nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

< grumble >

April 9, 2004

Oh, all email and websites hosted off of bornslippy.nuxx.net is down right now. I don’t know what’s wrong… The machine will return pings sporadically, and every once in a while just become available. It’s not a DDOS, and ofdoom, located on the same switch, is just fine. Something wonky… I’ve got a call in with the ISP asking them to reboot the box, so hopefully things will be back up soonish.

And yes, this is the same stuff I was seeing yesterday. I *thought* it was a runaway copy of PHP, but it looks like I’m wrong… The first thing to try? A reboot.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

…

April 8, 2004

Okay… bornslippy.nuxx.net is having problems. I’m not sure what’s going on yet, but it’ll receive email, you can check email, but I can’t ssh in nor hit it via http. Thus, I have no way of looking at it remotely.

Still digging… Worst case I’ll ask the onsite people to smack the reset button.

UPDATE: It seems that someone is heading into the facility later today and will reset the server for me. Uggh. Hopefully a few hours and it’ll all be back…

UPDATE TWO: Things are back to normal. I *think* that PHP being called by a new version of Gallery that I installed was causing hell. No idea why… I was able to SSH in, though, and things are just fine now. Now I just hope that the person at the colo doesn’t go ahead and reboot the server like he was going to. Eek!

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

…

January 26, 2004

Well, it’s done. I think that the box has been sealed, BIOS settings tweaked, and the base OS set on what will be the new webserver, bornslippy.nuxx.net, is built. Hopefully it’ll go live within the week, but for now, feel free to look at some pictures of it. You’ll actually be accessing the new box itself, as I’ve got it running here at my house, but it’s still on my cable modem. Hopefully it’ll go in on Wednesday or Thursday. I hope. :D

UPDATE: Yeah, I did something dumb and deleted all my websites. I’m replacing them now. I need to pay more attention next time I mess around with rsync. dumb dumb dumb. If the photos aren’t available when you check, try in a few minutes.

UPDATE TWO: All fixed. I upgraded Gallery to a more secure version, too. Yay!

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

!

January 24, 2004

Yay! FreeBSD is up and running, without any sort of RAID controller. After buying a 3Ware from eBay and having it need *identical* disks, I thought I was sunk. So, I ran out to Micro3000 (thanks, Erik!) and picked up a Promise FastTrak100 TX2. Turns out that this controller only does on-line swaps and rebuilds when using a special Windows driver. Gah! Oh, and manual, off-line rebuilds take forever. It took about an hour and a half to re-sync the mirror after I intentionally broke it. Ah well.

Anyway, to make a long story short, thanks to the wonderful help I received from , I’ve got a working mirrored system, and the know-how to do it again. Now, to get everything configured, test what happens if a disk does die, etc.

Oh, and yes, Erik, I think I will need to return that controller. It just doesn’t work quite how it says on the box. :\ Ah well. Things are good, for now.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

:(

January 24, 2004

Not. Happy.

This 3Ware Esclade 5000-series controller will only create a mirror from identical disks. Not identical *size* disks, but identical disks. Subversion number and all. So, now I’ve got two Western Digital WD800JB disks that I can’t create a mirror with, because they were made at different times of the year. Quick fix is to buy a new 80GB, but what do I do with the old one then?

Blah.

In good news, the colocation place looks really nice. I think my server will end up there. They pass all the tests: run by a geek who’s been around, been in business for a while, fair number of servers, nice guy, not-RBL’d, well connected, etc.

So, off to fight with the disk controller.

UPDATE: Now FreeBSD 5.2 dumped core when trying to boot in order to install. This might be because I don’t have any arrays defined. I wonder if I have a set of any old disks I can try this with. Hrm.

computersmoved from livejournal

…

January 16, 2004

Well, that’s it. My home file/web server has been shut down. Everything that was on the 80GB disk and the contents of the websites are being copied off. Fairly soon the server will be mostly disassembled, I’ll attempt to do the weird vinum install, then decide if I need the hot-swap RAID stuff.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

…

January 16, 2004

All, this isn’t all that important, but it looks like I’m going to be moving dingleberrypie.com out of it’s current place and into a full-out colocated server. As part of this, I need to get the server built, configured, secured, etc. So, for a while, dingleberrypie.com will be down. That means no recipes, photo galleries, etc. I’ve also got a bunch of server-moving work ahead of me tonight.

Let’s see… The file/web server will get parted out to become the new colocated server and the file server. The firewall will be moving back to it’s old Gateway 2000 pizza box. Either a second pizza box or the file server will become the new file server, depending on if I can get an external SCSI enclosure or not.

These decisions will come tonight. :D I also need to play with using Depenguinator to set up a vinum-mirrored disk set, per ‘s recommendation. I’ve got it mostly working here under VMware, but Depenguinator doesn’t come with the vinum lkm, so I’ll have to get things working.

This should be a really, really interesting trip. But, with any luck, I’ll finally be running my own, legal, publically accessable web/mail server.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

…

December 31, 2003

Well, it seems that I should be able to use the digital out from my motherboard fairly easily. That means I only need one piece of coax for audio run from the computer to the receiver, and it should be relatively noiseless, as it’ll be a digital signal. Video seems like it’ll be a bit more interesting, though. See, iTunes visualizations only run in 640×480 when full screen, so I think that composite *should* do all right. I just need to find a way to extract a composite signal from the board. There’s a five-pin connector that hookes to a $15 Asus TV-out adapter, but I don’t want to pay that. I figure there’s a common ground, one pin for composite, and the other three pins for s-video. If I can only find out which two pins are for the composite, and if the chipset properly detects a TV when this is connected, I’ll be in good shape. :) I think the appropriate thing to do would be to order some Belden 1807A, two s-video connectors, and the Asus adapter, but I’d rather not spend any more on this project.

If this idea had only popped into my head about four days ago. :\

computerselectronicsmoved from livejournal

DHCP Issue

December 12, 2003

Okay, well, I can now reproduce the issue I’m having with my firewall. Here’s how:

1) Reboot Firewall.
2) Log in as root.
3) Kill the dhclient process.
4) Execute ‘dhclient xl0’ to start the DHCP client again.
5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 two more times. (3x total)
6) Network connection goes poof.

I’m not sure if this is an issue with OpenBSD’s dhclient or what yet, although I see no reason why a DHCP server should be able to cause a client to go wacky. If I get a chance, I’ll try it tomorrow on a test machine at work. I’m very curious what will happen if I do this with a non-Comcast DHCP server.

If you’re interested, there are two network captures of the DHCP requests going back and forth at http://www.nuxx.net/files/dhcp_issue.tar.gz. Interestingly, the next packet after the server sending a DHCP ACK is my firewall ARPing for itself. (???)

Hmm, it seems that there is an OpenBSD Patch for arp which patches part of if_ether.c. I wonder if this patch would take care of my troubles…? I think I’ll try to grab the kernel source tonight while sleeping, then give it a try after work tomorrow.

I think I’m at least making headway… I hope?

computersmoved from livejournal