So very, very frustrated
Sep. 22nd, 2012 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amanda_loddenWarning: This is rant.
We have servers. This is probably not a surprise to any of you. Quite a few of these servers are aging. Depending on how long you've known us and how many old computers you've seen hanging around, this might not be a surprise to you either.
The current network plan is to move to virtualized servers. On the whole, I like this plan, just for the ease of moving servers around as hardware ages. (I'm less of a fan of the "cram multiple servers on a single piece of hardware" part, but J is generally pretty good about not overextending his resources. And I will admit that most of our servers have zero need for the massive hardware that exists today, so stacking them up isn't exactly asking a lot of the hardware.)
As is often the case, we're using ourselves as lab rats. I have a server on the virtual system, which I have been slowly moving things over to. Well, except for when I stopped because the server ran dog-slow. There were network upgrades and I was assured that it would fix the problem. Which it did... enough to discover the next problem down the line, which is that disk access is ungodly slow. There was supposed to be upgrades, and there might have been or there might not have been, I'm really not sure. What happens now is that when you first access any given directory, it takes forever and a day... and then a second access of the same directory goes lightning-fast. So as long as you want to access the same files over and over and over again, you're golden.
I don't want to access the same files over and over again, so I'm a lot less golden. I am, in fact, not even pyrite-like.
After a few rants about not being able to use my goddamned server, J set up another server for me on a different machine that supposedly didn't have any of these problems. I started installing it this morning, and mid-install the console closed down... and now the machine refuses to boot at all. (I am informed that the building it is in lost power, which is why it went down. Unfortunately, most servers don't take well to powering off midway through an install, so I don't have high hopes for it coming back in a usable state. Also, being told that my "good" server is located somewhere without backup power sources does not give me warm happy feelings about it being the "good" server... I tend to feel like that's just a different version of shitty.)
In the meantime, I have multiple projects that are waiting for a home on a server. At least one of these has a deadline and affects several other people. The others are just things that piss me off and desperately need fixing, except I don't have any fucking place to put a fix.
So now I'm eyeing the old server, the aging one that I don't trust not to keel over without warning, and thinking about putting those projects back on it. Because I am not entirely stupid but I am pretty paranoid, I went to look at how frequently it automatically backs up its data and discovered that... it doesn't. Which kind of distresses me, since I haven't actually moved all the old data off of it. Plus, I was pretty sure that it USED to back itself up automatically, so I don't know when or why that changed.
What I really really want to do right at this moment is go down to the store, buy a computer, install Linux and KVM and then another server on it and tell the rest of the world that they can leave my shit the fuck alone. Unfortunately, I don't really have the cycles to administer all of that, to say nothing of the learning curve involved in getting it set up. So instead, I am frustrated, with few outlets for that frustration.
UPDATE: Power came back on, and the install for the new server just started back at the beginning... which is better than the "will need to be wiped and reloaded" that I feared. I was in the process of getting backups sorted out on the oldest server and starting to feel like maybe life didn't suck quite as bad as I thought, so my desktop computer decided it was high time to piss me off again, and reminded me that it has been kernal panicking once every few days. For a little bit, it looked like it was going to eat itself up, because it refused to reboot and Windows Startup Repair claimed it couldn't fix the problem, but left to its own devices while I cursed it and all its brethren, it looped through about three boots and then started up just fine.
Some days, I think I'd rather just be a Luddite.
We have servers. This is probably not a surprise to any of you. Quite a few of these servers are aging. Depending on how long you've known us and how many old computers you've seen hanging around, this might not be a surprise to you either.
The current network plan is to move to virtualized servers. On the whole, I like this plan, just for the ease of moving servers around as hardware ages. (I'm less of a fan of the "cram multiple servers on a single piece of hardware" part, but J is generally pretty good about not overextending his resources. And I will admit that most of our servers have zero need for the massive hardware that exists today, so stacking them up isn't exactly asking a lot of the hardware.)
As is often the case, we're using ourselves as lab rats. I have a server on the virtual system, which I have been slowly moving things over to. Well, except for when I stopped because the server ran dog-slow. There were network upgrades and I was assured that it would fix the problem. Which it did... enough to discover the next problem down the line, which is that disk access is ungodly slow. There was supposed to be upgrades, and there might have been or there might not have been, I'm really not sure. What happens now is that when you first access any given directory, it takes forever and a day... and then a second access of the same directory goes lightning-fast. So as long as you want to access the same files over and over and over again, you're golden.
I don't want to access the same files over and over again, so I'm a lot less golden. I am, in fact, not even pyrite-like.
After a few rants about not being able to use my goddamned server, J set up another server for me on a different machine that supposedly didn't have any of these problems. I started installing it this morning, and mid-install the console closed down... and now the machine refuses to boot at all. (I am informed that the building it is in lost power, which is why it went down. Unfortunately, most servers don't take well to powering off midway through an install, so I don't have high hopes for it coming back in a usable state. Also, being told that my "good" server is located somewhere without backup power sources does not give me warm happy feelings about it being the "good" server... I tend to feel like that's just a different version of shitty.)
In the meantime, I have multiple projects that are waiting for a home on a server. At least one of these has a deadline and affects several other people. The others are just things that piss me off and desperately need fixing, except I don't have any fucking place to put a fix.
So now I'm eyeing the old server, the aging one that I don't trust not to keel over without warning, and thinking about putting those projects back on it. Because I am not entirely stupid but I am pretty paranoid, I went to look at how frequently it automatically backs up its data and discovered that... it doesn't. Which kind of distresses me, since I haven't actually moved all the old data off of it. Plus, I was pretty sure that it USED to back itself up automatically, so I don't know when or why that changed.
What I really really want to do right at this moment is go down to the store, buy a computer, install Linux and KVM and then another server on it and tell the rest of the world that they can leave my shit the fuck alone. Unfortunately, I don't really have the cycles to administer all of that, to say nothing of the learning curve involved in getting it set up. So instead, I am frustrated, with few outlets for that frustration.
UPDATE: Power came back on, and the install for the new server just started back at the beginning... which is better than the "will need to be wiped and reloaded" that I feared. I was in the process of getting backups sorted out on the oldest server and starting to feel like maybe life didn't suck quite as bad as I thought, so my desktop computer decided it was high time to piss me off again, and reminded me that it has been kernal panicking once every few days. For a little bit, it looked like it was going to eat itself up, because it refused to reboot and Windows Startup Repair claimed it couldn't fix the problem, but left to its own devices while I cursed it and all its brethren, it looped through about three boots and then started up just fine.
Some days, I think I'd rather just be a Luddite.
