Day: February 16, 2008

Windows Server 2008

Christian Leave a comment

Well, as it is Saturday and I’m having lots of time (whereas I’d usually spend it working), I thought I’d give Windows Server 2008 a try. What interested me most, is the Windows Server 2008 “Server Core Installations“, as it’s supposed to lower the security risk (as there is *no* Internet Explorer, no Explorer nothing running by default, only a simply cmd.exe).

As one of my co-workers requested me to upload the Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter DVD (which he got through our Microsoft Select 6.0(?) agreement) to our ISO’ VMFS, I had the DVD already at hand. As for that, I *really* love the feature set of VMware.

Deploying a new VM (even if you have to reinstall it) is quite fast (took me about 20 minutes, which I used to get some breakfast – it was only 6:30am). That’s about when I figured, how damn greedy Windows Server 2008 is. 16GiB hard disk as default installation and 2GiB RAM for a simple server ? Damn.

Other people’s property

Christian Leave a comment

Well, apparently some people don’t have any value for other people’s property. It’s that way in big cities, but apparently it’s the same is this shitty, lil’ village.

Scratch, top view
Scratch, top view

Scratch, side view
Scratch, side view

Whoever did that had serious fun with a key or something else. Tough, if I ever gonna get that person, I’m gonna rip his arse apart. The painters tell me, I do have to expect to pay ~300 EUR, as to the scratch being up to the primer below the upper color layer. So they’ll either have to paint half the door, or the whole door which *really* pisses me off!

Been a while

Christian 2 Comments

Well, it’s been quite a while since most of the people last heard a word from me. The last few months I’ve been extremely busy with work-related tasks (and as a side-effect of that, didn’t want to spend much time in front of the computer after 9 hours of work). I also started spending more and more time in the gym, like nearly two hours every Tuesday and Thursday.

  • I finally fixed our replication issues, we do now have a working! MySQL Multi-Master (1. Node, 2. Node — bear in mind, this boxes are *only* serving MySQL and nothing else, so don’t use these configurations on mixed setups) Replication Setup as database back end for our TYPO3-vHosts.
  • all the web nodes are now serving the content from a clustered, shared SAN volume (is that a good thing ? 😛 – don’t know yet …)
  • our VI environment is getting more and more acceptance (even if you hear some complaints now and then, like “awww, damn that crap my 4GiB RAM, 2×3.0GHz Windows 2008 is running soooo choppy” – simple answer, don’t use Windows Server 2008 and/or Windows Vista!)
  • I finished prepping our VM templates (at least the Windows ones)
  • we’re still putting together the plans on whether or not invest into a VDI solution.

The next few weeks are gonna be as frantic as the weeks before, I still have to migrate a lot of TYPO3 installations to our new cluster (which sadly needs time, as we need to wait for DNS changes to propagate). Honestly, I might be ending up extending the SAN volume for the MySQL data storage, as even with only three somewhat busy sites, the binary log of the last 5 days is about 2GiB in size. And we still have ~20 other busy sites on a separate box.

Lucky me, I created the MySQL data storage on a logical volume, so I can easily extend the volume in the san-manager semi-online (the fs needs to be unmounted and thus the MySQL process), then extend the physical volume (LVM2 PV) and the logical volume (LV) afterwards, and at last the underlying EXT3 file system.

As some of you know by now, I am on extended leave for now. I don’t have tree access (at my own request), though I’m gonna try to keep up with Chris and 2008.0 … So long!