Colin Charles Agenda

Khairil talks about server downtime, and I can attest to that (hogwarts is just above gambit). The Dell arrived on Friday, popped Centos 5.1 on it, realised that if you ticked “Virtualization”, you ended up not getting a regular kernel (no big deal, eh?). Configured it as best as could be configured, then headed out to the data center on Saturday morning. This after some fiasco of sleeping for under 4-hours, seeing that I was out on Friday night.

Removed the old box, installed the new one, everything came up, and life was dandy. Went over to C-ZONE in Low Yat to get my disk exchanged – it was one-to-one, seeing that it was within the first week. Very nice. Remotely configured the box with Zimbra again, and ZCS 5.0 is working fine. Its great to see that Zimbra figured out what the problem was with the RHEL4/CentOS4 installs of Zimbra. Fixed up the database, restored the websites, all remotely – I wonder if this kind of magic works in Windows land? I just love Unixes.

The Dell box is a 64-bit box, with full virtualization support. Question now is: how do I get more IPv4 IPs if the ISP only gives you one? While there’s some negotiation going on so I can get more, it’d be a shame if I had to create some Xen VMs to be IPv6 only.

Incidentally, if anyone wanted to see what a RAID failed device looks like, here’s some output:

[root@hogwarts ~]# mdadm -D /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Mon Jan 7 02:49:59 2008
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 485203072 (462.73 GiB 496.85 GB)
Device Size : 485203072 (462.73 GiB 496.85 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Wed Jan 9 19:44:45 2008
State : clean, degraded
Active Devices : 1
Working Devices : 1
Failed Devices : 1
Spare Devices : 0

UUID : a502d8a1:724a68ab:cac9860f:943d44a5
Events : 0.22190

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 0 0 0 removed
1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1

2 8 3 - faulty spare /dev/sda3

[root@hogwarts ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda3[2](F)
485203072 blocks [2/1] [_U]

unused devices: <none>

Technorati Tags: raid, dell, centos, ipv4, xen, sysadmin

The great Interwebs have caused my tabs to expand, but here are a few bits I think a lot of you will find useful.
(Should’ve posted this about a week ago, but somehow, it never made it)

• Joel Spolsky’s Travel Survival Guide – Joel recently went on a tour to promote FogBugz, and he comes up with some sensible tips. His air travel tips might be a little too technical, but the fact that they fly first class alone, interests me greatly. As someone that spends a great amount of time in a tin can, in coach might I add, I can appreciate companies that place you in business or first class. Large companies like IBM and HP generally have policies of placing anyone flying longer than n hours in business class – open source companies haven’t quite got the hang of this yet.
• A month with FreeBSD, Zope and Plone – KageSenshi is a Fedora contributor, and currently works as an intern at Inigo Tech, the company started by my friend, Khairil. Main focus: Zope, Plone, and FreeBSD. The blog entry is interesting, because you can see that he enjoys interning for Inigo, is gladly willing to provide free publicity for Inigo, and it seems like he’s truly proud working for a startup. Thats a feeling a lot of employees in larger organisations don’t seem to have any longer – they just become corporate drones, IMHO. Here’s wishing Khairil and Inigo all the best in keeping the startup feeling alive and kicking.
• Why Comp Sci Grads Can’t Hack (and why you need them anyway…) – Its refreshing seeing this in words, from someone else, other than me. Reading this, and the article that spurred it: Is Computer Science Dying? > Computer Scientists Can’t Program! can be pretty useful. A 3-4 year bachelors teaches you an array of languages and concepts, that in the end, one becomes something of a “know it all”, yet not an expert in any domain. There is just no room for you to become an expert, because the curriculum just isn’t free-flowing. Writing a library management system over and over again, in a different language even, just makes no sense at all, does it? (I picked on a library management system because Ditesh, Prabu and I had a good laugh about this yesterday).
• CCPlus – This is Creative Commons at its best. I can do a By-Attribution-Non-Commercial, and also add a +Company Commercial License. This is what I’ve wanted for a few years. Now, when will Flickr implement this? In fact, sharing the original sizes for CC-licensed things on Flickr has always bugged me – I’m fine with everything but the original size (duh, I upload original JPGs). This will also be fancy for work, like training materials. I have a feeling I’ll be using this one very, very soon.

Recently I read:

• An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi – I picked this up during my trip to India in early 2007, and finally got around to reading it. Highly interesting reading, his experiments and his teachings and thought process, plain simply rock. Documenting his strategies, etc. great reading.
• The Five-Dollar Smile: An Other Stories by Shashi Tharoor – he’s a bit wordy in his fiction, and his plays aren’t fabulous (I think reading script like that is best left to Shakespearean works), but its a very compelling book with some of his earliest writings. Joining the UN at 22? Makes me feel old. I like the fact that each story has a note pre-pending it – its important to know what were thoughts in those times. I still prefer his non-fiction, so far.
• Creating Wealth: Retire in Ten Years Using Allen’s Seven Principles of Wealth by Robert G. Allen – interested in purchasing real estate and turning it around? Want to know more about good debt? Realising that you really don’t need the latest whizzbang gizmo that is a depreciating asset? Most interesting reading, especially if you’re into the real estate market or planning on getting into it. Read this on my Vietnam trip mostly.
• Lonely Planet Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos & the Greater Mekong – used this extensively to plan my trip to Hanoi. So much more to see, obviously. I also read the Cambodia section to see if it tallied with my previous trip (it did), and the Laos section, mainly because I had initially planned to go there, but forked the plans to go to Hanoi instead. No regrets, Laos can wait.

My recent server buying experience has been interesting. I contacted a local company, ServerWare, seeing that they had some interesting servers – 4 disks, in a 1U configuration? Mmrm. To my dismay, they were trying very hard to not sell me parts, but complete systems, with prices that were about 30% greater than what I could get at Dell. The clincher, was when I was told that server SATA2 disks are different from desktop SATA2 disks, and there was no way I was going to get these disks so cheaply. Ahem, on Saturday, I took  a trip to Low Yat, and picked up a couple of 500GB SATA2 disks, remember?

So, it was down to calling Dell. Found my regular sales consultant whom I dealt with about a year ago, got the quote brought down from what the website said (I love how you can haggle with Dell, to get a bargain). Demanded a quick delivery (Friday, they tell me). With a nice 3-year next-day-on-site warranty. For 30% less than ServerWare. Without the hassles of being treated like an idiot.

On IRC, I mentioned that I was going to blog-mouth ServerWare. Consider this, just that. Its interesting to note that on the LUV lists, there is also chat about getting a 1U server. A lot of recommendations for Sun and Dell hardware. Apparently, Sun can provide even cheaper hardware than Dell! HP is also in the mix. No mention of off-the-shelf local companies in Melbourne though.

Friday, can’t come any sooner. Already booked a slot to be in the data center on Saturday morning, I’m hoping all services are up and running by then. And in future, I’ve got to think about backups – any recommendations for Xen instance hosting that is affordable? Purely for emergency use…

Technorati Tags: crass commercialism, serverware, dell, 1u

If CentOS (and by the same vein, Oracle Enterprise Linux) claims compatibility with RHEL, why is Zimbra saying that the issue with ZCS 5.0, Scalar::Util, and Perl, is caused by CentOS?

QA’ing against RHEL, and not CentOS is expected, but saying there’s no compatibility between CentOS and RHEL, sounds like a bit of a fib, don’t you think?

Even better, the recommendation to use Ubuntu. Will there be a LTS release, at some stage soon? It looks like Canonical are behind schedule for another LTS release…

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, zcs5, qa, scalar:util, centos, perl, compatibility, rhel

Sunday evening, I was in the data center. Hagrid had a failed sda in the RAID array, since post-Christmas (when I was on vacation), and I was going to replace it. Thanks to RAID1, it still kept humming along. Its almost impossible to find 120GB disks any longer, so I thought it would be time to upgrade to 2*500GB.

Monday, shone on me (smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda):
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

Again, sda was at it. A brand new, honking, 500GB SATA2 disk, failing. Power supply? Fubared motherboard? Now my thoughts of buying a Macbook or whatever new-fangled device Apple launches on January 15 at MacWorld, is clearly gone down the drain. I’m guessing a new server is in order. Well, at least it will be 64-bit, and every bit capable of running Xen.

In case anyone’s looking for a good reference to S.M.A.R.T. error messages, the Wikipedia entry on S.M.A.R.T. is pretty good.

Technorati Tags: raid1, s.m.a.r.t., failing disks