tech addict

So you have a group of windows boxes you want time synched right? The first thing that pops into your head is ntpd. Now if only windows had some sort of ntp daemon... Oh wait it does.

The windows time service has been around for a good bit and can be found in windows 2000sp4 or better. If you happen to have active directory setup and the machines are members of your domain, setting up synchronization is as simple as enabling the policy setting to do so. If your a member of the other half (the poor unfortunates administering multiple windows machines without an AD setup, or an ISV) then you will need to use w32tm to configure the machines. Select an external time source (or internal if you want them all synched with one machine) and then register and configure the machines.

I've come into a Seagate Scorpion96 DDS-3 autoloader, which would probably work just fine under windows using backupexec. Thats the kicker though, as I've removed all windows servers from my apartment in a consolidation effort After a little research I found bacula, which seems to cover all of my needs (and gentoo has an ebuild for). As this was my first time with a tape library/changer, I was initially oblivious to the lun probing requirement. The library itself is addressed with a single scsi id, but is actually made up of different components. In the case of the seagate we have the tape drive itself at lun 1 and the changing mechanism at lun

SCSI Media Changer driver v0.25 ch0: type #1 (mt): 0x0+1 [medium transport] ch0: type #2 (st): 0x2+4 [storage] ch0: type #3 (ie): 0x0+0 [import/export]

I've noticed that the changer driver attempts to INITIALIZE ELEMENT STATUS it will eventually timeout (3600 seconds later), which doesn't really work for me, so switched to using ch as a module and passing "init=0".

So far the bacula setup has gone well, tonight will be the first full backup. I will report my results. My only grip with bacula so far is the lack of a web ui, which I may take the time to write if bacula works well enough. On the stats side, turbo fredriksson has taken the time to write some cacti stuff for bacula.

As a note to people who attempt to implement a home backup system, mtx(1) and mt(1) are you're best friends.

<update>Apparently bacula does indeed have a web ui (bacula-web).</update>

If you have an IBM ServeRAID card running a pre 7.00 firmware, you will have trouble upgrading directly to the current firmware (7.12 as of this posting). Apparently there were changes allowing for larger firmware to be loaded. Regardless of that, you will see Error codes = 0x1446 and EC: 04h-46h when attempting to flash from the Support CD or the firmware bootdisks. You need to find a copy of 7.00 on IBM's site, first upgrade to 7.00 and then 7.12. All of this is not very well documented. At least after doing that you will have a working/configurable RAID controller. The support CD does not seem to allow you to configure the controller without upgrading the firmware.

In addition to my little firmware issue, the old gateway 7210 that I'm putting this card in supposedly has a 64bit pci slot. What it has is an abomination. My current server runs a supermicro board, which itself has an actual 64bit pci slot. The difference is the distance between the 32bit pci portion and the extended portion. Normally the spacing is the same as that of the 32bit pci connector's segments. Apparently gateway made up their own, because this slot has about 3x the space between those two bits. What this leaves me with is a nice 64bit pci card in a 32 bit slot. Yay. I'm tempted to try and fit my supermicro board into this case. All i really want is the hot swap scsi backplane.

A friend of mine asked me recently what setup I would suggest for seperating static content serving and dynamic content serving. The main concern being that dynamic content servicing under apache 2 is more resource intensive than static servicing (pretty obvious eh?). As far as static content delivery, there are far simpler web servers availible that can spit out data just as fast as apache for a lower resource cost (boa, lighttpd). Now you've got two web servers, one httpd for dynamic and one for static, but how are you going to make it seem like one site? mod_rewrite (lighttpd aparently supports url rewriting, so it might also do) to the rescue. If you toss apache in front of those two servers (possibly running on the same machine but sitting on different ports) then you can have that main apache process act as a traffic cop routing requests to the httpd that can service them.

That was just my first shot at the issue, if anyone else has ideas please send them on over.