teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

Last night the power went out from approximately 1:30:44 EST until about 5:45 AM. I had to shut down the server since it was due to thunderstorms and I had no idea how long it would take them to repair the lines. Plus, I needed to save the battery power in case it would become useful for other purposes. I did the same with my desktop, but I kept the network UPS running until its batteries depleated. I also have my cell phone charging off of the network UPS, and I had to charge my phone for the next day.

Then I went to school and I didn’t get my server up and running until about 6:30pm. I know, I know. Unacceptable… but it actually spent more time up than it did during my RAID-5 issues of last week.

Also, I would like to use this opportunity to state that the connection this server runs on is now fatter. Previously we had a 7Mbps/512Kbps, now we have 22Mbps/768Kbps. When we upgraded we thought it was supposed to be 2Mbps up… but clearly Time Warner likes to practice false advertising and they refuse to provide that (even though their infrastructure here is definitely capable of providing it, a la download often reaches 30Mbps). Perhaps in the future they will provide such speed. Either way, we have 50% more upload bandwidth, which should help with handling the high volume of traffic my site gets.

I rebooted the server to make a kernel upgrade as well as some general maintenance. As always… let me know of any issues you notice.

You know that feeling when your hard drives are almost all filled up? Your NAS of 500GB is almost full and you have crap on your computers that needs to be transferred to the NAS for their permanent homes. But you’re out of space! What do you do??

Buy a second NAS just like the one you have and run two? That thought crossed my mind… but that wasn’t going to be good enough because there is no redundancy and the LaCie NAS I was using doesn’t have the greatest performance.

So I wanted a real solution… Well, I run a server for a lot of general purposes… Why not just add some hard drives to that? Well… that’s essentially what I did.

I bought a HotSwap Enclosure and three (3) 750GB Hard Drives. I ended up needing a SATA controller card as well because the nVidia chipsets seem to always have problems with the onboard controllers. (There were issues that were making it impossible to successfully build the RAID.

Oh yeah… I put these 3 drives into a software RAID-5 setup. Yes, I realize the card I got does RAID-5 in hardware (apparently), but I wanted more flexibility because if the card dies… it would force me to have to buy that card again (and who knows if it will still exist). This way, I can buy any SATA controllers card(s) and have no problems.

It took all night to build the array, but that is certainly worth it for 1.5TB (1.39TB real) of solid storage. I then spent the next day throwing all my data onto the storage. And now I am all redundant. At some point I will probably purchase a cheap external TB drive to periodically copy the most important data to.

And for those curious… benchmarks indicate approximately 43MB/s write, 110MB/s read. The writing isn’t too impressive, but it is definitely not bad… definitely enough to keep up. I can almost saturate my gigabit network with the read speeds (as long as the receiving computer(s) can handle that).

Reminder: You can always check out my server’s information here.

Let me know if there are any problems.

I upgraded the server’s OS from Ubuntu Server 7.10 to 8.04 today. I know it messed with apache’s configuration a bit, and updated a bunch of stuff, so problems are likely. I’ve already found at least 1 problem, so… definitely let me know if you notice anything weird and I will do my best to fix it!

I added an extra gig of RAM to my server… bringing the total to 2GB. That should allow for slightly quicker response times for you… and for me… more virtual machines at once! And other advantages.

No… it wasn’t REALLY needed, but it was cheap (as far as DDR goes anyway)… so I got it.

Tonight, I was using my server for a lot of various tasks when… suddenly it left the network. I did all I could to restart the networking system to no avail. I ended up having to reboot the server (safely, not forcibly). There is no reason anything that you see should be affected… but certainly let me know if there are any problems.

To my defense, I was using the machine very heavily at the time… but that is still no excuse. Plus, it’s never happened before, so needless to say, I will be investigating. Perhaps I will add a second NIC to help prevent problems like this in the future because… this server is headless (no graphics card even– I basically hooked up a keyboard and blindly typed commands). Maybe even setting up a serial console could be nice to help me to fix these issues without a reboot.

On my end… no hard drive corruption occurred– all data is fine. The only real issue I’m going to be having is figuring out everything that was running and not anticipating a reboot. This is the first major reboot since the server has been set up, so there are most likely some things I’ve forgotten to have happen on a reboot. I just have to find those things.

And for the record… the uptime was somewhere around 47 days, 5 hours.