Some photos from the installation of five Oceanstor 9000 storage systems, ten Huawei x6800 with eighty H620 nodes, six switches, two racks, eight APC PDU, cables, and a little blood that will be in those damn cabinets forever.
Customer spends half a million on servers, storage and network. Documentation is not available in PDF, or if it is it is 1000 PDF files. Rackmount screws aren’t magentic, and they send EXACTLY the number you need. Screws are in 10 different sizes so if you lose one in the rack while trying to get the system mounted you are screwed (no pun intended). The screws are trash, strip easily which is a problem if you are trying to rearrange a rack at a customer’s…
I build this script long ago, using another script for reference. Lost track of the original long ago, sorry if it was yours. Basically, I run this script daily on web servers along with a tar backup of the /etc and any other vital directories. In the event of a disaster it is much easier to recover with this information. This isn’t as important now that we use virtual machines for almost everything, but it has come in handy quite a few times. I…
Kanban board like Trello have become pretty popular for managing projects. They are simple to understand and easy to use. But finding one that looks decent, works well, at a decent price can be difficult. Last year I setup one internally using the open source Wekan. Someone recently posted a Virtualbox image for Wekcan, but I prefer to use KVM and usually promote its usage. So I thought I would put together a similar how-to using a Proxmox KVM server. With the Proxmox distribution…
Part 5, Setup a local APT proxy Most of the hosts in my Magento development environment are going to be running Ubuntu. I will want to install security and application updates, but I don’t want to kill the Ubuntu repositories with my requests. I’d also like a little bit of control over the updates. If I want to install an update on production I need to test it first, and make sure the version I install on production is the same version I installed…
Part 4, Setup Ansible Ansible is a configuration management system. It uses SSH and easy to understand scripts to make changes to a host or hosts with very little interraction from the admin. It is perfect for small things like adding users, their SSH keys, and giving them sudo access. Big things like installing and configuring Magento. It can be used to enforce policies like standard configurations. And can help speed up things like server installations and application roll-outs. Ansible works over SSH. It…
Part 2, Creating the virtual machines in Proxmox In part 2 I am going to cover the setup of the initial virtual machines for the testing environment. Only the basic virtual machine creation will be covered in this post. Actual operating system installation and configuration will begin to be covered in the next part but will probably take 2-3 posts to cover everything. The virtual environment I am creating is the Test Environment. It is supposed to be as close to production as possible…
Part 1, Installing Proxmox on our servers In part 1 I am only going to cover the basics of the setup of the Proxmox 4.2 server. This will be fairly short because the basic setup of Proxmox 4.2 is very simple. If you are looking to get your toes wet with virtualization I highly recommend it. It is completely free, you only need to pay if you want their support services. I pay for the basic subscription simply because I like to support the…
Intro,A new Magento development environment A customer is in the process of moving to Magento. They have been playing around with it for quite a while and decided to purchase late last year. Their development environment was a little weak and they wanted something closer to what they will be using in production. So, this week I started the setup of their “new” development environment. The servers they chose were refurbished Dell R620 servers with dual Xeon E5-2670, 128GB RAM, 10x240GB SATA SSD in…
So, I am done testing the unit. They let me play with it for a week and now it is someone else’s turn. I never got to finish some of the testing I wanted to do but everyone in the office wants to give it a try so I had to pass it on. I had a few small issues with the unit and I reported those back to our rep who said they would be passed on to the engineers. Since it worked…