If you ever wonder what it’s like to be me, here you go: <\/p>\n
Heck of a day yesterday. Up in time to catch the 7:20 train (which involves leaving the house at 6:40). Killed off my INBOX, as well as last week’s essay on the train. Also made my way through the first half of the new Atlantic<\/a>. Good stuff on the imperial presidency and digital privacy vs the NSA<\/a>. They’re also running a special series of re-prints of old essays from the 1850’s to the present. There’s some amazing stuff in there. Essays by Lincoln, Keynes, Drucker, and many others. <\/p>\n Got to BDC<\/a> by around 8:30. Sat in the corporate cafe and had a warm cranberry muffin and a cup of coffee while picking up the news and comics over the wireless that BDC installed for this very purpose (since I can’t bring my coffee into the data center). Then, into the data center and on with the day at 9am.<\/p>\n First on the agenda was a call with the admin of a cluster (40 node) I built a while ago. They bought bigger disks for their RAID, and want to make them available, but without losing the data currently on the system. So, I’m doing the paranoid shuffle to make sure that we don’t lose any of their precious stuff when I nuke the old disks to make a bigger volume. Yes, trust me, I need to nuke the volume. I wish it wasn’t the case, but XSan is just awesome like that. We chatted for about half an hour while I re-reassured him that I have clue and I’m not going to FUBAR his system. Then I promptly managed to wedge it badly enough that it required a physical power cycle. Lovely. Doesn’t help that these customers are prickly … and I had just managed to get them settled down and not griping on a regular basis.<\/p>\n Once that was running, I kicked off the other cluster reconfig for the day (this is the 70 node system). We’re adding an additional NFS server to load balance things a bit better. Shuffled that around in background for most of the day. Turns out that Xsan has issues with *moving* a license. I may just put a gun to Apple’s head and demand an additional license, since I can’t find a way to make it release the old license from the machine that’s no longer being used. Yes, I have grepped through every file on every system involved, looking for the license number. If it’s there, it’s encrypted. Yes, I’ve also tried this with only one system online. Thanks for asking.<\/p>\n For a while, we’ve had power cables running under our cage wall to the UPS in the next cage over. I spent some time with the BDC folks getting that moved into our rack, to clean things up a bit. It turns out that we don’t even NEED the battery, since the unused 30A outlet in the cage runs directly from the Master UPS for BDC. Let’s just say that it’s sufficient<\/a>. Along the way, I used my kill-a-watt to measure power consumption on a various servers. Such fun! What I learned is that most 1U servers draw about 2A and 175W, give or take. <\/p>\n Somewhere along the way, I killed my personal web server. Not thrilled about that. So, if you’re trying to read the essays, they’re offline right now, sorry. Going back in tomorrow to try to salvage the data from that machine. It’s an old desktop P-II which may have finally just given out.<\/p>\n