From Oblivion to Serenity

Mon Mar 31 14:22:37 EST 2003

DNS propagation should be completed by now, so hostnames for my web and mail server should be moved from oblivion(.chaosreigns.com) to serenity(.chaosreigns.com). Yes, I enjoy naming my computers.

The rest of this entry will be geekish details.

Serenity came online at its new home on Fri Mar 28 at 19:51 EST.

Oblivion has served me well. It's the first computer I built from scratch, originally as a workstation. After I moved to Philly, and got around to getting DSL, I hosted my domains on curious (a p100) until I decided it was unbearable, and used oblivion as both a workstation and server until I built dancer.

The biggest problem with this arrangement was bandwidth. 128kbits up is slow for a server, especially if you want to serve anything larger than a reasonably sized html page. After I moved, and oblivion stayed in the same place, the latency really started getting to me, since I was no-longer accessing oblivion over ethernet. Upgrading the DSL didn't turn out to be a very useful option, I looked into others.

A co-worker/friend mentioned a friend of his had a rack at a colo that I could probably colo in at a good price. I started looking for a RU server - the smallest (and therefore cheapest to colo) size server.

Another friend, who I had discussed this with, found a good deal on used 1Us, I expressed my interest, and this is where serenity came from.

I was never able to work out colo arrangements with the first friend, but got a good price for coloing in another friend's rack at gnaps in quincy.

From serenity's invoice: $250 + $31 shipping = $281.

The two NICs are eepro100's. The SCSI controller is an Adaptec AIC 7896. The drives are IBM DNES-309170Y 9g.

I have partitioned the two disks identically, and set them up as RAID 1 (mirror) arrays. This is sweet, because I can shut the thing down, yank out either drive, and boot it up cleanly. And more importantly, if either disk fails, the array will just start ignoring the failed disk, and keep going. (I'd still have to shut it down to replace the failed disk.) I did the RAID conversion via the failed-disk method in the Software-RAID HOWTO. Due to an unfortunately mistyped command that mangled my first disk, I had more than a little difficulty with this. The Debian's raid tools disk refused to do anything but segfault for me (even after re-writing it and different version of the boot/root floppies to new disks). RedHat's rescue disk, which is supposed to be good with RAID, recognized my SCSI controller, loaded the relevant module, than insisted I didn't have any hard drives and refused to do anything for me but manually load more modules (to find hard drives). On another virtual terminal I could see messages indicating that the kernel had, in fact, found my SCSI drives and their partitions. So apparently the RedHat 7.3 installer doesn't believe in SCSI. At the recommendation of the creator of the Debian raid tools disk, I used knoppix (a Debian based distribution designed to be run from CD) to rescue serenity. Knoppix kicks ass. Boots directly into X, autodetecting hardware like mad, with all kinds of tools, including full raid support, and a Debian installer. This is how I plan to do my new installs from now on, if Debian's doesn't do something like this by the time I do another install. After I got RAID working, I had some difficulty with lilo. "raid-extra-boot=mbr-only" ended up making it work.

Serenity came with a freeme.com logo on the front of the case. "FreeMe.com is providing ISPs all the ASP stuff you've seen before -- calendars, planners, contact management -- but it's all free." freeme.com can be found in the internet archive (which is incredible). Excerpts:

Nov 11, 1998
Persistence
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; un-rewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. -Calvin Coolidge-
(entire text of the page)

Feb 02, 2001
FreeMe.com is bringing revolutionary new ways for ISPs to deliver applications and services to their customers.


Mar 31, 2001
FreeMe is a Referral Marketing Company that is offering to pay out Millions of dollars to Affiliates and Charities for referring new Members to our Free Credit Card....


www.freeme.com is currently inaccessible due to the domain's DNS servers (rumours.freeme.com and hearsay.freeme.com) not existing.

History of the company can be found via a google search for freeme.com.

A friend who has some experience with boxes identical to serenity says they're "true solutions" boxes. A company that doesn't exist any more. They were bought by VA Linux, and now VA Linux doesn't exist any more. He has also confirmed my suspicion that the soft pwr switch doesn't do anything helpful, and just puts the box in a weird state.

Pictures of serenity, in the rack it now calls home, and interior and exterior closeups, can be found in my collection of digital photographs. 
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 23:44:21 -0500
From: Darxus@chaosreigns.com
Subject: raid1 on serenity

I've been fighting with this way too long to not share with somebody.  I
got software raid1 (mirroring) working on my new 1u, both root and /boot
partitions.  I can shut down, pull either hard drive, and it'll still boot
successfully.

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *         1         8     64228+  fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda2             9        70    498015   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda3            71      1115   8393962+  fd  Linux raid autodetect

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *         1         8     64228+  fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb2             9        70    498015   82  Linux swap
/dev/sdb3            71      1115   8393962+  fd  Linux raid autodetect

And my /etc/lilo.conf:

lba32
boot=/dev/md0
raid-extra-boot=mbr-only
root=/dev/md1
install=/boot/boot-menu.b
map=/boot/map
delay=200
vga=normal
default=3b
image=/vmlinuz
        initrd=/initrd.img
        label=Linux
        read-only
image=/vmlinuz.old
        label=LinuxOLD
        read-only
        optional
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-2003-03-13-20-46
        initrd=/initrd.img
        label=3b
        read-only


I did a debian install on the first disk, created a degraded array using
the second disk, with the first disk set as a failed-disk in the array,
copied everything to the degraded array using cpio as the howto suggests,
rebooted to the degraded array, changed the failed-disk to raid-disk,
hotadded the first disk...

For the rest, google search for software raid howto.

Feel free to ask me questions.  This email isn't very complete due to my
wearyness of the subject and stuff.
next:Good music last night at Manray2003-04-17
previous:pinkee broke up with me again2003-03-31
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