Seeing light at the end of the tunnel

[unixronin]

I have to admit it ... a lot of my hardware, and the software running on it, has been getting really crufty. Possibly the worst is babylon5, my personal workstation, which has been my main workstation since before I has any separate servers on my home network — and thus had to carry a lot of the server duties as well. For a long time, in addition to being my workstation, babylon5 was also my gateway, mailserver, mailing-list server, primary DNS server, timeserver, backup server, Samba server, and SQL DB server.

In about 2001, gdmusumeci gave me a Sun Ultra30, minbar, that became my NFS server and cvs repository, took over primary Samba duties, and became a secondary nameserver. In 2005, I got hold of a pair of Sun Ultra5s; one, nijo, became my primary nameserver with babylon5 and minbar as secondaries, while the other, yama, became my firewall and router. minbar picked up a pair of 711 disk arrays along the way. babylon5 was still doing everything else. A lot of its software was getting really pretty horrible because, although I upgraded software as I could, I couldn’t really spare it long enough to do a clean reinstall, and the cruft and bit-rot was really starting to accumulate.

Last year, I was given two new machines by darthgeek, one of them a dual-Xeon monster with a rack of twelve hot-swap SATA disks. After 3Ware wasted nine months of my time keeping me dangling for a Solaris 10 driver that they never shipped for a card that they couldn’t be bothered to tell me they’d end-of-lifed eight months earlier, I finally got a pair of disk controllers into it (courtesy of darthgeek again) supported by Solaris 10, which I wanted to use on it for two reasons: ZFS, the Zettabyte File System, and the best NFSd in the industry.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve:

• learned how to set up Solaris 10 with a ZFS mirrored boot;
• learned to manage a 3.25TB ZFS RAIDZ2 storage array;
• figured out how the Solaris 10 svc service-management system works, and how to extend it to support my own services;
• learned how to use Solaris 10 zones and set up a new primary nameserver running in one;
• migrated NFS and Samba duties from minbar onto the new machine, babylon4;
• built and installed a complete gcc-4.3.3/binutils/autoconf toolchain, a threaded Perl5.10 and most of the gnu userspace tools onto babylon4;
• installed MySql5.1 on babylon4 and migrated all of the databases from babylon4 to it;
• migrated Postfix, Apache2, MailMan, and Dspam to babylon4;
• finally reinstalled a current version of apcupsd (though I'm still having a few communication issues with my UPS, a HP-badged APC SU3000RM2U that should speak APC's SmartUPS protocol but doesn't seem to do so over the cable HP supplied);
• updated several of my own SQL-based tools that assumed mysqld was running on localhost to be able to talk to a mysqld located anywhere on the network;
• and most recently, finally updated to Bacula 3.0.1, now running on babylon4 and backing up most of the machines on the network as we speak.

That, finally, gets all of the network services off of babylon5. babylon5, finally, is once again only a workstation. And that means that once I transfer all the user files off of it and onto babylon4, I can finally erase a disk on babylon5 and start a completely clean new OS installation on it — most likely Gentoo, based on the scratchpad installation I’ve been working on using the other machine from darthgeek. (That machine, if I can get some quieter fans into it than the shrieking banshees currently in it, will then probably end up becoming my new firewall.)

The light at the end of the tunnel is in sight, and this light at least isn’t an oncoming train. Soon, all the cruft and bit-rot will be gone, I’ll have an up-to-date install on my desktop to go along with the fast new server, and I’ll have learned some useful new knowledge along the way.

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I am about half way through an install of gentoo on the Ultrasparc 5 system that I got. I tried some of the other flavors, but I have been using gentoo for over six years now. I understand it (as well as I understand linux in general. I still prefer DOS.) I am just deciding the rest can wait for another day. I enjoy learning new things, but right now, I need the things I know about to work. I will deal with the FOG* later.

*Flipping Opportunity for Growth

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

Where is gdm & aiglet living now? last I heard they were in the NoVa area, but seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

We put them back where we found them. (SF Bay Area)

[lizzibabe.livejournal.com]

clean and unbroken, I hope?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If they're not both housebroken by now, there's a problem.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

I've found gentoo to be a damn pain. Yes you can tweak it to death. But often you HAVE to tweak it or the packages you get to get them to work the way you want them to. At least that has been my experience. Also it just plain doesn't seem to be as well maintained with new versions of stuff as redhat/fedora or debian/*ubuntu.

I've just standardized on Xubuntu / ubuntu server all at version 9.04 because things just work without hassle as I wrote in this review - http://tech.blog.extendance.com/2009/05/01/jaunty-jackalope-incrementally-massively-better/ - subsequently I've discovered one bug to do with printing but it was quite easy to resolve and I've found a bunch of other things that "just work"

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with the "Step away from the console, citizen" distributions like Ubuntu is that I have to hunt through all the package lists to find the right -dev packages if I want to install anything "unusual" that they don't have a header for, and I have to settle for how the maintainer chose to build the packages and what the package maintainer chose to support. Among other things, this usually means ALSA sound, and I do NOT like ALSA. And then there's the "I have an update available for FOO. Removing conflicting packages BAR and BAZ." "But I was USING those!" "You didn't tell me, citizen. It's too late now." "Well, RE-INSTALL them!" "If you say so, citizen. Removing conflicting packages FOO and FOOBAR..."

Sorry. One-size-fits-most doesn't fit me. I build a LOT of my own code, and I don't always configure things in "the conventional way" because I want support for unusual things I'm doing. The installation on this machine is based on Slackware 7. When I rebuilt the machine around about 2002-2003, I tried to upgrade it to Slackware 9. I couldn't ... because I was doing things that out-of-the-box Slackware 9 didn't support yet.

Ubuntu is a great distribution for the Windows emigré who just wants to use it, and wants the common desktop stuff to Just Work in common, standard ways. It's not the distribution for me. Besides which, all of the "preconfigured desktop environment" distributions really try to look a lot like Windows or OSX, and I don't want that. If I wanted a cluttered Windows-style desktop, I could just drink the Kool-Aid and run Windows.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

To each his own. My experience with Gentoo was that it took a lot of effort to get even fairly basic things to work. I don't need that hassle. More to the point since I get paid partly to be able to edit word docs, create powerpoint, read email, skype people etc. this has to work otherwise I don't get paid. Ditto stuff like sound, I really don't care if I'm using ALSA or OSS (or whatever) I just want the damn thing to work so I can concentrate on what I need to do.

Moreover it is true that most of my development stuff uses some combination of perl/python/xml/http etc. I use the C compiler mostly to compile odd perl modules that aren't available in binary form. Gentoo currently remains in a VM which I start up whenever I'm feeling masochistic and am testing my "minimal perl linux appliance" idea.

However I think I should point out that Xfce - the basis for Xubuntu - is not windows. It doesn't look like windows by default and the layout I have looks even less windows like. I want a window manager to provide the basics and then get out of the way and XFCE does that very well. OH and the "Terminal Here" right click option is a life saver when you have X-applications from multiple computers running on one screen.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I want a window manager to provide the basics and then get out of the way and XFCE does that very well.

Oh, absolutely. That's one of my criteria for selecting fvwm2. (The other principal two being that I can easily customize just about every conceivable aspect of its appearance and operation, and that it consumes very little of my system's resources while doing its job.)