Just Another Dave

They verified who I was and then told me a qualified for a new FREE phone!! Oooh!! I could have my very own Nokia 6085 if I sign up for a new 2 year contract with them.

I told the guy no thanks, and he sounded confused. He asked why I wouldn’t want a new phone, and I told him I was quite happy with my Treo 680. He said according to their records I had an old Nokia (the last phone I bought from them). I said I wasn’t interested in the Nokia clamshell and wished him a good day.

It really seemed as if he thought I was lying to him….

The new hardware has been stable in apoc so far. Almost 48 hours solid, which is a fairly big jump from rebooting every 12-16 hours.  It’s also a far cry from “proven stable” in my mind though.  I think I’m going to start running some tests on the hardware I pulled out though.  First round is going to be a couple passes of memtest.  If that clears then I guess I’ll be getting a pair of hard drives and trying to mimic the OS install.

From there I hope that the same behavior will present itself.  Then I can try the tweaks one by one, disable hyperthreading, disable usb, disable apic, etc.  Until we find out what solves the problem.  Then I can get this board back in apoc.  I’d really much prefer to have the full 3gb in the VM host.

I’ve got all the MD units renamed now, so instead of /dev/md0 consisting of /dev/sda5 and /dev/sdb5 those units are in/dev/md5 and so forth. Does it make a difference to anyone but me? No not really.  But I like having things consistent.

Today I headed down to the colo after work.  I swapped out the mobo, proc, mem, and sata controller in apoc.  So far things seem to be a bit more stable.  However, I made a number of other tweaks that may have fixed the instability. On the new board, I disabled hyperthreading and onboard usb. Unfortunately this board doesn’t do dual-channel ddr and only has three slots instead of four for ram.  I would eventually like to get the original board back in apoc, but only after extensive testing at home.

Here’s to hoping we get a stable Xen box soon.

Picture of the DAGRNET half-rack. From top to bottom:

• Cisco 2924XL-EN
• Custom colour coded patch panel
• Apoc
• Tank
• Dozer
• APC SU2200RMXL5U

This is apoc with the new 5 in 3 cage installed. It’s a SNT-3051SATA.

I picked up the 5-in-3 Sata cage this morning at the suppliers, along with a 40pin to 44pin IDE adapter. The adapter is for a data recovery attempt on a laptop drive.

I’m going to test a few things with the sata cage tonight, hopefully. Preliminary tests last night hot-pluging a sata drive on a linux box at home on a promise controller didn’t look to promising though. Nothing showed up in the system logs, nothing seemed to recognize the new drive until a reboot. So even if the linux driver for the promise tx4 I have doesn’t support hot plug, having the cage will make swapping drives when they die much faster than the current process of pulling the 4U out of the rack, half-way disassembling it all, replacing the drive, and putting everything back.

It looks pretty too!

I’ve made a couple changes to the site after I upgraded to the new release of WordPress. The drag and drop arranging of the sidebar widgets is pretty neat and I was able to add in the last.fm dealy pretty painlessly. Just created a new text box and pasted in the embed code from last.fm.

I’ve cleaned up at home a bit. Got a pipe rack in off ebay so I re-arranged the shelves here to fit that in. Pictures here.

I’ve had another hard drive failure downtown. It’s one of the recently replaced units too. Luckily I got it through our supplier at work so it’ll be painless to get a new unit in. I’m really debating getting a SATA 4in3 hotswap cage for that machine. I’ll think about it this weekend. If I do get it now, I can get them to order it in and I can install it when I swap the drive sometime this week.

It also looks like I’m preparing to revamp the entirety of my setup downtown. Time to move on from VHCS to the new fork. ISPCP Omega. I’ve installed a fresh copy of etch in VMware at home that I’m going to test it on. As soon as RC3 comes out with the migration script, I’ll be moving node1 over. Once that’s settled down, I think I’m going to move email hosting for my friends domains to be managed by VHCS instead of ISPMAN as it currently is. Once that’s done, I’ll be able to make a decision as to what I should do about my own email. I suppose I could even do it under VHCS too.

VOIP stuff has stalled for now. I had trixbox working under VMWare for a while, and I got it to tftp stuff to the CP7960 without issue, but there were latency issues and the voice prompts were getting garbled. Though I have to wonder how necessary it will be to run asterisk at home.

More later… back to work.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
(more…)

Did a bit of research, hopefully I haven’t screwed myself by going too bleeding edge.

Getting a Core2Duo E6420, 2×1gb of Kingston 533mhz, evga 7300gt 256mb and an Asus P5B-E.

This is rather eery, I’ve never run an intel proc in my workstation. The times are changing indeed.

First symptom I was able to log was a kernel panic related to the ivtv driver for my WinTV PVR-250. Just so happens I’ve found a capacitor bursting right next to the PCI slot that card was in. Add to that all the other weird shit I’ve seen and my hand has been forced. It’s upgrade time.

More later.