News

Server overhaul

Monday, 31 January 2011 03:44 Written by Laurence

Recently I've found that my server needs have changed somewhat, and with a few recent disk failures I decided to act upon it.

I have found myself wanting to practise other Linux distrabutions, Windows servers and generally experiment with server and networking systems. Unfortunatly I don't have as much spare hardware laying about as I once did as I get continually reminded by two perticular ladys who have become part of my life (yes it's the mother daughter tag team!) to stop hording. So now I'm left with very little in way of gear, never mind though as I have a storage server with a a dual core CPU, 3GB Ram a few TB of storage and very little to do other than warning me when drives are failing! So with this over powered machine being nothing more than a glorified room heater I decided to get it hosting some virtual servers (VPS).

First came the issues:

For ease I had to get rid of my beloved Gentoo install
I had a second drive drop out of my RAID 6 array, whilst I replaced it for some reason it would get to 99% resync then drop the entire array! I needed to --force assemble the array with 2 drives missing, not a good sign so needed to back the data up! (note I have important data backed up off site, but I have 100's of GB of DVD's that I have ripped from my collection that I'd rather not re-rip if I could help it!)
I needed to pick the correct virtualisation platform and a nice straightforward control panel, whilst I am happy manipulating through shell it's just hassle I could avoid!
The wife gets annoyed when I take the storage down as she can't watch or listen to anything on her PC or the Xbox's (Xbox Media Centre)

The solutions?

Cloned the disk to an image and will redeploy on a VPS
I backed all the data up on the arrays cold spares, borrowed 1TB drives, and the dual external drive that I use for on-site backups (totalling about 4.6TB)
I installed cloudmin to test it on my desktop, liked it and tried it out on the server. Centos 5.5 continually kernel panic'ed after installation (duing boot) which I'm happy that I could have solved the problem (ctrl+c during boot allowed to a boot into shell) I really didn't want to waste my time. I then remembered that a friend of mine pointed out Proxmox (Debian with a nice control panel that manages KVM and OpenVZ), so installed it and love it!
Tell her that it was either this or loose everything, seemed to work.

Other than swapping the servers E2160 for my wifes E6600 to benifit the virtualisation with VT-x (so I can host windows machines) the install was pretty straigh forward and worked like a charm. Whilst I will still need to run my CCTV system of the host machine every thing else should be able to run off guest VPS's.

Currently my new setup is as follows:

arkh-morpork (Proxmox - host machine) - E6600, 3GB DDR2, 2 x 20GB IDE (RAID 1 for Boot), 2 x 40GB SATA (RAID 1 LVM for VPS's), 12 x 500GB (RAID 6 for Storage)
I may upgrade the LVM drives to 2 x 200GB however the boot drives will stay IDE as they are only used by the host machine not the VPS's
This machine is sharing the storage to VPS's via NFS and also stores VPS ISOs, images, backups.
thegreatatuin (Gentoo - guest machine) - 2 cores, 512MB RAM, 5GB LVM, 12 x 500GB shared via NFS
This machine is the original "everything in one" that I will now strip back down removing anything that other VPS's will now be used for, i.e. remove zoneminder, sip, etc.
This machine will mainly be used to distribute my storage i.e. samba, upnp, streaming.
dibbler (Windows 2008 - guest machine) 2 cores, 1GB RAM, 10GB LVM
This machine is simply to play with exchange and active directory functions with, I may use it permanently I may not.
nannyogg (trixbox - guest machine) 1 core, 256MB RAM, 5GB LVM
This is my new SIP PBX

Everything seems to be working as expected however I haven't tested performance yet to see if I can get the host machine struggling with the guest machines under stress.

One improvement that I want to make is to upgrade the host machines specification to quad core CPU, 8GB RAM and larger drives for the VPS LVM whether this will be achieved on it's current platform (AB9 Pro 775) or something newer I am unsure of yet and will depend on hardware costs.

Old GDM Theme Added

Sunday, 13 December 2009 02:22 Last Updated on Saturday, 23 January 2010 07:04

I've added an Invader Zim (Gir) theme to the downloads section.

I created this theme 2 years ago for Laura whilst I was trying to get her to use Linux. The long and short of it was she got into playing games on her computer, and Linux just doesn't do games

Before people start, I am aware of Cedega and wine but they still just don't cut it! Until there becomes a Linux version directx or all games companies release a Linux client it just ain't gonna work.

RSS Feeds Fixed

Sunday, 13 December 2009 02:16 Last Updated on Saturday, 23 January 2010 06:34

I've had a couple of people mention that the sites RSS feeds didn't work

Well I've fixed it by reinstalling the e107 plugin.

To be honest I havn't noticed it, because it seems that if you were already subscribed it still worked, it just wouldn't let new people subscribe.

It's little bugs and issues like this that's really putting me off e107, that and the apparent lack of development.

Did I hear someone say Joomla? No? Well even so it's another CMS that I'm having a look into, I'm actually looking into moving the entire site over to my own server and at the same time totally recreating/reorganising it.

The main difference people will see is that qsplace will become more of a project site, and my own bloggy windgy posts as well as more personal family items will get moved to a subdomain. I just recon it'll be nicer that way.

DNS Migration

Wednesday, 09 December 2009 00:53 Last Updated on Saturday, 23 January 2010 06:34

With the imminent change of servers (mainly for the gallery), I have migrated DNS servers.

Rather than use my current web-hosts DNS servers I have changed them to one I run myself.

Why? What will this achieve?

Well in short, my current web-hosts are very restrictive about the amount of CPU time I can use, whilst I am not interested in overloading their server I need to access the CPU for a one time bulk image manipulation session. Currently if I try to set a cron job to achieve this the CPU usage gets killed after about 10 seconds, this is whether I request 100% usage or 1% usage, because it's a constant session it gets killed off even though this is only ever going to be a one time thing.

Now to why migrating DNS servers can help, because I section off the gallery as "gallery.qsplace.co.uk" this creates a sub-domain that I can easily host on another server. As I intend on ever expanding my site with sub-domains it is easier to have my own DNS server automatically manage the DNS records as I create the new sub-domains, than for me to constantly create new records by hand.

In short I intend on having more content and subdomain on my own server than on my current web host's server, so it makes more sense to have the server that is hosting the most sites manage the DNS records. That and the fact I will be leaving this host, although because I still have just under a year paid with this host I don't know when I will migrate the entire site across.

Emailware!

Tuesday, 01 December 2009 16:23 Last Updated on Saturday, 23 January 2010 06:35

Recently I've been going through my file server, it's capacity currently sites at about 5.02TB (12 x 500GB - RAID 6) but that's another story.

Anyway going through my file server.........

I have started coming across files and projects that I have either completed and haven't really done anything with or partially competed projects.

So I've decided that I'm going to start to release them via "Emailware".

Basically this means that if you use anything which is labeled as distributed as Emailware I would like you to send me an email, it's that simple!

Why the Emailware?
Because I'm nosey and would love to know what and were you use my material.

My email address?
Well if you have a head on your shoulders you'd start with laurence @
or
just click the "Author email" link when downloading some of my emailware.

Lets start off with a set of buttons.