www.TheJoe.com

Our servers in Dallas hosted by The Planet have been running now for almost 4 years. Our main server has been running quite well and hosting most of our sites with no issues. I am thinking it’s time to upgrade our servers.

We’ve been looking at one large beefy box running some sort of virtualization to consolidate our servers. In house, here in Vegas, we’ve been testing out Microsoft’s Virtual Server and VMWare Server. Both provide what we are looking for in terms of running what we like as guest operating systems. In terms of host operating systems, VMWare runs on Linux where as Virtual Server does not. Also, remote access capabilities for Virtual Server is slightly better than VMWare’s.

Now, I am a computer person, I do not subscribe to the end all be all belief that one OS is better than another, I believe that there is good reason for some to run Windows Server and for others Linux or Mac OSX. They all have their purpose for various situations. I believe in running the proper tools for the job.

We are a Microsoft partner and for years have done well with Microsoft’s products, but I must say, that almost all of our web apps and services are all PHP/MySQL based. (I took our MS SQL server offline almost 2 years ago) Now, PHP/MySQL sites run best in an Apache/Linux environment. So, we definitely want to have our web servers on Linux in the future. (yes, this site is running on a Windows Server host)

Moving forward, it looks like we’re going to go with Windows 2003 Server host running VMWare server. We will have all of our other servers running in a Virtual Machine. We’ll probably host the MySQL server itself on the Host OS and have the Virtual hosts access it through the network.

The reason we’re going with this decision is that most of our group knows how to work with the Microsoft environment and it will ease the transition to the new machines. This will allow us to get to our new projects faster.

For about 4 years now, I have had a 1.2 terrabyte array running with no issues. It’s comprised of four 400 gig seagate IDE drives and connected to a Promise Tech raid controller.

Welp, about 2 weeks ago drive 2 failed and I went out and got a replacement drive and rebuilt the array. Now, 4 years is a long time for a system to be running, so I started to look at other options.

I had been playing with the Linksys NSLU2 for a while. It’s a neat little device that has a network connector and 2 USB ports and allows you to hook up USB hard drives which you can access over your local network. The one great thing about this device is you can install an accessible linux (based on debian) system on this device to configure it to do all sorts of things. Basically, it’s a mini computer with a fully capable operating system on it.

So, I went out and bought 3 of these NSLU2’s (1 for practical use, 2 for testing). So I hooked up 2 Seagate 750 GB external drives to the main one and configured it to be our file server here in our network.  This has been working out well, the only downside is that the Seagate externals go into sleep mode after 10 mins and it takes like 15 to 30 seconds to bring the drive back online when connecting to the NSLU2. (I will be working on this later)

On the other 2 NSLU2’s (slugs as we have reffered to them) I loaded the “unslug” firmware which gives me access to the Linux OS on the slug and the second I loaded DebianSlug and am beginning to play with Linux on these small devices.

All in all, it’s working out well.  I am also working on upgrading our servers in Dallas to newer faster systems.  I will post more on this as that project nears completion.

Well, we got Windows Vista on release day.

We began working on installing Vista on our arsenal of laptops which now consists of:

Sony UX280P (me)
Sony AR290G (me)
Sony FE790PL (me)

HP DV9230US (Jens)
HP DV8339US (x3 - Dana, Angel, spare)

Toshiba A135 (draylan’s)

We bought the DV9230US and A135 with vista installed so there were no major issues there.

So, I begain working on doing the install on my big machine, the AR290G. At the time I started this project, Sony had not put the vista drivers up on their website. I noticed that the AR300 series was very similar in specs to the AR200 series. I figured they were basically the same machine except the 300 series just had vista. So, I downloaded the drivers for the 300 series and began my upgrade on the AR290G.

Everything went pretty smooth. I had to do some extracting of the drivers or tricking the install program to think it was installing on the appropriate machine. All in all it went well. It took about 4 hours or so of tweaking and two re-installs to get it right, but I got it running with all my regular programs (office 2007, adobe creative suite cs2, EVE-Online, SOE Total access, Firefox, etc)

One ironic thing was, once I got the system all set up, I log into the Sony website and see that they just published the drivers for my laptop. hehe

Jens did a re-install on his laptop and he’s fairly happy with his settings. We’re leaving the girls at XP till we get the actual upgrade DVD’s from HP.

I will try to make time and post a detailed install order and what issues there are etc soon. Silver Streak’s array had a drive failure and I am working on that at the momment.

I am also working on the UX280P and the FE790PL’s upgrades.