Another problem with Endive was the HDD. Not as bad as Chicory, but it was making strange clicking sounds which made me suspicious. I ran a check on the drive with SpinRite but it didn't show any problems, but I took this opportunity to change the drive anyway.
Before wiping the old drive I backed up the Docs and Settings directory, zipped it and put it on Idaho at /data/gregster/backups/UserDocs_from_Endive.zip
Category: "Activity log"
August 8, 2008
August 7, 2008
I've reorganized R&D. It's my fault.
I've pulled Cortland off the floor and moved benches around, gotten rid of the big clutter-gathering table and some other stuff.
August 6, 2008
Stewart reported that Endive wouldn't boot one day while I was on vacation. When I returned I started looking at the machine.
I assumed a dead power supply but in the end I tested every component that has anything to do with booting a box and came to the conclusion that something (power spike, brownout, lemon p/s, etc.?) fried the power supply and in the process fried something on the motherboard. The box is now nearly 5 years old and well out of warranty.
While the machine is salvageable (for a price) I would prefer to retire it. With that in mind I have built Frankenbox the Younger from a good case and an ASUS P4800 board. I also had a good 300W P/S at home that I've donated to the cause. This machine should remain serviceable for at least a couple of years.
Minutes worked reflects diagnosis of Endive, and the teardown(s) and building of FTY.
August 5, 2008
Started gutting the dead TAPoR box to figure out what the problem is.
While the P/S is definitely dead, there seems to be more going on with it (RAM/MoBo?).
I won't spend too much more time on it before writing it off as a parts box for the other (identical) stations.
July 30, 2008
Stewart has graduated to an Intel iMac, so I rebuilt his old machine with Leopard.
Scan Can needs a document-feeder scanner to scan back issues. ETCL has a networked scanner that has recently re-entered use after a repair. Unfortunately, it wasn't working very well over the network. It took quite a while to sort out, but the short version is:
The networked scanner needs to be on the same physical network as the computers accessing it.
The computers accessing it need to have an app installed called "Epson Scan Settings" in the Utilities folder (for OS X) and the Scan software, which also installs the TWAIN driver for PS and so forth. The name of the disk image I found is EXP10000XL_EScan_OSX_30y.dmg
There is another app that one uses to actually set up the scanner. It's called "EpsonNet Config" and gets installed by the installer mentioned above.
July 10, 2008
unexpected power failure in morning. Greg and I tried a controlled shutdown of the servers, but the power for the KVM was not on the UPS. One of the servers failed before we got that sorted, so we then just powered the rest of them down. When power renewed, we plugged the KVM brick into the UPS and started servers. In afternoon there was a planned power outage for 10 minutes to re-establish normal service. By end of day, all we had left to do was restart the mapoflondon and francotoile exist servers.
May 30, 2008
Post-Elizabeth rebuild of Pippin went well, except that the AIrport card stopped working. A bit of fiddling revealed that the card was loose - I re-installed/re-seated the card and we were back in business.
Only installed OS updates, MS Office and Keynote etc.
May 14, 2008
Bit the bullet and installed SP3 on my dev machine. I did this with some trepidation, as the SP3 install had hosed one of my home computers by trashing the ATI graphics driver. On my work computer, everything seemed to go smoothly, although there were many warnings from the firewall (Sunbelt Kerio); however, on reboot, I got a black screen with only a mouse cursor. Pressing Control-Alt-Delete brought up the Task Manager, though, and also the firewall window, which had been waiting invisibly for input. Had to go through this sequence many times as SP3 set itself up, with the firewall window stopping the process without showing itself, until the 3-finger-salute brought it up. But everything seems OK, fingers crossed. Now doing a bunch of other updates that apparentrly weren't in SP3.
April 3, 2008
I've been working on building up a storage/services machine using 4 1TB SATA drives in a RAID configuration and I've learned a few things.
1) The motherboard (Asus K8N-DRE) has an onboard RAID controller which is apparently capable of RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. I intended to put the OS on a 5th drive - an older 120GB ATA drive - and stripe/mirror the 4 1TB drives in a 0+1 array, which would apparently provide 1.8TB of striped and mirrored disk; very safe. RAID is configured with a BIOS tool. All went well, but when I booted the OS it reported 4x1TB drives instead of 1X1.8TB. Research showed that
2) This is known as fakeRAID. Rather than being a RAID controller, the onboard chipset provides "multi-channel disk controllers combined with special BIOS configuration options and software drivers to assist the OS in performing RAID operations" (from here). The quoted article also describes the value of this type of arrangement. "The most common reason for using fakeRAID is in a dual-boot environment, where both Linux and Windows must be able to read and write to the same RAID partitions". Well, I'm not doing that so it's back to square one with this whole RAID thing.
3) Further research shows that while there is a performance hit when using software RAID it is not onerous, especially in this context. Too, it is entirely transferable in that I can move the disks to a different hardware setup (even a different OS) and expect the RAID to work perfectly.
4) Setting up software RAID is not too complicated. A few sites seem to point the way for RAID 1, RAID 0 and so forth, but I want to look at RAID 5 and RAID 10 too.
Links:
http://advosys.ca/viewpoints/2007/04/setting-up-software-raid-in-ubuntu-server/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/RAID1
http://riseuplabs.org/grimoire//storage/software-raid/
http://juerd.nl/site.plp/debianraid
The last one looks at RAID 5 as well.
This one is the one I used:
http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/raid-lvm.php
I am now building the RAID 5 array - 200 minutes and counting.
I can check on the status of the array with this command:
mdadm --detail /dev/md0
and I can watch the process live by doing this:
watch cat /proc/mdstat
The general idea is that I'll end up with about 3TB of disk which can sustain a complete single-disk failure. I went with this because the data that we'll be storing here will be duplicates (or there will be duplicates elsewhere by default). It is not going to be an archive machine, rather it will be a service/data duplicator for projects running on TAPoR boxes.
Next step is to duplicate services. The machine was built as a stock Ubuntu LAMP+PgSQL stack, so it's mostly config tasks to complete at this point, but I will have to deploy a Tomcat stack that works in concert with Apache (like the TAPoR machines). I'll need an in-service from syadmin, I expect. I'll also take a crack at MapServer and deploying viHistory.
UPDATE: the disk is now finished, formatted and mounted. It's 3TB of ext3 goodness. I had numerous problems with the creation of a filesystem - too much information is available on such subjects - so I got some advice, and some unexpected hands-on help, from Evan regarding the subject.
What it boiled down to was, use fdisk to create a filesystem directly on the device (/dev/md0). He also edited /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf to include the details of the array.
For future reference, if a drive fails, I need to remove it from the array using mdadm, then remove it physically, replace it, use sfdisk to copy the filesystem from a remaining disk, then add the new drive to the array and watch it start to synch.