May 2010
1 post
Oracle is Plop.
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...
April 2010
2 posts
DISK CRASH!
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.
9 tags
Spacewalk →
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.
March 2010
18 posts
5 tags
7 tags
Servers Arrived
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...
4 tags
I Bought Three More Blade Servers
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
Talking to the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Blade
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...
I Did a Little Dance
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...
iLO Manual →
Blade Goes In Here
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...
Installation Manuals →
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.
5 tags
4 tags
Chose an Operating System
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.
I've bought a blade server! →
Just 45 quid for a dual xeon 3.2GHz system with 2GB mem! No disks. A phone call to the supplier secured a 73GB drive for £25. Includes RAID controller and 4 network cards. For £70 - awesome.
I bought a box for blades! →
This one looks pretty complete. It’s not an empty box. It’s got power supplies and data and power sockets that the blades plug into. It’s cheap and a popular HP one, so there’s plenty of cheap used equipment around.
What Are They? →
Here’s a link describing what a blade server is. Basically, lots of computers in one (big) box.
Why am I doing this?
I want to find out how they work. They have no screen and keyboard, so how do I install their OS? How do I know they’re all ok and what they’re all doing? How do I give them stuff to do? How loud are they?
These are questions I don’t know the answer to. I’m going to wade in up to my waist.