[tech] Mooneye upgrades (and misc others)

[mitch at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au]

> 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.)

Capt'n Zanchey strikes again!!!


Mitch

Quoting "David Adam" <zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au>:

> 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
>