Nobody leavz...
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So, been a few days, lots to update on.
We got the replacement drive a day late, but luckily, there were no problems. Put the new drive in, and it got marked as a spare. Kinda wish the Xserve RAID behaved like the Promises, in that the new drive would be rebuilt and the original spare would go back to being a spare, but, no big deal.
We ordered some hardware late last week. Mainly a new power supply for one server, and a new Xserve. Should be a lot of fun to play with. The Xserve has a Geforce GT120 in it, so stuff that uses OpenCL or CUDA should be able to take advantage of it. I’m looking forward to running BOINC on it when it comes in. =)
Thursday was a short day, as I got off early and headed to Walla Walla, WA for the long weekend of the 4th. We were there until Sunday. Long, hot, weekend with Tara’s family. Was nice, though kinda missed a couple of her cousins not showing up. The drive is really frickin’ long (about 350 miles), but it’s pretty. The Columbia River Gorge is, I think, one of the most beautiful places on earth. And although a lot of people seem to dislike the Windmills, I love them. They’re really “other worldly”, and graceful. Plus, they’re not polluting. There’s a coal plant out on that end of the state, and I really would love to see it removed/shutdown once there are windmills there to replace it.
Overall, good weekend.
Back at work today, it’s been fairly boring. Summer is rather slow this year. But, it’s letting us get some stuff done. I really am needed to code up some more stuff, and I’m slowly working myself out of a coders block. I just imported my car gas log into MySQL so I can update the average mileage on my site, as well as do some more nifty google API graphing. But, that’s a bit down the road. I’m really hoping I can make a nifty page for adding fuel tanks via my iPhone while I’m on the road. We’ll have to see. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any real MySQL work, but I’m relearning, and picking up new stuff this time. Hopefully there’ll be something on the sidebar pretty soon (probably tomorrow).
For work coding, I need to get quotas going… but that means I need to get something setup to email all the over quota people telling them they need to get stuff off the system. All and all, about 210 people (out of 1600) use about 50% of the space on our system (enforcing quotas for those users would free up 3TB of storage. About 6TB total is used right now).
Once I get them under control, I might even be able to do some type of backups of user data *shock*. Really not sure about that though.
On the AFP front, I’ll say that the current attempt to address the issue seems to be working. AFP has been running successfully for over 5 days now, and today we had about 45 users logged in (which is, I think, the highest usage this summer). I’m going to see if we can get a few users using Mail.app tomorrow to increase the load on the system, and see if that tickles any bugs.
I hope to add more plants to my list in the next few days. So far I’ve only added the one that I remember specifically where I got, etc.
Alright, that’s it for tonight. More later this week.
Today at work was fairly boring, save the fact that at 4:30am this morning, a drive died in one of the arrays. So it’s been rebuilding with the spare since then. Should be done by about 8pm tonight. It’s a 3.6TB array with 750gig PATA drives, so rebuilds take a while.
Thankfully, we have an extended service contract with the Apple on the array, so a replacement is free, and was shipped from either Portland or Seattle today. Should be able to replace it tomorrow. Turns out, these can be ordered from the campus repair shop, which is an Apple Authorized Service Center. Otherwise, Apple wanted to put a $1070 hold on my Credit Card until they got the old one back. =[
More work with ACE today. Again, can’t comment on much. But, progress is being made. =) Otherwise, no comment. =)
Today we also moved over a server from another department that we’re now hosting their hardware, which hosts their website(s). Pretty easy move. It’s a G5 tower, so the hope is to migrate it to something in the rack, or better, migrate it to our primary web server. Least we have the power and space in the room. Worst case, I might just put the tower on top of the rack.
Word on the street is the state legislature is going to approve our $7.5 million in bonds which will match the private donations we’ve gotten at work. This will give us a building expansion, remodel the remainder of the 2nd and 3rd floor, and replace all the windows with double glazed windows (our current windows are circa 1950, so the building leaks like a sieve, and dust builds up everywhere). Interesting part, the bonds would need to be used by the end of the 2009-2011 fiscal year. So, construction is probably going to need to start by next summer at the latest. Next summer and year is going to be… “fun”, but well worth it.
I’ve added a couple sections to the site. I hope to open up the Code section when I have something there, and to populate more of the “Plants” section. Basically I just excluded that category from the front page with a single line of php () in the post loop of the index_template.php (link). Here’s hoping. I have a couple other sections I need to start populating as well. Think I’ll do the same for the reviews section.
Also been playing with the iPhone Configuration Utility 2 for our faculty/staff that have iPhones. Overall, it’s extremely cool. We can create a template for each user, or just a generic one that sets up LDAP for an email directory, as well as set up a calendar server. Once 10.6 is out, we’re going to set up iCal Server 2, and get everyone onto that. Then we’ll finally be able to kill MeetingMaker. Once we can kill the Quark License Server (i.e. once we get rid of Quark), and we get rid of the APWire Satellite feed (which the software that parses the feed runs at 100% CPU, all the time), I might be able to basically decommission a server due to lack of services, rather than consolidation.
Alright, that’s it for now. Again, hope to post some about home in the next few days. But not a whole lot has gone on, so it’s kinda difficult to write about.
TTFN.