Day: February 28, 2007

Waiting

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We are still waiting for the money promised by the state and the country for our HBFG (again, it’s “Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz”), that hopefully is reducing or eliminating our storage/SAN problem we have currently. Right now we have to Cisco MDS9216 (that’s a 16-port 2GBps SAN-switch, two for redundancy), which means we only have 16 SAN-ports. That isn’t much, but still is to less, as we have like 30 machines or so, that *really* need access to the SAN, so we either end up unplugging some of them from the SAN or merge them onto some big machines (like our x366).

The other side of the problem is the storage .. Currently that isn’t redundant, which means we’re fucked if the storage decides to not come up, or one of the controller smokes .. So were looking at two DS4700 with 2 enclosures each filled with 300GB 2GBps FC disks. That will hopefully also solve our constant lack of rackspace.

Apart from that, we took a look at the terminal server market, heard someone from Citrix, looked ourselves at 2X (and I think we are going with the 2X solution – even if they don’t support the authentication passthrough – yet). We might want to consider buying dedicated hardware for the terminal servers, as I implemented them running on the ESX which isn’t a permanent solution, as at least the students will work on those terminal servers 0700-2200, that means continuous load in that time, which isn’t good for the ESX Cluster, as they are pretty loaded already.

We’re also looking in buying a third box for the ESX Cluster, probably one of the same as we have currently (that is x366 – with 2 DC Xeon’s, 16GB RAM, 2×73 GB SAS, 2x dual-port Intel NIC, 2x dual-port FC HBA) to get some extra capacity.

Recently I did some experiments with Gentoo as MySQL cluster (master< ->master replication for our upcoming database servers – that’s what the blade chassis and the two blades are for) and noticed that the Gentoo VM’s were sucking up RAM and didn’t release it, so I had to reset them every morning, in order to free some RAM. I guess I should poke Chris a bit about that, as he told me back at FOSDEM that he was doing some load testing with a similar setup not so far ago.

Learning french

Christian 1 Comment

The last few days in Brussels really made me think about learing some french again. There were times, I/we was/were completely lost, and I really hate being lost … So I’m going to look into learning french again. Will see if the local academy has something scheduled in their upcoming program. I really hope so, as I think french is something I could use.

Also I’m thinking about taking dance-lessons (yeah, yeah I know – I suck 😛 ), as I’d really like to dance … *mmmmmh*

Shibboleth (WTF is that?)

Christian Leave a comment

OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days – oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin.

My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term – it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin).

Yesterday was quite amazing workwise, we lifted the 75kg Blade Chassis into the rack (*yuck* there was a time I was completely against Dell stuff, but recently that has changed), plugged all four C22 plugs into the rack’s PDU’s and into the chassis, patched the management interface (which is *waaay* to slow for a dedicated management daughter board) and for the first time started the chassis. *ugh* That scared me .. that wasn’t noise like a xSeries or any other rack-based server we have around, more like a starting airplane. You can literally stand in behind of the chassis, and get your hairs dried (if you need to). So I looked at the blades together with my co-worker and we figured, that they don’t have any coolers anymore, they are just using the cooling the chassis provides.

Another surprise awaited us, when we thought, we could use the integrated switch to provide network for both integrated network cards (Broadcome NetExtreme II). *sigh* You need two seperate switches to serve two network cards, even if you only have two blades in the chassis (which provides space for 10 blades). *sigh* That really sucks, but its the same with the FC stuff …

So, we are waiting yet again for Dell to make us an offer, and on top of that, the sales representative doesn’t have the slightest idea if the FC passthrough module includes SFP’s or not … *yuck*

I must say, I’m impressed by the Dell hardware, but I’m really disappointed by their sales representative.