some of you may have noticed that krusty was down both of the past two
weekends. what follows is roughly what happened. i'm not really fishing for
donations, but i do want to give an idea of what donations to support
digest.net are likely to pay for:
around close of business Friday a week and a half ago, krusty (the
server that
supports digest.net) crashed about the same time that my Audi opted to stop
running. normally i can access krusty during regular business hours, but
with no car, i couldn't get to the server until i got a ride monday
afternoon.
i took the backup krusty hardware with me, and swapped one disk & disk
controller from the old to the new. krusty got back up and running, but only
one disk seemed to be ok, the backup disk didn't seem to want to get
rebuilt (for the IT geeks out there, krusty is set up with a hardware raid-1
configuration. if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it.)
as a result of all these events, i decided to modernize a bit, and picked up
a box of 5 of the 73GB fujitsu disk drives i'm using (not consumer drives),
a used IBM x335 server off ebay, and a good used IBM SCSI raid controller to
become the next generation krusty. i'll have to pick up a duplicate system
in the near future, as i prefer the backup hardware to be as close as
possible
to the production hardware (the current krusty and the failed system are
the previous generation IBM x330 systems, solid stuff but they're pentium
III systems, with the x335 i'll be making the great leap to the pentium IV.)
the following thursday night i headed down to Lime Rock to serve as Chief
of Tech for the SCCA NARRC Runoffs road race weekend. friday morning,
krusty crashed again. i was unable to visit until monday morning, and
discovered that the stalled RAID rebuild had ultimately crashed the system.
i removed the questionable disk driver and restarted the system, it seems
fine for now.
the new krusty system won't go in until i have a little time to verify that
everything works ok. i've run all the hardware tests and it passes, but i've
yet to make time to install a copy of CentOS linux (which is what krusty
runs) and put it through its paces.
so yes, this stuff is maybe a little old, but it's enterprise grade hardware
and i've had excellent luck over the years using this type of hardware
coming off lease, it tends to be very reasonably priced on ebay.
richard
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