Since then, throughout the week, we’ve been fixing imperfections in the ceiling, buying a hopper sprayer, and a few other things. Last night, we spent about 3 hours texturing (well, maybe 60 minutes texturing, the rest of the time was taping and plasticing) the ceiling with “Orange Peel” (that’s the look, not the material). The house is now really really dusty, and there’s the smell of plaster everywhere. And, we still have more to go. We had to fix a few more issues with the ceiling (drywall tape marks, low spots in the plaster, etc). We’ll probably do the rest next weekend, or the weekend after when we scrape the vaulted ceiling area. I’m just happy at this point, at work, I don’t smell, taste, and am not covered in plaster. I’m also happy that my 14.4v DeWalt drill is beefy enough to stir the 5gal bucket of plaster to the consistency needed for doing texture. 

Also, on Tuesday, our floors came!!! About $2500 spent a few months back, and we now have 1800lbs (21 boxes at 85lb/each) of Jatoba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatobá) (Brazilian Cherry) sitting in our garage. Now we get to finish the ceiling, rip up the carpet, fix any subfloor problems, then lay the floor, and then paint the walls, ceiling, etc (theoretically in that order). 

To that end, we’re heading to K-Falls this weekend to go to Tara’s Aunt and Uncles, to have him (her uncle) help us make the bull noses for the stairs. You can’t buy them for this wood (at least, from our distributor), so we are going to rip some of the boards, laminate the result, then router the edge to make a nice nose. We purchased extra wood for this purpose… so it’s just a matter of the time needed to make them. 

While I’m down there, I’m also going to try to get some work done on creating a script to send out quota warnings on our system. 

Will try to post again from K-falls…

We have 2 Xserve RAIDs, which each consist of 2 controllers, 7 drives each, except the one that’s for Metadata. So, that means we have 3 controllers for data, which means, basically 3 LUNs. Xsan really wants even numbers of LUNs. So, when I set up the “new” SAN, it stuck 2 LUNs in one “storage pool” and the other LUN in it’s own. Which blows. It means that Storage Pool 2 is filling faster than Storage Pool 1. 

This was partially my fault, because I used the stupid wizard for “home folder storage” rather than custom. But, it doesn’t really tell you at any point what it’s going to do, it just bitches that “you really should have even numbers of LUNs”. Gar… Xsan 1.x didn’t do that crap… *sigh*. Basically, later in the summer I’ll have to do this again to fix the issue. Also will use this time to fix some other mistakes the wizard made… like, setting the stripe breadth too small at 64 blocks (should be, for a 2 LUN pool, equal to 128 blocks ( breadth = (transfer size (1M) / LUNs ) / block size (4k)). It set all of them to 64 blocks… the 1 LUN pool should be 256. 

So, we’re on Xsan 2.1. Quotas work, but are off until the week after next (getting ready to send out the email to users that are using more than 4gig each). Yeah, interesting statistic… about 7% of users on our system (about 100 out of 1400 users), use nearly 40% of the storage. Cool huh! Small file storage does seem to perform better, so overall, things are better, but not as good as they could be. 

Overall, the upgrade took all weekend. Copying stuff off took about 12 hours, then removing the SAN, and recreating it was quick, then copying stuff back took about 20 hours (which partially had to do with the split LUNs), and therefore decreased bandwidth. *double sigh*

On the positive side, the new fiscal year starts Tuesday. So, we can start spending money! We already have some stuff ordered… PCIe FC card for our FCS system, another copy of Xsan2, a really cool APC UPS serial multiplier (lets you hook the serial output of a UPS up to more devices (in this case, 8). That means I can finally hook the RAIDs up to the UPS, so they’ll be able to shut down gracefully incase of an outage. 

On the super positive side, we are applying for a grant that would get us a Promise Vtrak array. That would be awesome because I could put some 15k SAS drives in it, and move MD to it…. as well as buy 7 750gig ATA drives, and fill up the current MD side of the Xserve RAID with drives, and have an even 4 LUNs)… which would give about 320MB/sec performance… would be pretty cool. The rest of the Promise would be for other stuff… not sure. Might be inclined to move user directories to it, and put video stuff on the Xserve RAIDs… but who knows. 

actually… in looking online… maybe I shouldn’t change my block size. I mean, there are a lot of prefs and such that are small files (smaller than 4k) that would balloon to 8k with a block size change. 

Okay… hmmm… maybe I’ll backup, install, wipe, recreate with a 4k block size, then copy stuff back. I pretty much need to do the wipe to get ACLs back working. 

So, yeah… fun weekend of the constant: start a job, wait, check it, wait, check it, wait… start another, wait…

At this point, this blog is going to mainly consist of SysAdmining stuff, and political topics. Commenting can only be done via some moderation at this point, as I really don’t want to open up to being spammed.

Please ask for an account if you’re going to be a regular, or, post a comment and I’ll approve it, then you can post after that (first one must be approved).

Also, if you have any suggestions for themes, please let me know.