sutton050

I've spent about three hours checking and sorting out the machine which went down, and come-what may I found problem after problem, but not with any of the software.  If your software checks out then there's an obvious other place to look... Your hardware. My first step was to remove the drives, specifically my ZFS devices.  No difference, everything still broke. I then set about systematically removing one piece of hardware at a time, first my quad ethernet card, no difference, then I removed the added dual SATA card still broke... Finally, I removed all the memory and inserted just one stick... For the first time the firmware of the motherboard reported something had changed (at boot) it knew the memory has reduced from 8GB to 2GB.  But then the grub boot was really fast, it came up and into the system very quickly. Now, I had been getting MySQL Error 2013 for nearly ever query or SQL dump, with 2GB of RAM this didn't happen, sudo and all the programs now work again... ...

What kind of bloke gets to play with servers on his day off?  A damn lucky one my wife always tell me?.. Am I lucky?  Or do I have a plan?  I think I have a plan, this is a project I've been meaning to sort out for quite some time, now I have a week off of work, I'm knocking things out the park... Sooo...... Meet my new server wrack, so this is a pair of Ikea Lack Coffee tables, one with the feet fitted, and it's screwed down onto the top of another, with a pair of wheel which I also got at Ikea. I've reinforced the leg uprights, and I'm busy fitting out the rear with a dedicated switch and power setup. It's all on wheels so it can go anywhere in my office with relative ease. And yes, these are my older Poweredge servers (from my fan/noise reduction videos). Only the top unit is operational, with all the drives fitted and a full compliment of memory (64GB I think is in it).  Its socking a quad port gigabyte Ethernet at the moment but I have a whole box of fiber...

Today I've spent sometime doing a little different video, rather than just play about in code, whilst I played about I made a video of the time I had... Here is it... We cover: C++ Coding Standards Structured Programming Functional Programming Encapsulation Object Orientated Programming Building the Boost Libraries (1.67.0) Visual Studio 2017 Static Linking And generally spend time seeing how I turn gobble-de-gook code into something usable and maintainable against my own Coding Standards. Get the code yourself here:  https://github.com/Xelous/boostBeast

A long time coming, here's another story from my days long past, this one takes me to my very first serious role in an IT department, I was however just the dogs body.  The company ran many old PC's (which I actually was around to see mostly be updated to nice Compaq Pentium III's) and they had a couple of high spec Silicon Graphics workstations in the design department. The main manufacturing control and purchasing system, as well as payroll and a bunch of other services ran on a dual 386 based mini computer, which had a custom cut of ScoUnix and a bunch of bespoke C programs comprising the actual system stack, this was accessed by a whole host or Gandalf multiplexers combining the serial connections down from a hundred or so Wyse brand terminals (I wish I'd have nabbed one of those before I left). Anyway, it was time for this back end stack to be updated, and so a pair of Compaq Proliant servers were brought in, these were dual Pentium III class with a dedicated stora...

The new home server build starts with the case, I've elected to go with my wallet, and this means the cheapests ATX case with the mode drive bays... The Coolmaster N300 comes in at just over £38 and sports an impressive 8 internal 3.5" drives.

You're all aware (I hope) of my stack of servers under the desk, however, the main server I use is actually a re-purposed desktop - it's the G33 chipset Socket 775 to Socket 771 running a Xeon E5420... And I have my plan forming to re-case my main workstation, however, I wondered... As I'm currently very exposed with data not replicated across drives on my little server and the machine being quite high power, whether I might not do better in the short term of recasing both... AND changing the server to an always on box. This way, I could build a machine around a dedicated new board and chip... I started out with the AMD APU's the 2580 and some others, up to a quad core, and as fabulous as they look on cost they didn't float my boat. I don't need a lot of number crunching power on the server, so what was my concern?  Well, I'm an Intel guy... Always have been, and think I always will be.  Obviously I started with MOS processors, then moved into the world of M...

Health & Myself What a whirlwind few weeks I've had, first of all, I've had some minor medical work done so not really been in the mood to do anything very interesting except recuperate in my spare time.  I've also got on-going dental treatment going on, so I'm doubly aggravated. Next I have been so busy with work, I've had a change of job title, I've been effectively promoted into the lead developer role for the platform/product range I work on; this is sort of a defacto position, as I'm the ONLY developer working in this area at present, however I'm now officially the man on point and am about to reform a new development team around it.  I will be working in Scrum methodology with this new team, we'll be pushing product to both Windows and Linux, Git will be our source control system (no matter what anyone else says) and I'm going to leverage C++ as the core product with tools all being produced in Python, very exciting stuff. Server Issues...

Make your own ZFS array (mirrored) with USB Flash drives, for cheap! http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/using-flash-drives-in-zfs-mirror.html Since this... interesting post of mine... has only about 10 views, and my tech items usually get a few hundred, I figure somewhere along the lines it got trampled by my silly New Years post....

This post comes from an idea I had to allow me to easily carry a ZFS mirror away from a site and back again, we didn't need much space - only 5gb - but it had to be mirrored in triplicate, one copy to stay locally, one going into a fire safe on site and the third to be carried by the IT manager off-site each evening. The trouble?  A near zero budget, so for a little over £45 we have a 14GB ZFS mirrored pool, across three 16 GB USB Flash drives and one three port USB 3.0 hub. It was perfect for the task at hand, extremely portable, and cheap, I thought the same approach may help anyone trying to get to learn a little more about ZFS, a student or even someone using a laptop as a small office server - as the laptop literally has its own battery back-up system built in! It's not the fastest solution, its in fact extremely slow, but as an entry step it's perfect. See the full video below, throughout the commands I list were in use... Commands: Listing Disks by ID... ls /dev/disk...

Its happened, the announcement with not quite enough information, but it did happen and the WoW orientated internet has slightly melted over it, everyone and their dog on YouTube have posted opinion pieces on whether this "in development" service will fullfil their desires.  I have no opinion in that, instead I'm going to talk about my Warcraft Experience... I first met the world that is Warcraft with "Warcraft II", which I remember my brother and I bought whilst on a trip into Nottingham, we bought it from GAME on Lister Gate, and talked about it incessantly as our parents made us trudge around Marks & Spencers, rather then rush home to play immediately. We played this on our Intel 80486-SX2-50Mhz, with 4MB of RAM and a 128K S8 video card - VGA baby! I don't remember finishing the game, I have to be honest, I don't remember it that much... However, I still have the game, the exact box we bought is proudly on the shelf, and has been visible behind me...

You know that moment when you see this... And the mage rolls need.... Yeah, that's the kind of day I've had. More World of Warcraft topics to follow...

Yeah, I'm serious, I've taken time tonight to look at the release of Ubuntu Server 17.04, specifically to set up a new mini-server which is to be Core 2 Duo powered and on 24/7 as boot strapper & service strapping server itself. But, before I run I like to walk, so I set up a 2 core, 1GB RAM VMware machine from the 17.04 ISO... Take a look at the first thing it has presented to me.... Yes, just read that again... I booted the server... and the only action I took was to log in... Welcome to 17.04... All good... What wait?.. Why am I being warned to upgrade my 12.04?  This is 17.04? Before I ran around like my last vestiges of hair were on fire, I decided to do a simple test, I've previously found that Ubuntu often goes wondering off on the internet for message of the day (motd) information, so I pulled the network card (virtual) out of the machine. This results in a long boot time, but you at least know no remote files or services are going to be listing things on your s...

As a systems admin, or dev ops, or whatever your job title might be, never ever assume that the person you're handing a system to has a clue.  This might seem harsh, but it's true, and proves itself true time and time again. "Assumption is the mother of all f**k ups" About a year ago I deployed a system which automatically sent requests to remote machines (via SMS) getting those machines to report their status or send back error information, but also to gather some basic information. It has run happily for a whole year, it has been all pretty plain sailing, the hours and hours of work I put into it, to automate it and keep it self-sustained have paid off, zero faults, zero down time, self-regulation is the way forward for me; even if it took slightly longer to put the system in place, it has needed no human input for nearing a year! However, the unit needed to move, about a week ago, it needed be physically picked up and taken out of my small server room and into the ...

How robust is your back up solution?  Go on, be honest with yourself, how good is it?... Because I've seen a whole host of them and, at this very moment, this is the screen up on one of my servers.... Yes, my raid 5, just a test raid 5 with three really bad recycled SAS drives in it has failed; this doesn't surprise me, but it does delay me because I now have to rebuild the data... However, I know my data is good.... Lets see how good my back up is. This back up is coming from a DD created raw image of the virtual disk, stored to and soon lifted from my NFS accessible ZFS mirrored back up server. Therefore you would be right to ask, why are you rebuilding the virtual RAID disk in the above screen shot?  Well, I'm going to test my back up strategy! I popped the known bad disk and the good disks out, replaced all three and I'm able to test a restore to a new virtual disk set, I have a USB boot drive ready, this is a test. This kind of test, a real live restore, is sorely ...