On the hardware front ... I have my new main server, babylon4, up and running, with Bacula 3.0.1 doing nightly backups to disk on a rotating cycle. I switched the nameserver zone over to use bge0 instead of bge1 last night, after discovering that (a) a Solaris 10 zone won’t start if it’s set up to use an interface that’s not plumbed in the global zone, and (b) an interface won’t remain plumbed in the global zone across a reboot unless it’s been assigned an IP address in the global zone. (I really should set up bge1 as a failover interface for bge0, anyway. I just need to learn how to do that in Solaris 10.) babylon4 is in its permanent home in the primary rack now.
As I mentioned, right now, Bacula is backing up to disk on babylon4. But I consider if you’re backing up to disk, you don’t really have backups, just a snapshot history. Long term, I’m planning to have Bacula copy or migrate full backups from disk to LTO tape after, say, a month. All my tapes will then become my Archive pool. I’m just debating how best to accomplish this. The server rack is out in the deckhouse, and it’s probably an insufficiently controlled environment for an LTO tape drive. But if I keep the tape drive on babylon5, here in my office, then the source and destination of the copy/migration jobs will be on opposite ends of what at the moment is a 100Mbit network bottleneck. (Yes, with this tape drive, 100Mbit Fast Ethernet is a bottleneck. The LTO1 is an Ultra160 SCSI device. A single 100Mbit Ethernet connection is not sufficient to keep it streaming.)
I also still haven’t yet solved the communication issue between apcupsd and my main UPS, an APC SU3000RM2U rebadged by HP as an R3000XR. I need to call APC and find out whether it SHOULD speak SmartUPS protocol or whether HP intentionally crippled its communication ability, and whether it has the correct serial card installed — or possibly whether its serial interface card is dead.
I was hoping to be working on a clean reinstall of babylon5 by now. Except for the disk that failed last week. babylon5 had three 18GB IBM Ultrastars installed, two of them a mirrored boot pair, the third a spare drive on which I was planning to put my new Gentoo install up until I was ready to permanently cut over to it. All three drives are eight years or more old, though, and one of the three — formerly /dev/sda — began throwing large numbers of uncorrectable hard errors and hanging, forcing me to cut it out of the mirror and replace it with /dev/sdc, which however leaves me without a spare drive for the new install. I could unmirror and install on that disk anyway, but neither of those two remaining disks is likely to have a lot of life left either. The honest truth is babylon5 really needs new disks, and they should probably be SATA at this point. But right now, I don’t have the cash to spare for a new pair of SATA disks. I do have an 80GB PATA disk I could use at a pinch ... but, ugh. I just got the last legacy PATA device out of vorlon; I have no desire to follow that up by putting PATA back into babylon5, which has always been an all-SCSI machine. The PATA disk can become a replacement disk for one of the machines that’s already PATA-based. Right now it’s nominally a second disk for the 1U machine temporarily known as sandbox, but long-term I’d like to get that machine booting off a mirrored pair of 2.5-inch SATA disks the same as babylon4.
There’s a power-savings argument for going the 2.5-inch route on babylon5, too. Adapter kits to mount two 2.5-inch disk in a single 3.5-inch bay are becoming much more widely and cheaply available — this one from Scythe, for example, or this one (another Scythe model), or this fancier hot-swap one from Vizo — and, as that last article notes, “nearly all of the exciting hard drives in the last year have been 2.5 inch drives.” Of course, in a full-tower case designed ten years ago to hold multiple 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch devices, it’s not as though I’m hard up for space. The roadblock here is budget — no money to spare for new hardware beyond the minimum I can get away with — and the smallest capacity 2.5-inch SATA drive I can find from a reputable manufacturer will cost me about $5 to $10 more than the smallest-capacity reputable 3.5-inch SATA drive, and will probably only have a one-year warranty instead of five.
I did just replace babylon5‘s CPU cooler, though; the OEM cooler’s fan died a month or two back, and I temporarily swapped in the one spare Socket 462 cooler I had, a Thermaltake Volcano 7+. It’s a good, solid, effective cooler, but at 47dBA, DAMN, it’s loud. I’d gotten very tired of its 7000rpm whine, and since this machine sits under the desk in my office in an area largely open to my bedroom, I just spent $11 to replace it with a Spire WhisperRock IV. The WhisperRock IV was a bit of a pain in the ass to install without pulling the motherboard out, simply due to access to its retaining clip, but is rated at 23.5dBA. For those of you not clued in on reading sound pressure levels, every 3dBA is a doubling of perceived noise level, so that 24dBA noise reduction means the new cooler is 256 times quieter than the Volcano 7+. That’s easily worth $11. (babylon5 still isn’t as silent as vorlon, though.) The WhisperRock IV has a much better retaining clip than most Socket 462 coolers, but I did have to unmount the fan to flip the retaining clip around to gain clearance (in the original orientation, the latch blocked the first DIMM slot), and also had to bend the clip slightly before it would latch securely.