Recently in hardware Category

boar.prgmr.com had a bad disk, and now it is its time to die. There are only 6 customers left on boar, and the prgmr.com website itself. I'm going to move the web server vps first, then the other domUs to coral.prgmr.com, but this blog is on a different vps and won't be affected anyway. The disk allocations on boar are relatively big so it will take a few hours for each vps, but it should be done today. Each customer will also be emailed before their migration starts. I will also update the blog here when the migration is complete.

Cattle and girdle both have failed disks in their raid mirrors. We will need to reboot them this afternoon (in the next few hours) to replace the disks, because hot swap sata is broken in the sata_nv nvidia chipset driver. If all goes well everything will be back up by 5 pm pacific time and the raid will be rebuilding, so there will be slow io for some time.

Edit:  there was a problem;  we brought the wrong disk.  cattle and girdle were built back when we were using consumer grade drives like morons, and we sized the raid for 1.5tb disks... so the 1tb 'enterprise' disks won't work without a /whole lot/ of work.  We ended up hitting frys and buying two more 2tb 'consumer grade' disks that we'll just short-stroke down to 1.5tb, 'cause they didn't have any 1.5tb disks that were faster than 6000rpm... the last disks lasted north of a year;  if we can get another year out of these new disks, I'll be happy. 

Anyhow, cattle is coming back up as we speak;  when cattle is up we will shut down girdle and replace that drive, too. 

root@lion ~]# uptime
 18:12:12 up 451 days, 17:42,  8 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00


as usual, if we don't screw it up it will be 20 minutes downtime and no reboot for you, due to xm save/restore

maybe I"m just lazy and blind, but I can't find any post diagnostic cards that work with modern pci-express only servers

for those of you who are not janitors (or who work exclusively with tyan boards, which have an awesome post diagnostic LED on-board) a post diagnostic card reads I/O port 0080h, and prints out a 2 digit hex number on an LED display, which you can look up in the back of your motherboard manual to figure out what the hell is going on when your server is so goddamn loud you can't hear the goddamn beep codes. I had one that was PCI, and see many that are PCI and ISA, but I see none that would fit in my PCI-e only server. And I've got a supermicro that won't boot. One side of a 2 in 1u, too.

Example of a ISA/PCI post diagnostic card: http://www.elstonsystems.com/prod/pc_post_diagnostic_card.html

I need one of those, only I need it to plug into usb or serial or pci-express or some port my supermicro 2 in 1u servers have.

Meanwhile, I went ahead and overpaid for another stand-alone supermicro motherboard and hooked it into one of my old 3U chassis, so I should have capacity sometime later this week.

.