May 2008 Entries

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)

The Vegas SuperNAP

Datacenter Knowledge has 2 posts up about Switch Communications new datacenter in Las Vegas, which they are claiming is the highest-density datacenter in the world. http://www.datacenterknowle... http://www.datacenterknowle... Switch Communications says it is successfully cooling a section of its Las Vegas data center running at nearly 1,500 watts per square...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:49 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)

Friendfeed Sysadmin Room, Twhirl FF support, and Pretend-Sysadmins

So not long after I complained that there where so few System Administerors on the social media scene, Friendfeed introduces “Rooms” and immediately Adnan takes the initiative and makes a Sysadmin Room. The uptake was pretty damn fast, probably partly due to Adnans blog being part of the Planetsysadmin collective. (why am I not on there yet?! ) So, lets hope admins posts “adminy” and interesting there. Adnan and me are off to a good start, at least. Meanwhile, I realised I now had a treasure trove...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, May 23, 2008 10:54 PM | Feedback (0)

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)

Loic le Meur responds to my post

I pinged Loic le Meur, creater of Seesmic and owner of Twhirl on Twitter to draw his attention to my post on some of the issues i have with Seesmic. He responded as follows: “you have great points and we are working exactly in the spirit you expect” I will take this to mean that we can expect groups/filter function in the Twhirl client or the Seesmic service in the near future. I cant wait :)...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, May 13, 2008 1:20 AM | Feedback (0)

Sysadmins on Twitter, lack of groups and Seesmic issues

So I have been trying to find and add other System Adminitrators on both Twitter and Friendfeed. I am a bit picky though. I looked for people that seemed to Tweet at least some of the time about their work, tweeted regularly, and in English. Also preffering Windows Sysadmins over Unix for now, but I might reconsidder that. So far the results have been good, and with results I mean that I can get little conversations going about tech stuff. What I would love to see happen at some point, is a discussion...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, May 11, 2008 4:33 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)

Where are all the Sysadmins?

I posted the following post on The Server Room forum at Ars Technica ————————————————————— Hi all,Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I get the distinct impression that sysadmins, for some reason, are not very community-oriented. If you look online for developer communities, you find a fantastic amount of forums, websites, and blogging communities. When I wanted to start blogging about my sysadmin adventures, I looked for communities similar to developer sites like geekswithblogs.net, Channel9,...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, May 07, 2008 12:27 AM | Feedback (1)

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