My thoughts on life, the universe and beer

Howdy,

I decided to upgrade my workstation today. I ended up with choosing:

Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4

Intel Core 2 Duo 8400

4GB OCZ DDR2 RAM

Antec P182 chassy with Antec 500W Phantom PSU

1x 320GB Seagate HD-ST320S2 disk

1x 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS disk

Gigabyte Nvidia 8600GT 512Mb GPU

I started the assembly today, and will hopefully finish it tomorrow. As operating system goes i am going for Fedora 8 or Fedora 9 (Rawhide) x86_64.

Hopefully this will serve as my workstation for the next 2 years or so ….I currently have a Dell 22″ LCD that i will share with my Thinkpad T61 laptop i use for work with a KVM (DVI/USB). I have not gotten so far as finding a nice one here in Iceland yet but currently i am aiming for a Belkin KVM since it seems to be easy to get for the stores around here. I’ll try to find one tomorrow hopefully.

My friend is having a release party for his new album, Telling Tales, so i am going to spend tomorrow night drinking and hopefully having a good time ….Join us at Gaukur á Stöng!

Laters…
Finnzi

Howdy,

About a year back i was doing some work on a EMC Clariion box for a customer. I found the management interface to be extremly “boring” …it was clunky and stupid for someone who had worked with a IBM DS4000/HP EVA box. I finished the project and got on with my life.

Now i am again looking at a Clariion box. I’ve spent pretty much all of my spare time since i came back from work reading up on new features and stuff. I really find the Powerpath licensing stuff to be …well….stupid. Why on earth doesnt the box come with a fully functional version of the software ? I mean, we bought a IBM SVC around 1.5 years ago and it came with a full blown version of the multipath software for every OS i can think of, including HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, Windows etc etc …

However since i was working on a Clariion a lot has changed. It has gained something EMC calls a “Virtual LUN” which basicly means you can migrate a lun live to another array within the box (kinda like the SVC does). This is a pretty neat feature in a entry level storage box. However this is not a must-have feature but it is pretty neat from a performance perspective since you could migrate a potentially loaded disk to a Tier1 media where it would not affect the other volumes as much etc etc. This feature is also free, as in it comes with the Clariion software.

If you need a box and can get a good deal on Powerpath or use device-mapper-multipath with it this could end up being a very nice box if it is the only one. However after working with the SVC i must say i would not want to go back to having a single large storage system instead of having a SVC in front of few “smaller” onces. The SVC has saved me from potentially long nights migrating a machine from box a to box b

I migrated my 2 Xen machines to a single fedora install few days ago since the Xen host machine was giving me problems. The hardware is a bit funky, the network card is not supported out-of-the-box on a CentOS5 install and i kept forgetting to recompile the driver on each kernel upgrade so i decided to go with a Fedora 8 install instead. Everything worked like a charm.

Bleh …..i’m getting tired …..

Laterz,
Finnzi

Yay….weekend at last!

I was on 24/7 call all last week (We have a system where 5 administrators rotate the 24/7 shift every week). I have opened a beer .

Today i was doing to VMWare maintainance with a fellow sysadmin, which reminds me again why we have this wonderful boxes ……We upgraded two boxes to ESX 3.5 yet without a single virtual server going down. Yes yes, i know, we could be doing the same thing with Xen or Ironfoundry or some other product. Yet, we have been using VMWare ESX exclusively since 2005 and have yet to find a major issue with the product. The management tools are very good, the ESX product is stable as a rock (without a exception regarding a bug regarding EVA, ESX 2.5 and rescanning disks;). Now we can juggle our virtual machines around with ESX, and we can juggle the disks the virtual machines are running from one diskbox to another with our IBM SVC product. All maintainance on the ESX servers & the SVC nodes can be done during daytime which saves us a great deal of sleepless nights, which are still way too many .

Well ….going to keep on watching Kerrang and drink more beeeeeeer!

Cheers,
Finnzi