and found that one of the fans on my CPU was dead. This is not a good thing when you have an athlon. They are run very hot. Even with two fans, they run at about 125 degrees, under normal conditions. So yesterday I picked up a new fan, and it was happy again. We went out to the house yesterday and came to the realization that we’re gonna be living there inside of 3 weeks! We have so much stuff to do, like I dunno PACK!!! I hafta call the main office of our builder to see if they have a closing date for us yet. My guess is in about 2 weeks.
HELP!!!
Aliens are trying to talk to me through my laptop hard drive!
I am surprisingly awake for only getting 3 hourz of sleep last night, or this morning I should say. I stayed up way to late working on the firewall. I ran into a few problems with ARP, and ended up having to setup proxy ARP. I should hopefully have everything working tonight. Sorry for any latency you may have been/Will be experiencing on the web server.
Got both hard drivez reformatted and partitioned in the web server. I don’t know that you will notice anything client-side, it was done mainly to re-allocate disk space from old partitions to give more to the ones that were starting to hurt. I also setup a caching nameserver last night. Now I just need to take the time to model our firewall, since the server is built and ready to go. Time to go get some food.
Okay, you ever do something and forget to do one simple thing, and it completely hozez the whole thing? I do, I do! Last night I was repartitioning some space on the www server. This should be a relatively simple task since I was completely wiping out a 5g partition, then creating new partitions on it to move existing ones to.
So I unmount the partition, use fdisk, wipe out the existing partition, and create 3 new ones. Then rebooted (this would be where I fucked up). I forgot to format the partitions, so when linux is booting up, fsck starts spewing out the errors. Now had I realized right away what I had forgotten, this would have been easily recoverable. But I did not.
I look in fdisk, and see that there are a bunch of errors on the partitions, one of which was (what I though) an old partition that should have been removed. So I hit “d” fdisk says pick a partition (1-10) I hit “5” then “w” to save the table, then exit out of fdisk. It is now that I realize that I had forgotten to format before, so I format my 3 new partitions, and reboot.
Linux starts booting, and fsck gives me another error about a partition that should have been “swap”. I go into fstab and realize that something got fucked up some how, and hda7 and hda8 some how switched. I fixed this and rebooted.
Linux boots fine this time. I log in, and type in an alias that I use, and get an error. I immediately knew what happened. /home was gone! somehow, the partitions had all gotten switched around, and /home ended up getting formatted. DOH!
Luckily, unless my users were doing so without my knowledge, there was nothing terribly important on this partition. I lost a lot of misc. stuff that I kept in my home dir, but nothing I can’t live without. Thank god /www /usr & /var are all on another disk.
Oh well, shit happens! This is how I learn all the stuff I know. Make a dreadful mistake, don’t ever do it again.
blah
spent the past 4 hours or so building a new server outta scraps. finally got the hardware issues resolved, and loaded up good ol’ redhat. now to compile a kernel and get this bitch ready to do some serious work.
Okay,.. so far so good today. I found a home for the second server. The best part,.. its gonna be in a rack in the same farm, actually like two racks over. This means, I don’t hafta worry about tryin to get a a port on the switch trunked to the correct vlan. All I hafta do iz pwer it down, re-rack it, and plug the same cables right back into it.
Unfortunately, I still hafta come in on Sunday night, but at least I dont hafta worry about whether or not other people got shit done in time. If all goes well,.. I am in and out of here in less than an hour. Though driving to and from will take me an hour and a half. Oh well…
Okay, so I’m actually gonna write something semi-meaningful here. Work suckz! I have this big project I am working on, which requires moving some servers from one farm to another. The catch…. The farm the servers are moving to, has no front-end network yet. The farm I’m moving from…. is going to have an internal move, which will require me powering down these servers, which are live monitoring servers.
So last week a run around trying to get ahold of a couple servers to setup as swap machines. After numerous issues, like finding out that each machine only had 1 nic, then finding out that they only had 1 cpu each. We stole another cpu for the primary machine, and found a couple more nics. Looks like life is good, the new farm is supposed to be ready in time. Should be a seamless move.
I come in to work today, and find that Network Ops, fucked up and notified the wrong customers of the downtime that they will have when they activate the new switches in the farm. So they in turn pushed the change back until Saturday night/Sunday morning. Oh, I failed to mention that the move within the farm these servers reside in now, has to happen Sunday evening. So now I’m told that they should have these switches activate d Sunday morning, and I should be able to fail the servers over to the new ones waiting in the new farm.
Now, all of the sudden my manager goes,.. “we need a backup plan”. I’m like look dude, you knew about this shit 2 weeks ago, you shoulda thought about this then. So now he’s all like “you need to find us rack space in one of the other farms, where we can temporarily rack a machine as a backup”. Trying to get rack space in a customer farm here for a “non-profit” machine, is next to impossible. Not to mention, It’s Thursday, and I need this shit ready to go tomorrow!
Bah! Life’s a bitch.