Revantine, The Life and Times

The notes here will primarily be technology projects I am working on or occasionally a photography outing. If the information is on Google on the first page, I probably won’t have it here. If the information took half a dozen sites and a weekend to implement, I will memorialize it here so we can both find it.

You can view some of my photography at www.capturinglife.org.

I haven’t updated the journal in a while, but I’ve add some information to ShellAccounts.

I RMA’d the failed hard drive with Seagate. I shipped the failed drive on Friday. Monday was a holiday and I received the replacement on Thursday. Well Friday because they required a signature. That is a really good turn around time. They sent a 500G ES drive to replace the 320G ES.

I still remember RMA’ing a Toshiba notebook drive and it taking 30 days for them to decide they didn’t have a repair and only shipping me another drive after I called to prod them.

I put the 750G in my workstation and moved the swap to it. That alone improved my frames per second by about 8 while I am in Shatt on World of Warcraft.

Oklahoma Bargains finished moving and opened at their new location. I bought 3 hard drives during the moving sale at a great price. One of the used notebook drives manifested a failure during the Windows XP Home install. My wife took it over there on Saturday and Rob is going to take care of us. He sells a lot of off lease and discontinued equipment and it is a great place to get a machine about 1GHz to play with Linux. Sign-up on the low traffic mailing list for the best weekend prices sent at the end of each week.

I had another UPS battery die on Friday. This time it had a larger impact – it was one of the cheaper workstation UPS and was powering the core switch, router and bridge (internet). So everything went black for a short time. What was worse is that several batteries that were working on the rack appear to have been at the end of their life and so I had to try three or four before finding a working UPS. And it still need new batteries too.

Moving the gallery
I moved the gallery at http://www.capturinglife.org from the stand alone box back to the web server now that the web server has a lot of storage. That let me power down another box. Less power, less heat, less noise…

Speaking of noise, I put the french door back on my office as well so the 1U is not filling the house with the buzz of fans.

All I need to do to migrate gallery was to backup the database, copy the files over and then restore the database. I used phpMyAdmin to backup and restore, and upgraded phpMyAdmin while I was at it. One minor path change in config.inc.php and a dns update and it was up and going.

Xen block process
I ran in to a problem with a vm last week where processes named “block” spawned many process, the host machine was non-responsive and the vms had odd problems. I restarted and it cleared up, but I will need to monitor for that kind of behavior.

I ordered a new hard drive from ZipZoomFly.com last week and it arrived Monday evening. I powered the server down and put the drive in that night about midnight since I doubt anyone was using it at that time. I should find out if it is possible to hot swap the SATA drives in that Tyan chassis. I was not sure enough of it to try.

I made a lot of progress tonight. The problems with amavis-new were /tmp permissions that were wrong, and missing nodes in /dev. The missing /dev nodes led me to the root cause of the missing urandom and so I fixed a deeper problem. In the progress I believe I have completed the migration of the mail server, gopher.

I am more than fed-up with NewEgg.com. When I setup owl, the xen server, I bought 9 hard drives over a period of a month.
I bought 2 and I bought another 4 shortly after. Because of a smashed AMD Opteron CPU I did not immediately unpack the first 2.
First 2, 1 bad.
Next 4, 2 bad.
NewEgg had me ship them back seperately on 2 RMA numbers so it cost about $16 in shipping.
Because they do not cross ship and I am now 2 weeks behind, I returned those 3 for a refund and ordered 3 more. This makes the total 9 now.
When the 3 replacements arrived, one of them was DOA. That brings the score to 4 out of 9 dead on arrival. I should also mention the first batch looked like they were dropped before leaving NewEgg – the case was flanged.

NewEgg has no way to file a complaint about product handling. Even the employee I spoke with did not know how to spell Seagate (C gate as he put it). Seagate took care of the last one; they replaced it with a 750G SATA drive.

Avoid NewEgg hard drives. They do not handle them properly.

So last night I was building gopher and when I rsync’d the /etc directory I wasn’t in the vm, I was in the host OS. So tonight I reloaded the host OS

The only upside is that I know the instructions work and what options to select.

I finished the migration of kanga and documented the steps well enough I should be able to duplicate the process kanga vm. The notes about the MySQL migration were more complicated so I put them in a seperate document. kanga: Migrating MySQL.

Now that I have a process I will test it on another server and see how smoothly it goes.

I got started on the mail virtual server, Gopher: gopher vm.