This wouldn't have happened with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters.

Eaten By Mice

In theory, we're scheduled to move to a new server tomorrow.

That might still happen, though it's looking doubtful.  The reason it might still happen is that if it doesn't, I'll be up for hundreds of dollars in fees to keep the old servers around for another month.

And the reason it's doubtful is that we had trouble with the systems at work every day last week.  Every day, US time.  So between 3AM and 5AM my time.  And every time, I got woken up and had to fix it.

One hardware fault, one software bug, one software bug in an error-handling routine triggered by another site going haywire, one software bug in normal processing triggered by another site going haywire, and one instance of things just not working right for no apparent reason.

Then I finally got back to setting up the new server.  I found some issues with my configuration of the containers for the CPanel sites - insufficent space allocated for the kernel structures, insufficient datagram buffers (which is hardly critical, but I fixed it while I was there) and a couple of other things were we were close to the limit.

So I fixed all of that, recreated the containers, and reinstalled CPanel.

Whereupon I came unstuck, because CPanel would not install.

Turned out - after considerable cursing and deleting and recreating of containers - to be a firewall issue.  CPanel's installer couldn't access CPAN (no relation) because CPAN couldn't access the server.

Fucking FTP.  Passive mode is there for a reason - though it seems to work about as consistently as secondary DNS servers.

Anyway, sorted that out, but noticed that 6GB of RAM had gone walkies without leaving a forwarding address.  It was physically there, but unaccounted for inside Linux.  A reboot sorted that out, but then I had a slight accident with a command run on the hardware node instead of inside a container.

So I decided to do a clean reinstall of Linux and load everything again.  Since I've been experimenting on the box for two weeks now, this is not overall a bad idea.

The reinstall of CentOS went smoothly.  The I went to load OpenVZ - and the OpenVZ repository, and indeed the site - and the list of mirrors - was down.

Gah.

It's back now, but I've pretty much lost a day.

Plan now is to move mee.nu (and the mu.nu Minx sites), and prepare to move mu.nu.  That way I can cancel at least one of the servers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:24 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Speed For Need

Akane, the new mu.nu/mee.nu hyperserver, is as fast as 100,000 PDP-11/70's.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Big mu.nu Welcome

To Akari, Azusa, and Kodachi!

Akari is a quad-core system with 6GB of RAM; Azusa and Kodachi are dual-core systems with 4GB of RAM.  All running CentOS 5.3 64-bit and CPanel.  They'll be taking over duties from Midori and Sakura.

Next up are Nabiki and Kasumi.  Nabiki is a quad-core system with 4GB of RAM and a dedicated SSD; it's our new database server.  Kasumi is our replication server, to couple our data extra-double-safe.  It's a one-and-a-half core system with 1GB of RAM.

Yeah.

As that last might have alerted you, these are not real, physical, stuff-you-can-kick servers, they're virtual servers under OpenVZ.  It takes about seven seconds to create a new server, but it took about five hours to get all the configuration settings correct* and install CPanel.**

Took a little reading to get up to speed on all the commands and options, but I'm saving about $2500 a year by not paying for the pretty user interface of Virtuozzo, and for $2500 I'm willing to do a little reading.

* At one point I had Akari, Azusa, and Kodachi running with 30% and 20% of a CPU - rather than 30% and 20% of the total number of CPUs.  That was a leetle slow.

** CPanel's installation takes a while at the best of times.  It takes about five whiles if you've accidentally restricted your server to only use one-fifth of one processor.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:51 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Joy In The Early Evening

We blew up a high-end Intel SSD at my day job today.  That isn't supposed to happen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:13 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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