Everybody Staze...

Work has been going fairly smoothly since Spring term ended earlier this month (Jun 13th). Since that time, usage has been way down on the servers, so AFP has been crashing a lot less (once every few days). I’ve been having continued progress with Applecare Enterprise on the issue, but so far, looking at leaked Seed notes from 10.5.8, it doesn’t look like it’s addressed. I really can’t comment outside of that.

All and all, I’ve been spending a LOT of time documenting various things at work. From our Xsan topology, port layouts, service topologies, backups, etc. This has been something I’ve needed to do for a while, and going on vacation week before last really made me realize that if I’m out of cell range, and something breaks, work is kinda boned. Needless to say what would happen should I get hit by a bus.

To do the documentation, I’ve installed dokuwiki at work to handle it. Plone just doesn’t accomplish the collaborative aspect as well as a wiki, and Dokuwiki is just so damn simple, and yet extremely flexible. We used it briefly at work before Plone as an eportfolio experiment. So I knew it easily integrated into LDAP, which was necessary, and it stores all it’s data as flat files, making backups and moving stuff around a breeze. So, that’s pretty much taken up a lot of my time.

I would really like to get a code repository of some type up on this site in the near future to keep track of my various scripting/coding projects, and in a way, force myself to go back over that code, and comment it, as well as clean it up. I have so many scripts I’ve written at some point that I use once or twice, then forget about.

*sigh* svn is easy to set up, but I don’t have a ton of experience with it. But, I’m giving it a shot.

This week at work is short (holiday), and I’m going to leave early on Thursday. Because the Fiscal year starts Wednesday, we can start ordering hardware tomorrow. Basically, as long as we don’t receive the hardware until Wednesday or later, it’ll go onto the next fiscal year budget. So, here comes a new Mac Mini, and a Nehalem Xserve. And an extra PS for one of our other servers (we accidentally ordered it with only one). Once I have that server, I can update our ldap server, and secondary metadata controller (I’m merging the two together, since the secondary MDC never does anything anyway, and it’s actually how Apple suggests with smaller setups). The Mini is going to become a test server, which will run VMWare Fusion, and allow us to easily test different things (like a test web server, development web server, linux testing, windows web testing, and something to run OS seeds on).

Can’t wait to try out the Nehalem 8 core server (which has hyper-threading, so shit will see it as 16 cores). Handbrake, or better, Xgrid will be just awesome (Xgrid sees all 16 cores). 2.26ghz x 16 = 36ghz. From one server. crazy! That with the GeForce GT 120, should give us crazy performance. Hell, I’m just going to run SETI on it for a week. =)

So, other than waiting for all of that, this week will be a lot more documentation, and writing more of the quota reporting website. I need to implement quotas over the summer, which means just turning on quotas for those under, but some more special stuff for those that are over. Sending emails, setting soft and hard quotas, and timelimits. Hope to get that mainly done this week… at least the basic website functionality for students, and enabling quotas for those that are under quota. Once I get the secondary MDC upgraded, I’m hoping to turn on Spotlight on the SAN.

That’s all for now. More later when I get SVN up, or when I have more to talk about in some other way. I might post a “home” update in the next day or so.