|
|
| bithose.com | home | jakari | gallery |
TEH POWAH!
Power was out for a couple hours tonight. Everything back up to normal.
A ConnectUPS module has been acquired for the main UPS, looks like I had better set that up if National Greed continues to have such lousy service this year.
Gallery updated; old server shut down
At this point I think I have all domains cutover and the new Gallery2 install is up and running nicely.
I deliberately abandoned the old /gallery/ and /gallery2/ links - it redirects but the old links don't work anymore.
Moved servers.
Moved to a new server. Hopefully everything still works, it seems to.
Next priority will be upgrading and merging the Gallery pages. I suspect this will pound the crap out of the servers for a few hours.
Mmm beer.
You will enjoy it.
Local (NY,VT,MA) Ski Conditions
Thanks to the nifty interfaces available at RealConditions.Com and their willingness to provide custom queries for me, you get a quick run down of the reported conditions at local ski areas:
NiMo 1, UPS 0
Well, just when you get complacent about the power being remarkably stable this past year, we lose power for no readily apparent reason. Unless cold fog is a good reason.
Someday, Niagara Mohawk might actually upgrade whatever piece of crap switchgear that keeps letting this happen, but until then, all I can do is buy more UPS capacity to try to ride it out.
We almost made it this time... and when it was obvious we weren't going to make it all the way, I started to shut things down. Almost, but not quite in time to get the main fileserver and webserver down safely. ;)
Nothing was lost or damaged, but sometimes you need this sort of event to remind you of all the "temporary" fixes and changes you made a few weeks or months ago. As in, when nothing restarts correctly or is all pointing the wrong way. Well, I have a list of busted stuff to fix permanently now, we'll see if I actually do it.
I actually happen to have two new (to us) UPSs in the storage at work. A 1400VA, and a big bruisin' 2200VA. Never felt real compelled to haul them home before, since that means hauling around one 70 pound unit and one 90 pound unit, and then up three flights of stairs. Looks like I just need to lift with the legs, not the back, and just do it already.
Back online
Up and running with the firewall on the new box, sakura.bithose.com.
The new OpenBSD 3.6 install is performing great, haven't seen any hardware bugginess pop up in the console messages so far.
I love Sun hardware when it is behaving itself, which is most of the time. This particular box has run 24/7 for the better part of 8 years (it had Solaris 2.4 on it when I turned it on!) so it's well burned-in by now. Maybe after kerochan is back together again I'll think about putting a new(er) hard disk in this box, since that's the one thing liable to eventually die. The inside of the box is so clean, it looks like the fans have never seen a speck of dust in their lives. So that much seems to be really solid.
The major issues I think are resolved well enough for me to go to sleep finally. Tomorrow I'll see about getting VPN tunnels running and DHCP tested.
Junk. (Updated)
Well, it could be worse, but the timing is less than ideal.
The power supply in our firewall machine is flaking out - it's turned itself off outright, and now it power-cycles at random. If you can read this, it's obviously up.
Or, I've managed to put a temporary replacement machine in its place. Seeing as I have at least three machines I can drop in there right now and expect to work, I might as well go do that.
Of course it has to wait until late on a Sunday night when I really should be reaching for the bedsheets and not the tool box.
updated Going on 11:20pm now and I'm building a replacement box. After watching kerochan (the "production" firewall) reboot itself twice more, it seems like a good idea.
What really stinks here is that kerochan is also what I use for network boots, and so I have to install the new box from CD. The SparcStation 5 I've picked has an unbelievably slow CDROM drive. Next time I think the tape drive might actually be quicker.
At least this SS5, having been provided initially by a Very Big Telco, is of the 110 MHz variety with two disks and 64MB RAM, so it's pretty butch, and somehow I have a nice quad-port NIC for it too. So it ought to be entirely adequate until I replace the power supply in kerochan and rebuild it.
11:45pm: The install marches on once more, after getting 1/3 of the way through to discover the CDROM drive is failing to read. So now it's crunching away with an HTTP install, and the bottle-neck is the local disk.
Great... just heard the fans in kerochan spin down and stay off. This isn't going to finish a moment too soon.
Craptacular
Due to a stupendous (yet totally predictable) fuckup on Verizon's behalf, our DSL has been down since about 16:30 EST, Saturday Jul 31, and is still down. They've been running in circles it seems trying to avoid actually fixing the problem.
Not having a warm fuzzy feeling that the ISP's update left on my voice mail ("Should be fixed [Wednesday] morning") I called up Time Warner cable at about 4 this afternoon, found out they had a $29/month special on Road Runner (cable modem service) and that I could get HBO for only $3 more, and I was sold. Picked up my modem in the Troy office around 6:30, had a SparcStation 10 rebuilt with OpenBSD 3.5 by 8pm, and we were running.
And Verizon wonders why they can't get any DSL marketshare.
So as we're running half-routed on the cable modem with a minimal set of services patched in, don't expect everything to work. I have mail working inbound and outbound; DNS is strung together with forwarders and static routes; the webserver is routed back through the cable firewall.
We'll probably be keeping the cable and DSL together which makes some interesting new configurations possible; should hopefully improve speeds for everyone.
Overhaul
I am overhauling the site to use the Blosxom blog/CMS tool so things are liable to go missing for a while.
That being said, some things may go permanently missing or un-indexed, but I will try to actually have more useful up-to-date content now that it is MUCH easier to do so.
Update
Ok, so VI isn't quite as easy as say, iJournal or LogJam (LiveJournal GUI clients) to rattle off a random brain-fart with. But that's probably a good thing.
And now I've determined a laptop is probably better used on your lap than on an odd-height kitchen counter - arms and back so painful and stiff that I feel ill - so I'm done for now.
Email me any suggestions for the site.
w00t!
First post! ;)
Trying out Blosxom for a new web log.
It's cool because:
