June 11, 2012
by dhoytt
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Replaced Router & Updated MultiPlayer Game Server Fans

I replaced one of the routers in my environment as well as updated the fans on the multiplayer gaming server to improve cooling and air flow.

The router started suddenly causing issues in the environment last week in the middle of some other projects I had going. I reloaded the firmware since it was at the latest firmware as well as reloaded the settings from a config file I had saved but the router continued the erratic behavior of dropping packets.

I had an older router that just really has one LAN port not functioning with all other functions working fine so I uploaded the config file to that router and put that in place of the router that was dropping packets and so far everything looks just fine.

I think that I will have to consolidate my router operations at some point and I’m researching and evaluating multi-IP routers.

The multiplayer game server I reconnected some positional fans that hover over the CPU’s that I had previously connected but disconnected to connect the turbo fan heat sink combo I have now. This system has some serious air flow issues since I built it into a non-standard case with the motherboard layout its really not ideal. Ill soon be moving the multi-player server to another system an that will alleviate this issue.

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May 9, 2012
by dhoytt
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Repaired MySQL Tables for Blog

I was having issues creating an entry for the “Snakeice House of Beats” radio Blog and then went into MySQL on that server and discovered some issues with the MySQL tables that I then repaired. I went ahead and created that entry after the repairs and all looks fine as this post also shows since its shares the same MySQL instance and code base!

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March 1, 2012
by dhoytt
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Solaris 11 x86 Now Installed

Well I placed Solaris 11 x86 on one off My Supermicro systems for now to see what’s different and this also gets any version of Solaris back up in my environment after a long absence. Previously I had this system running ESXi 4.1 and a few virtual machines.

Now with Solaris 11 x86 I will get an opportunity to deploy Oracle’s version of vitualization “Zones”.

Looks like a lot changed in Solaris 11, plus I realized after talking to some administrators who play with Solaris full time I needed to stick my fingers back in on a more regular basis to re-familiarize myself. I think I will throw Solaris 10 up somewhere as well maybe as a virtual guest on VMWare or Solaris Zones or are they Solaris Containers?

My Adatptec 7902 SCSI RAID card is throwing out some errors but my drives were recognized just fine. I may suppress those errors if I find they are meaningless as I suspect. I added additional drivers for the SCSI RAID during install that installed fine so will see how things play out.

Stay tuned the promised changes to the web sites is still going albeit slowly and my entire lab/computer room is changing along with other major adjustments in life so you will see changes in bursts!

Posted from my new Solaris 11 x86 system’s desktop.

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February 25, 2012
by dhoytt
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New Servers in Environment with Linux VMware Possibly Solaris

Well after some freaky months of numerous issues coupled with having to spend money on other projects I finally have my systems at the proper foundation hardware & base OS roles and assignments moving forward!

The main issue that I had was that the SAS RAID daughter cards initially didn’t quite work the way I wanted even with the specialty connector’s that I ordered for my Intel S5000XAL motherboards. I initially ordered these because they were quite a bit less expensive than the internal cards plus the information out there was sketchy for this motherboard and I incorrectly thought the external daughter cards also had internal connectors and I was wrong.  I also ended up with some faulty SAS drives so that combination didn’t help.

I updated and downgraded the SAS daughter card firmware several times but with that combination of bad drives & incompatible SAS daughter cards & specialty customized cables I connected externally then ran internally there were way too many issues!

I finally ended up buying the internal SAS daughter board cards and they didn’t work with the drives so I really thought I was against it. Next step I purchased another SAS RAID card for another system and tested the drives and the drives didn’t respond to that SAS controller either.

I finally brought in two new Dell systems 1850 & 1950 which has SAS and I confirmed that the drives I had were bad by trying to use them in the Dell 1950 SAS drive bays. I then took one of the known good drives off of the 1950 and tested with the internal SAS controller cards on my custom system with the S500XAL motherboards and they worked just fine.

So now I have the two identical systems with the S5000XAL motherboards in custom 2U cases and the two Dells systems in my environment which are 1u.

I will use one Dell system for my web server for now and the other for my management server running Open source application monitoring software, backups and software in that genre. The two custom built identical systems with my Intel S5000XAL motherboards will run VMware. I will then load Solaris x86 on either my former web server or another VMware system I have already in my environment and the other will be my duplicate web server.

I have other systems that will play a flex role and I will use for tests and filling in holes in the environment and/or development.

February 14, 2012
by dhoytt
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Replaced Switch in Enviornment After Failure

I was working on some new pages on my site and then my site went down. I
had to troubleshoot the issue and found that it was my switch that
comes into my entire environment from the WAN that then goes to my
routers. I had to fire up Wireshark to see that the responses were being
rejected until I bypassed the switch to each router. still the switch
would act as if it was working and then finally after the last power
recycle of switch not even the connectivity activity lights came back
on.

While the switch was connected the routers started cycling to show a
status of WAN disconnected so that was another clue. Oh well time I
slapped another switch in its place and I’m fully back up once again.
I’ll have to upgrade in that area once again which I was already looking
at but wanted to look into other upgrades in the environment first.

Either way back up and serving web pages and streams once again!

January 9, 2012
by dhoytt
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Working On New Look & Functionality For Site

In the background on my others servers I’m working on a completely new look for the site with a new CMS\Blog platform! Seems that my current platform has been somewhat bogged down in the development area and the others are taking nice stride forward and will give me the functionality to really craft my site it seems more to my liking. I think that the pieces and parts will be more but the customization that I’m running into is great but I just need to get up to speed on it!

I will be able to have more forms more interaction and that should make it more user friendly with more to do and integrate with other sites you may use.

Stay tuned!

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November 21, 2011
by dhoytt
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Starting to Like systemd systemctl to Control Linux Services

Looks like “systemd/systemctl” are taking over from System V service controls in Linux. Fedora 16 this is the default manager for controlling the services on Linux. I was attempting to use “chkconfig” and it kept forwarding the request to “systemctl” so I was finally forced to look at the man pages and the Fedora page and so far I like what I see except the assigning of start levels takes too many keystrokes and too long to check status.

Not completely sold on “systemd” but I will work with it and see how it does for now it seems to be working just fine.

Here are some helpful links:

Fedora SysVinit to Systemd Cheatsheet
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet

Fedora Systemd Page
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd

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