Oracle’s download servers were down for 48 hours.  Very professional and reassuring.

When I eventually downloaded, I had no luck installing on Centos x64, getting cryptic “tns listener all appropriate instances are blocking new connections”.  

Eventually, I found it’s because I’d set my hostname to bay5.lan2. instead of localhost.localdomain.  Like I said, Oracle is plop.

The PC I was setting up as a Spacewalk has died with a disk failure.  Arse biscuits. Start again.  Go directly to jail, do not collect £200.

I was using a little old PC as the spacewalk server, but now I’m going to use one of the blades.

I’ve learnt provisioning.  It’s boring.  I’ve learnt PXE, DHCP, Kickstart, DNS, Routing.  It takes an hour and a half to get a blade up and it’s very boring, unacceptable and needs streamlining and automating.  Looked into a few provisioning system, but I’m going to invest some time with Spacewalk.  I’ll report back soon.

Here’s the cool part of iLo - you get to see the console booting up but in a web page.  There’s also another tool that lets you mount a disk image .iso as a CD drive on the blade remotely.  This allows you to do an operating system install remotely. \o/

I’ve got PXE booting and installation almost working (god that’s not fun - I won’t elaborate - just read the fun manual) only it says it can’t find the kickstart file when it is DEFINITELY THERE!

I’ve got a Centos machine VMed on my Windows 7 machine in the sitting room.  That’s running DHCP, TFTPD etc.  I’m VNCed into that from my netbook in bed.  Lazy admin.

The three new servers arrived.  Spent the evening trying to discover the static IPs they were configured to, then reconfiguring then to use the IP range I’d assigned to my rack.  Very boring.

Found I can’t let the servers all power on at once, because the fans go to bonkers nutter setting 11 for a few seconds on power up, and would, together, overload my PSU.  Set them all not to auto power on.  It’s really not that far to the bedroom, err, I mean data centre.

Been reading about Chef by Opscode.com to provision services on the cluster and Eucalyptus to provide a compute cloud privately, that’s compatible with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.  Can’t wait to play with these puppies.  Still looking for a simple OS deployment system.  Anyone?  No?

Edit:  Looks like KickStart is a good place to begin.

4 GB, no disks (got some spare from an old work server), dual 3.2GHz processors.  £130 for all three including P&P.  Sweet.

May have to shine them up and pass them off as mirrors to the girlfriend to avoid a diplomatic incident between Britain and the Czech Republic

So imagine you remove the keyboard, screen, floppy and CD or DVD from your PC.  And you’ve got a new disk drive in there.  Now install a new operating system on your system, be it Windows, Linux or OS X.  How can you do that?

Now imagine you have to do it eight times.

All will be revealed when I can be arsed to reinstall my OS and take some screen grabs.  I’ve done the install already you see, and in my excitement, I ploughed on to the end like a dog chasing a squirrel ending up in a tree.  

All will also be revealed about how to do it multiple times when I actually find out how to do that.  Any info to http://www.twitter.com/keithmarsh2 please.  I’m guessing I create a disk image from the first and clone it then change the hostname.

Watch this space.

You’re not on the guest list.  Only Safari could get me past this point.  Firefox, Opera and Chrome flatly refused to even let me acknowledge and skip this.  And IE8 (special bus) just crashed ffs.

The username and password for the iLO interface is printed on the case of the blade.  Nice thinking Mr H and Mr P.

What a world of wonder awaited when I finally logged in.

Arse.  I’ve got a duff enclosure I was thinking.  Time to do what everyone does when they haven’t got a clue, take bits off and put them back again.  I took the blade out of the leftmost slot and put it in the rightmost slot.  Fans sounding like jet engines started and lights danced on the blade!!  Christ on a bike, only the right hand side is powered.  Muppet!

There are two power inputs, A and B.  I’ve powered B because my jump leads of death won’t reach A.  A powers left hand side, B powers right hand side.   Ta Daa.

Checking the ARP table of my router, I see a new IP address.  Type it into my browser, and up pops the HP iLO Login Screen.

I did a little dance.

The enclosure comes with a management module which is basically a little webserver built in (not correct, but read on) that you can plug a laptop into and set stuff up.  It’s called iLO, meaning Integrated Lights Out somethingorother.

I spent a good three hours trying to make it speak to me before I plugged a blade server into the box.  I was thinking that it must be my network connection that was duff, or it wanted a specific subnet or some such bs.  I ran packet sniffers, trying to see if it gave away it’s address, but all to no avail.  I used an old ADSL modem that has a DHCP server, and was polling its ARP list franticly hoping to see another IP address show up.

I plugged the blade server in, but that didn’t power up.  Humph.  Cup of tea.  RTFM.

[ The enclosure doesn’t have a server, just a simple net hub to each blade’s management port.  So I wouldn’t have ever got a response from the box alone.  Bleh. ]

Powered on for the first time aaaaand, nothing happened, except a little orange light on the blade enclosure box saying check polarity.  EEK wtf!  Quick check with a meter confirmed that + on the power supply was indeed positive.  Very relectantly, I change the cables over temporarily (wearing rubber washing up gloves - electricity scares the bollocks out of me) and the red light became green!  Fans started.  Gordon’s alive!

HP kindly keep their docs online, so its easy to find out how much it’ll hurt when you drop it on your foot and the like.

The missing power supply modules arrived, but they didn’t come with in the enclosing rack full of monitoring electronics they live in.  Cheapest on eBay is £650!  All I need is 48 Volts and plenty of Amps.  Time to find a standalong power supply nearby.

And I got one!  Went to Caterham to pick it up.  It’s a quality piece of German kit, ex-telecomms, £60, and nice and quiet.  Game on.

After a bit of traditional bit of British-Bodgery, I hacked some meaty cables from the bus bar that came with the blade enclosure.  Frighteningly thick and chunky, like they’d use  in a Texan prison.

While waiting for the PSU to arrive, I wanted to choose an operating system.  Had to be Linux because it’s free and also one project I’m interested in, Hadoop, is for Linux only.

I looked into RedHat Enterprise (RHEL), but that looked like it costs to get updates and patches.  While looking I came across Centos, which is a free RHEL.  Downloaded the disk images all ready.