[tech] Yak shaving on Mollitz

David Adam zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Thu Jun 11 20:23:31 AWST 2015


I wanted to try upgrading Mollitz (the backup server located offsite) to 
the latest version of Debian (8 or Jessie), and got to spend some quality 
time yak shaving[1].

The main problem is that the OCZ Vertex II SSD that is the boot drive 
doesn't play nicely with kernels any newer than 2.6.32 (which is the 
kernel from Debian 6, squeeze).

Along the way, I discovered that:
 - GRUB confuses IPMI Serial-over-LAN
 - The DRAC5 Virtual Media applet doesn't work in Java and requires 
   ActiveX
 - The latest Java doesn't like self-signed SSL and requires editing 
   system-wide configuration to get it to work

Most importantly, I figured upgrading the drive firmware might help, but 
the PowerEdge 2950 only supports Legacy ATA mode (not AHCI) for the SATA 
drives, and the OCZ upgrade utility only works with AHCI.

In any case, Mollitz is now running Jessie but with an old kernel, the old 
udev and thus no systemd. As the kernel is now unsupported I think it 
would be a good idea to look at either upgrading the firmware on the SSD 
or replacing it with one that is less likely to lose all the data on it. 
This will be complicated by the fact that it is located offsite and also:

"<bob> the top right bay (the one holding the ssd) has a screw holding the 
clip closed because it's a hot-swap bay that isn't hot-swap"

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey@

[1]: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html


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