pluzzi.com

September 7, 2010

Paul — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:02:15 +0000

Shutdown vmQmail and vmISP since both have had replacement servers online now for just about a year now. If there are no issues for the next 2 days, they’ll stay down permanently.

August 26, 2010

Paul — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:18:16 +0000

A rather annoying thing as of late, was fixed tonite. My FreeNAS server, which makes a great nas device - has a share mounted on my private webserver to enable access to some key files for me. This webserver is a Fedora Core 8 server, and uses the “nocase” option in the mount command. The problem is that while nocase truly does remove the case sensitivity, and is nice to work with - it totally breaks read permission on the files - so I was constantly getting “permission denied” errors. It even happened on the command line in my Fedora box, so I know it wasnt apache’s fault. After removing all options one by one, it turned out to be the “nocase” option that was breaking it. So that was removed, and now things are good again.

August 25, 2010

Paul — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:38:18 +0000

Following up on recent changes, I started to move some laptops around now. The dv9207us will now be my first floor laptop. The dv9008nr that was in that role is now being ghosted, and will be rebuilt as a win7 machine since I don’t yet have one of those. This allowed me to take the wet54gs5 out of its role as “the wireless” for my dv9008nr (which has a bad wifi), so that can go away now. It goes away because where the dv9008nr is going, it will be in my office, on my desk, right next to my workgroup switch so it can be easily wired in. Since the dv9207us is 32 bit, it will remain Vista, and the dv9008nr which is 64bit will be rebuilt as the win7 box. Well, that or a hackintosh - not sure yet. I may build the dead dv9925nr into the hackintosh once that mobo arrives. We’ll see …

Oh and with the “new” wrt300n in place, I am able to retire the wrt54g3g-vn that was serving in a helper role for one of my ssid’s. So these are good updates.

August 24, 2010

Paul — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:50:31 +0000

Swapped motherboards on my HP DV9207us tonite. It has worked in safe mode only, and ONLY if you could put up with an insanely flickering screen. The video chip was going bad - and wasnt totally dead yet, but it was headache city trying to use it. Since I now had a bad dv9008nr, a bad dv9207us, and a bad dv9925nr - it was time to get some of these working. I found a refurbished motherboard for the dv9207us for $117, so I grabbed that. Tonite was the swap. Took about 2.5 hours start to finish - but there were interruptions. Anyway - its back online, and working good. Next will be the dv9925nr, which is on order - found that one for $137. The dv9008nr is working, but has to be hardwired in, since wireless is shot - and thats a sign of mobo going bad.

August 23, 2010

Paul — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:51:24 +0000

Been having problems with wireless lately. Time to fire up the analyzer again and see which one is walking all over the others. But short term fix was to put a trusty WRT300n from eBay into place. These have fantastic range and signal strength, and I’ve been using for a while in other clients. So I finally got my own. So I set this up on the same ssid as my other ones, and one by one will turn off the old ones and funnel into this one. Should stop alot of these wireless laptop application crashes now. Hopefully.

August 21, 2010

Paul — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:34:04 +0000

Completed the migration of my vm380num2 DL380G1 OpenSuSE 10.2 server to a virtual host tonite. Sadly, I couldn’t get the converter to do the work for me like I wanted. I had to basically do the main disk/filesystem, and then create one big filesystem as a secondary disk. Then I booted the new virtual server with knoppix iso, tarred up the 6 filesystems from vm380num2, scp’d them over to the new virtual server, and extracted into the big monolithic filesystem there. After all was done, hostname and IP’s set, and blah blah blah, I brought down vm380num2, and brought up vmSuSE - the new virtual server. At this point, apache and big brother are working, my 2 database instances are working, and a few other things look good. Now I just have to check my dhcp server hosted here, and a few other things before I can feel comfortable reclaiming any parts from the DL380G1.

August 20, 2010

Paul — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 02:47:25 +0000

Did a few virtual tasks :

some work configuring resource allocation for my vm’s tonite, so that nothing can “run away” with all the resources anymore.
some work in trying to convert my old dl380g1 suse10 big brother server to a virtual machine, so that I could shutdown another server, saving power and cooling. Its a 50Gb instance, and will take another 5 hours to convert, so the jury is still out on this one.
Found a nice link useful in a datacenter build, to show power consumption, air condition values, and other useful information for HP servers

Also changed my vmFedora8 sendmail config (/etc/mail/sendmail.cf) in the cW macro, so it no longer sends out “localhost.localdomain” as my SMTP HELO name, and now should clear some additional recipient checks.

August 15, 2010

Paul — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 05:32:47 +0000

More for my own notes on what happened when, one my families dv9008nr laptops died this week. Well, more accurately, the wireless stopped working, and thats a sign of motherboard failure looming. So for now, I took the drive from the bad dv9008nr, put it in my dv9008nr, and gave that laptop back. Problem solved there. But now mine is hosed. But the wired network still works. So since this is my kitchen laptop, and it really never moves - I decided to find a way to wire it in. So I ran a hard wire cable from the server room up to the keg room. That freed up my wet54gs5 - which is now in the kitchen right behind the dv9008. So I have a 13 inch custom length wire now and everything is back online. Plus the hard wire in the keg room now means that I get better quality network on my TivoHD - so better YouTube, better NetFlix, and so on.

August 11, 2010

Paul — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 04:54:28 +0000

I’ve been trying to get the last of my “old” virtual machines migrated off of my old VMWare Server 1.0.1 host to an updated VMWare server. But its just been a lower priority. Recently, it started complaining about some hardware issues, so it was time. So this Solaris 10 x86 was migrated over to a new Linux LAMP server. Its nice to have it now on a modern version, and not having to fight with things like Sharity on Solaris on Intel - which was just never an enterprise quality solution. This also means I can finally power down my old DL580G1, which will be nice.

August 8, 2010

Paul — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 11:24:55 +0000

Upgraded one of my core virtual servers from a 2.4Ghz DL380G3 to a 3.06Ghz DL380G3 and migrated all vm’s over to the new server. Hopefully this brings some additional perfomance boost for some of the lagging vm’s lately.

Also finally got a vm setup for my sockso server. The little pc that it was running on overheated on me back when the consecutive 90 degree days heat wave hit. So its been offline for a couple weeks now. But with the new virtual server, additional capacity, and better speed - it seemed a good time to virtualize this one too.