servers

There are 25 entries for the tag servers

When you touch that server you touch me

They turned off the HPSIM and general management and alerting server this morning, or at least, unplugged it, cause it was causing this huge network spike at a remote site I know for a fact that no one besides myself knows what it is exactly that machine does, as its only usefull to me and what I do. That doesnt mean it isnt explained in the server list in Sharepoint that I made and painstakingly try to keep up to date, that no one bothers to ever look at. And of course no one bothered to ask during...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, July 25, 2008 10:56 PM | Feedback (2)

Big Bang Servermove succesfull

This Saterday, we switched the subnet over, and moved all the remain criticle systems over to a new serverroom across the country. I didnt get to make as many pics as I liked, and no video, this was mainly cause I was so bussy of course. :D Half the pics below are curtesy of Arnold. Back of the Digital Alpha box, refernece sho for recabling. Packing up the servers in special locked crates. You could see these movers where the right stuff, big burly guys, but they handled the servers like feathers....
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, July 07, 2008 10:51 PM | Feedback (0)

Meanwhile, back at the old location

A tour of the current state of the office, and one of the server rooms, where most racks are now empty or near-empty. An Epic moment. Gert-Jan uninstalls Citrix on the last 2 servers in the farm, effectively ending 6 years of the 2000-user, 60-server Metaframe XP Citrix farm that served our Netherlands users. I would have had Marcel do this, but he has gone on holiday. Various IBM servers and almost all the blades lie ready to be moved to the new location. We don't have a use for any of these currently,...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, July 04, 2008 9:15 PM | Feedback (0)

T-Minus 1 day to Big Bang serverroom move

Spent today going over some cabling details mostly. Its strange how stressed we all became over these little details, while we will have larger issues to worry about on the day. (high res) During the move, we will be moving the Voip servers, RF-Controllers (used by various sites to do handheld-scanning), an Authentication server, the Wyse-Terminal (thin client) management server, and 1 PDC. We are also moving 2 very criticle FTP/EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) servers, that handle lots of customer-related...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, July 03, 2008 9:12 PM | Feedback (3)

Version 7.1 of the TCR rack diagram

This is more or less how its gonna be. All the bits are now in place, half the rack stuff has been put in place already, the last stuff goes in coming Vriday. One of the biggest oversights we made was with power requirements. If you want redundant power for a lot of servers, you need to make sure you have a LOT of plugs, enough PDU’s, and plenty of PSU to back it all up. We didnt, partly due to time contraints, budget, but also short-sightedness, and my reliance on people that I, to put it bluntly,...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, June 30, 2008 11:57 PM | Feedback (0)

Computer Room Cleanup and re-cabling Pics and Movies

So a few weeks ago, we spent our Saterday doing major recable work on the new Technical Computer room (TCR) in the new location, in preperation for our Big Bang services move coming up on the 5th of July (it was delayed from the 22nd)) So thise pics and videos are a few weeks old now, but who cares. PICTURES (scroll down for movies) Not enough room to neatly get all the fat KVM cables sorted, so later I actually extended the room for the cables to 2U, and used the cable guide rail only for ethernet...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, June 30, 2008 11:37 PM | Feedback (0)

Datacenter Move post 4

Youtube videos are worth a thousands words, so I will let them do the talking. Progress TCR Move May27 part 1 (the old location) Progress TCR Move May27 part 2 (the new location) What Mustafa thinks of IBM rackmount kits: And some pics from the last 3 days: (Click for larger versions) IBM xseries 336, bout 3 years old now ServeRAID 6M controller (in the PCI slot bay). Its IBM branded but its basically an Adaptec. This comes out of one of the 2 xseries 336 servers that, together with the EXP400 shelf,...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, May 28, 2008 8:28 PM | Feedback (0)

Desicionmaking on the new Proxy solution

For your enjoyment, here is a, slightly edited, email I just sent to the department head and various other decision makers. It goes over some of the options we need to consider to solve the current issues with our internet access. Names and places have been changed to protect the guilty ;) And please exuse the spelling. I was in a hurry and I really dont care about spelling as much as I do content. ---------------------------- Hi all, We are currently faced with some decisions that need to me made...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, May 26, 2008 7:34 PM | Feedback (3)

Videos of serverrooms and progress report

So I havent posted about our Datacenter move in a while. Well we are starting to pick up the pace now, all the new servers at the new location have been set up, and various other teams are now installing their stuff on there. We are now getting into decomissioning more and more servers from the old server rooms. Here are two videos of rooms as they were 2 weeks ago. Old Datacenter 1 from Robert Kloosterhuis on Vimeo.(I focus on one of the comm pc’s for a while, as the mouse was moving just a minute...
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, May 24, 2008 1:11 AM | Feedback (1)

Scheduled reboot batch job, unexpected "access denied" and how to handle security

So here is something silly I was running up against. In the end its super simple, but its not obvious, and not easy to google for. I want to equip the new servers are are installing with a standard weekly reboot schedule. I created a batch file that launched shutdown.exe with some fancy parameters, and set this up as a scheduled task for each server. I created a special domain account called sa-scheduledreboot with normal user rights, and rights to access the share, and of course the famous "log...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, May 14, 2008 7:26 PM | Feedback (0)

TCR Move destination rack plan v2

Picture on Flickr High-res version This is version 2 of the rack plan, as it currently stands. To make sure we have enough room for everything that could (potentially) be moved in, I moved things about a bit from where we are now, means we need to re-rack 2 servers tomorrow, but other than that we are good. I am really hoping we get to re-use the HP Storageworks tape library, I am not sure at the moment what type it is specifically. I also dont know yet how much room the Advocent Switchviews have...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, May 08, 2008 2:42 AM | Feedback (1)

Datacenter Move post 2

So it turns out, we are gonna move all the servers to 1 location. Expect a new rack diagram soonish ;) I hate politics. Moving it all to 1 place is both a blessing and a curse. Naturally, its logistically easier for us. But it also means we are facing potential power and airco issues at the single location. Moving to the 1 location was a political desicion, and not made with the best of technical considerations in mind. On top of that, the big Citrix migration project, that we are depending on being...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, April 25, 2008 12:57 AM | Feedback (0)

First Datacenter move post

Ok, so this is the first post in a long while on this blog. The reason I have started blogging again, is cause I finally have something interesting Techie to blog about – namely our datacenter move. I hope this will become a series of posts, over the next few months, relating to our move. Our datacenter: – 100+ Citrix servers– Buch’O infrastructure server– About 20 application servers– About 8 web/FTP servers– About 6 IIS/Web servers– 2 IBM Blade Centers– Bunch’O Unix servers– About 6 SQL servers–...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, April 15, 2008 12:52 AM | Feedback (0)

WSUS fubar - Microsoft Desktop Search

Thank you Microsoft, for once again bypassing my Windows update policies. I can now go explain to my managers why 500 workstations and 12 servers have ended up with Microsoft Desktop Search, without anyones explicit approval. To illustrate how totally stupid this is, check out these screenshots out of our WSUS box: As you can see above, our current update policy only allows Security updates, Critical Updates and Security Roleup Packs to be automaticly installed ("Approve for Installation") on select...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:49 PM | Feedback (6)

Forcing hardware power on state with IBM Director

The screenshots in this post have been restored on my new blog. Check out this article here. Okie.. so I am totally bored at work, lets see what fun I can have with IBM Director and some spare servers lying around. I thought it might be cool to try and make a rule that checked if a server had been turned off, and then brought it back up. This would be usefull for us, as we cannot physically administer all the servers we are responsible for, and there are always overzealos ‘admins’ walking about in...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, December 28, 2006 1:22 PM | Feedback (2)

IBM Bladecenter power warning

This post discusses the Standard IBM Bladecenter Chassis, not the T -or H Chassis systems. A common warning message you might recieve from an IBM Bladecenter is as follows: "Demand exceeds a single power module. Throttling can occur in power domain 1." The message is normal.In a normal rudundant situation, all power needs are drawn from both PSU's, so you effectively have 2 x 2000 = 4000w for a single power domain during normal running. Its not a fail-over system, its drawns its power from both PSU's...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, June 01, 2006 1:48 PM | Feedback (3)

Finding Downloads on the IBM Site

Finding and Downloading anything from the IBM site is still a confounding process. This post, attempts to illustrate some of the issues I encounter, and has also been my mental notepad in this process. This post is also a rant. We purchased two IBM xSeries 366 servers, with the ServeRAID 8i SAS controller included. We installed these servers using the latest ServerGuide CD, version 7.3.6, dates 11/25/2005 The OS is Windows Server 2003 SP1 However, once we installed the IBM director Agent, the servers...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, January 18, 2006 7:14 PM | Feedback (3)

New IBM xSeries 346 servers

As part of a new global Active directory roleout, we recieved 4 xSeries 346 servers today, which will function as domain controllers. Here are some pictures I made (also on my Flickr! work page) IBM xSeries 346 server, with a 5 disks in the front. Mark is placing the controller. The Blower-array of the IBM xSeries 346 server. Each fan can be taken out seperately, or you can take the entire rack of fans out in one go. This little module that looks much like a memory stick, is in fact the Adaptec/IBM...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, December 30, 2005 6:58 PM | Feedback (1)

Building IBM Bladecenters - A foto journal

2 x xSeries 366 Servers, unpacked, and ready to recieve options So much stuff to build, so much to unpack!! Over 100.000 dollar worth of components on the table here. Extra CPU's, Harddisks, Option cards, even Acoustic Attenuation Modules .. all to be built into our Blades, Bladecenters, and xSeries 366's 21 HS20 Blade Servers, still in Box. One of the 2 IBM 366 servers, they will be running Windows 2003 and SQL 2000. The 2 Bladecenter Chassis waiting to be unpacked. Way way waaaaaay to many boxes...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, November 24, 2005 6:53 PM | Feedback (1)

The tale of the server who was not to be updated

Dear friends, Now I relate to you a take of perill. It concernes a Windows 2000 server with Cisco VOIP software that we did not know about. No one had ever told us about it. We have been pushing to get all of our servers to some kind of patch standard.. a mammoth task, 200 servers, and nothing even resembling a patch management infrastructure. I had installed WSUS, and added all clients that where on the old SUS server over, this included mostly PCs and Laptops, but also a bunch of servers, including...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, October 20, 2005 11:40 AM | Feedback (1)

IBM is reaching out

There are some guys at IBM that have started to ‘get’ that whole “clue train” thing. As a result, I have been given the oppertunity to talk directly to the IBM Xseries server team, on their website in particual and my experiences as a customer. I recently posted about my initial experiences with IBM hardware and their website in particular, and these experiences where not exactly.. good. I found very little about IBM in the blogosphere, so I felt that if I made IBM aware that...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, September 01, 2005 11:30 AM | Feedback (0)

eating_zotob

Originally uploaded by Jemimus. Update fun at work today, trying desperately to get 50 windows 2000 servers up to some kinds of descent patch level...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, August 17, 2005 3:28 PM | Feedback (0)

IBM xSeries clustering woes

Here is a copy-paste of a forum post I did in Tek-Tips. http://www.tek-tips.com/vie... We are totally new to IBM hardware, and the last few weeks we have been trying to navigate the forest of IBM software and documentations. We have gotten quite lost a few times, but we are making slow progress. There are, however, a number of issues that we are still strugling with. We started out downloading the newest versions of various IBM CD's, thinking it would be benificial to flash...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, August 01, 2005 3:24 PM | Feedback (3)

Messing with IBM xSeries 336 1U and IBM in general, my experiences so far...

Pictures @ eWeek So in my current job I get to play with some cool toys, like the IBM xSeries 336 model 8837, and the EXP 400 Disk cabinet. I must say its the first time I have had some real hands-on experience with server hardware, and then to get to work with stuff thats pretty new is quite cool. Add to that, the fact that its my job to get to know this stuff very well, something I am not accustomed to, is very cool. My past jobs where all pretty pretty boring compared to this, so very rarely was...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, July 26, 2005 8:03 PM | Feedback (3)

ITT: Troubleshooting some (common?) SBS 2003 issues I came across

Today I am at a customer again, for whome I had set up their first network and domain, based on Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.They have called me in today to solve some of the 'critical errors' their SBS server is giving them. Because they seem to be pretty generic, and probably common errors, I thought a ITT blog post might be cool, so I will be formating this post as a kind of 'dairy' of the day.(The SBS installation is in Dutch, so I am forced to traslate errors ad-hoc, I try to name by...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, March 30, 2005 5:51 PM | Feedback (1)

Copyright © Robert Kloosterhuis