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sobriqueIt's been a long week here at the farm.
You know, I don't think that God was this busy on the the 6th day. In fact I know He wasn't, because he can only have had 2 users moaning at him.
Yes, God was a Sysadmin.
Monday was preparing for a training course. 15 copies of 2000 server, in an active directory and 7 of linux.
Thankfully we had a vmware ESX server available and so it wasn't _as_ hard as it could of been.
On Windows 2000 install the OS, don't bind it to a domain.
Copy the image as many times as necessary.
Then fire up each, alter the SID (Icky windows thing - unique ID key for system. Irrelevant up until the point you join a domain, and then bad stuff happens) and then join the domain.
Great.
Oh and I had to create the domain in the first place. That was icky too.
Tuesday was the start of the training course.
About the point that I found out that each of the training machines (that I'd already started up) required SQL Server 2000 service pack 3 installed, oh and IE 6.
So I had to troddle round and get that installed too.
Unfortunately whilst VMWare is extremely cool for rapid magicing up of servers, when you have 15 systems hitting a 4 spindle RAID 5 volume, the disks start to thrash and chug.
This is bad. It meant an hour of so watching a painfully slow install.
But I also found out that the Active Directory team were having a few interesting problems. They're starting the UK deployment of active directory. To my Unix Geek eyes, the structure and stuff looks absolutely revolting. I mean, is it _really_ necessary to rename and rebuild every single user acocunt.
But that meant I could wander around and do the whole 'Would now be a bad time to mention that I'm just a Unix Admin.' line, and just be excessively smug at them :)
Tuesday _evening_ was eating italian food, with 4 french people, an indian, a pole, and 2 swiss. That was interesting, since standards of English and accents were variable (including amongst the serving staff). I was rather impressed at the one lass that dropped into french. Usually us brits are too self concious to try and wave around our language skills. Probably because we're just no where near as good at French/German as most Europeans are at English.
On wednesday, we had more of the same. Training course all day, come out lunchtime to find that our evil helpdesk had assigned me a load of rather urgent calls to deal with.
I must say, that dieting by virtue of not getting a lunch break isn't good. Cos I was about hungry enough to eat the training brochures by the end of the day.
That afternoon, our 'primary' VMWare server decided that it was going to sit there thrashing it's disks and otherwise sit sullenly in the corner. Doing nothing.
Not good.
A little jiggle of the power button meant it fired up again, and actually, I'm not entirely sure that anyone noticed. I mean, it had our print server on it, but the print jobs would have just been queued until it finished starting anyway.
We _think_ it's due to a lack of memory, causing it to page. And thus run like a slug.
After all, we're now at the 38 virtual machines on one physical box point. Which is pretty cool really, considering.
It's a HP Proliant 760, with 4x2800 Pentium 4 Xeon processors, 17Gb of RAID memory (hot swap dimms? I think so!) and 8x146Gb 15,000 RPM seagate SCSI drives.
It's starting to chug a bit, but that's hardly surprising given that that each of the 38 machines has been allocated 4Gb of disk, at least 512Mb of RAM, and a processor each.
So we've an upgrade on the way. Another 4 processors, enough memory to get it to 25Gb (20 usable - the price of RAID) and another 6 disks to fill it's RAID box.
These disks are going to be RAID 1+0. I don't care that it 'wastes' space over RAID 5, we're IO bound on the 4 way RAID5 volume, and so we really need performance, not space. (although we're running short on space too, that's not a problem when we add another 6 spindles).
Actually, I think that VMWare is really good. It's so _very_ useful to be able to deploy another server in a matter of hours (real time, not work - most of that is just copying the 4Gb disk image, or installing $OS_OF_CHOICE). Most 'we need a server NOW' requests we get are pre-emptive - they want the system so they can start developing it, not to put in production. So handing them a Development box to their spec, and a purchase order for the ninja bastard hardware they wanted, they look at the relative pricing and go 'hmm, maybe VMware would be OK. After all, I get it now, and it's only a third of the price' (Your typical Compaq DL380 single processor 1Gb memory machine is around 2 grand. Our average price is around 3 because of upgrades).
And then was Warhammer Roleplay in the evening. That was a good laugh as ever, as our party proceeds to blunder from chaos to mayhem. (Was starting a riot in the middle of a market square in the middle of the big festival _really_ a good idea?)
Thursday was more the same, a little quieter, but having my courses interrupted a bit by people wanting EMC stuff. I mean, I'm not the _only_ one who's been on that training course. And I'm only a little Unix Admin, so I don't have a clue how to go about binding a new interface and NETBIOS name to their new active directory.
(Actually, that's a lie, I do. But I'm busy, and my clockings this week already read 4 hours over 'standard' even if I clear off at the earliest possible interval on friday, I'll still be up by 3 1/2.)
Oh, and Graham got in touch to point out that he's having real life problems, and is having trouble doing his magic for SINergy. This can be done. I'll have to sit out and work out how much I can rely on the various offers of assistance, but we _can_ keep this going, because SINergy is cool.
And today is friday. Things are calming down. I'm trying to put together some CDs for this training course. There's something vaguely perverse to using VNC to connect to our CD burner system, and sending MSN messages (via an RDP session) to a collegue to feed it more disks when it's finished.
Well, except we've got one of the guys here who booked his flight for 13:00. Good timing, given that our training course is expected to finish at about 14:00. Bah.
Now don't get me wrong, busy is good. But one _can_ have too much of a good thing.
It's good for my Ego to be in the centre of the whirlwind. There's something deeply satisfying in being the Guru.
Oh boy am I looking forward to the pub. Roll on 3:30.
"The problem with people whose minds are in the gutter is that they keep blocking my periscope. " snarfed from here
You know, I don't think that God was this busy on the the 6th day. In fact I know He wasn't, because he can only have had 2 users moaning at him.
Yes, God was a Sysadmin.
Monday was preparing for a training course. 15 copies of 2000 server, in an active directory and 7 of linux.
Thankfully we had a vmware ESX server available and so it wasn't _as_ hard as it could of been.
On Windows 2000 install the OS, don't bind it to a domain.
Copy the image as many times as necessary.
Then fire up each, alter the SID (Icky windows thing - unique ID key for system. Irrelevant up until the point you join a domain, and then bad stuff happens) and then join the domain.
Great.
Oh and I had to create the domain in the first place. That was icky too.
Tuesday was the start of the training course.
About the point that I found out that each of the training machines (that I'd already started up) required SQL Server 2000 service pack 3 installed, oh and IE 6.
So I had to troddle round and get that installed too.
Unfortunately whilst VMWare is extremely cool for rapid magicing up of servers, when you have 15 systems hitting a 4 spindle RAID 5 volume, the disks start to thrash and chug.
This is bad. It meant an hour of so watching a painfully slow install.
But I also found out that the Active Directory team were having a few interesting problems. They're starting the UK deployment of active directory. To my Unix Geek eyes, the structure and stuff looks absolutely revolting. I mean, is it _really_ necessary to rename and rebuild every single user acocunt.
But that meant I could wander around and do the whole 'Would now be a bad time to mention that I'm just a Unix Admin.' line, and just be excessively smug at them :)
Tuesday _evening_ was eating italian food, with 4 french people, an indian, a pole, and 2 swiss. That was interesting, since standards of English and accents were variable (including amongst the serving staff). I was rather impressed at the one lass that dropped into french. Usually us brits are too self concious to try and wave around our language skills. Probably because we're just no where near as good at French/German as most Europeans are at English.
On wednesday, we had more of the same. Training course all day, come out lunchtime to find that our evil helpdesk had assigned me a load of rather urgent calls to deal with.
I must say, that dieting by virtue of not getting a lunch break isn't good. Cos I was about hungry enough to eat the training brochures by the end of the day.
That afternoon, our 'primary' VMWare server decided that it was going to sit there thrashing it's disks and otherwise sit sullenly in the corner. Doing nothing.
Not good.
A little jiggle of the power button meant it fired up again, and actually, I'm not entirely sure that anyone noticed. I mean, it had our print server on it, but the print jobs would have just been queued until it finished starting anyway.
We _think_ it's due to a lack of memory, causing it to page. And thus run like a slug.
After all, we're now at the 38 virtual machines on one physical box point. Which is pretty cool really, considering.
It's a HP Proliant 760, with 4x2800 Pentium 4 Xeon processors, 17Gb of RAID memory (hot swap dimms? I think so!) and 8x146Gb 15,000 RPM seagate SCSI drives.
It's starting to chug a bit, but that's hardly surprising given that that each of the 38 machines has been allocated 4Gb of disk, at least 512Mb of RAM, and a processor each.
So we've an upgrade on the way. Another 4 processors, enough memory to get it to 25Gb (20 usable - the price of RAID) and another 6 disks to fill it's RAID box.
These disks are going to be RAID 1+0. I don't care that it 'wastes' space over RAID 5, we're IO bound on the 4 way RAID5 volume, and so we really need performance, not space. (although we're running short on space too, that's not a problem when we add another 6 spindles).
Actually, I think that VMWare is really good. It's so _very_ useful to be able to deploy another server in a matter of hours (real time, not work - most of that is just copying the 4Gb disk image, or installing $OS_OF_CHOICE). Most 'we need a server NOW' requests we get are pre-emptive - they want the system so they can start developing it, not to put in production. So handing them a Development box to their spec, and a purchase order for the ninja bastard hardware they wanted, they look at the relative pricing and go 'hmm, maybe VMware would be OK. After all, I get it now, and it's only a third of the price' (Your typical Compaq DL380 single processor 1Gb memory machine is around 2 grand. Our average price is around 3 because of upgrades).
And then was Warhammer Roleplay in the evening. That was a good laugh as ever, as our party proceeds to blunder from chaos to mayhem. (Was starting a riot in the middle of a market square in the middle of the big festival _really_ a good idea?)
Thursday was more the same, a little quieter, but having my courses interrupted a bit by people wanting EMC stuff. I mean, I'm not the _only_ one who's been on that training course. And I'm only a little Unix Admin, so I don't have a clue how to go about binding a new interface and NETBIOS name to their new active directory.
(Actually, that's a lie, I do. But I'm busy, and my clockings this week already read 4 hours over 'standard' even if I clear off at the earliest possible interval on friday, I'll still be up by 3 1/2.)
Oh, and Graham got in touch to point out that he's having real life problems, and is having trouble doing his magic for SINergy. This can be done. I'll have to sit out and work out how much I can rely on the various offers of assistance, but we _can_ keep this going, because SINergy is cool.
And today is friday. Things are calming down. I'm trying to put together some CDs for this training course. There's something vaguely perverse to using VNC to connect to our CD burner system, and sending MSN messages (via an RDP session) to a collegue to feed it more disks when it's finished.
Well, except we've got one of the guys here who booked his flight for 13:00. Good timing, given that our training course is expected to finish at about 14:00. Bah.
Now don't get me wrong, busy is good. But one _can_ have too much of a good thing.
It's good for my Ego to be in the centre of the whirlwind. There's something deeply satisfying in being the Guru.
Oh boy am I looking forward to the pub. Roll on 3:30.
"The problem with people whose minds are in the gutter is that they keep blocking my periscope. " snarfed from here
