[tech] Machine Room Cooling Issues

[Bob Adamson]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Matt Johnston wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 10:58:19PM +0800, Bob Adamson wrote:
> > Regarding the aircon situation, maybe an extra *two* 15A sockets are in 
> > order, or perhaps it would be better to just amalgamate some machines. I 
> > think that deserves a new thread if someone has some ideas.
> 
> Put a power meter on things, see what's generating the most
> heat, and throw out the loser. I reckon those old disk
> arrays would be the hottest item at the moment. Are they
> worth keeping?
> 
> Could the UPS be kept outside the machineroom?
> 
> Matt
> 

I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with the power supply for the servers 
being easily accessible to curious freshers...

The old disk array still has some stuff on it but that can be moved to the 
SAN and the array retired - it's only using 35G afaict, but it in reality 
it isn't all that hot. The SAN is pretty warm, but the current setup 
doesn't really permit us to disconnect an entire shelf, and removing 
unused disks will only make it hard to cool the remaining disks.

Other things that we can maybe turn off/do:

-Martello. What services still run on that btw, and do we want to 
retire/repurpose it completely?

-Heathred. Move the heathred software and name to meimei's hardware, then 
retire the P4 xeon heathred's running on. Meimei was good for cameron hall 
3d, but it's totally underutilised now. With a new network card (the 
current one crashes under load), I reckon it would make a great upgrade to 
heathred.

-Mermaid. [TRS] pointed me at a fantastic nano board that satisfies all 
the criteria for the new dispense box - more to come on this, but the 
current mermaid box is *very* hot (especially the disks for some reason)

-Pomona. A club owned box that I claimed, can move to a VM somewhere as 
long as I still have access to the SAN. It is however, a sun V20Z, so I 
would feel a little sad if the hardware were going to waste.

-Meersau. Is a boring dual P4 Xeon running debian, and all it does is run 
the thin terminals, do a little build-botting, and generate heat. Could 
another server run those services instead?

-Coconut. Is our core switch, and runs *very* hot - not much we can do 
about that afaik.

-Some server that some guy from ITS has in there. That's long past its 
departure time in my opinion, and it's the first thing that should go 
before a single UCC server is touched.

[BOB]