[tech] Mooneye upgrades (and misc others)

[David Adam]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2009, David Adam wrote:
> With the power outages yesterday, [MSH] reminded us that one of Mooneye's 
> disks has been throwing errors for a while. [TRS] and I decided to try and 
> replace the drives with a pair of 36GB SATA Raptors scrounged from DAA 
> (the company).
> 
> We only got about halfway through tonight, but Mooneye now has the drives 
> and a Promise SX4 controller installed, and boots happily off the new 
> disks. The controller does RAID, but we're using it in JBOD mode and 
> relying on Linux's software RAID instead. Mooneye has been dragged kicking 
> and screaming into the 21st century, using GRUB instead of LILO and 
> leveraging LVM to give us more flexibility for future upgrades.
> 
> The filesystems haven't been synced over yet, but that shouldn't take too 
> long tomorrow night. However, if we get time we'll probably also try and 
> upgrade to a newer version of Debian, so there might be a few things that 
> don't work straight away.

The whole enterprise took a lot longer than it should have, exposing bugs 
in the Promise SX4, the replacement LSI MegaRAID 150-6, and the various 
Linux kernels we tried.

We eventually gave up on the SATA cards and just added another SCSI drive 
to the onboard controller. Incremental moves over the last couple of weeks 
mean the SCSI drives are now software RAIDed with LVM sitting on top. 
Mooneye hung for some reason tonight so I used to opportunity to do the 
final parts of the move.

Mooneye also got upgraded to Lenny, the latest release of Debian. So far 
everything that broke in the upgrade has been fixed except Phonehome, 
which is having issues with the SOAP layer or something.

While I was messing around in the machine room tonight, I also took the 
opportunity to replace Martello's Ethernet cable, so we now have gigabit 
speed NFS again. (Also I broke the webcam cable for Nautilus and nearly 
ripped the transciever off the board in Camwhore but never mind that.)

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au