After yesterdays saga I was looking forward to an easier day today, but I didn’t get it. At the end of my last post I was trying to disable the primary controller in the array. It took a while, but it didn’t help. However, after some more discussion with Paul at Sun we noticed a lot of errors for the …
We have a fairly long standing hatred of the Sun T3 storage arrays, and last night they once again proved why we feel that way. At around 7pm last night I noticed a lot of SCSI errors on myrtle (our staff and research Solaris server) which I quickly tracked down to a problem with one of the attached T3 arrays. I was …
On Thursday I arrived back from Cornwall after a fairly lengthy drive, and to get back in to the swing of things I dived right in to the deep end at work. This weekend there was a complete power shutdown on the campus for some “essential electrical work”. This required us to shut down all our machines, wait a few …
In an attempt to allow my mind to rest from work-related matters I’m heading off to Cornwall for a couple of weeks. I’ll be back for the Easter weekend when I’ll be shutting down all our systems at work for a campus-wide power shutdown.
If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been working on a new filestore project at work for a while now. After getting things working nicely on our Solaris machines, and finally moving my home directory over, I decided to tackle our Debian server. It quickly became apparent that I’d need to upgrade the machine, which was running …
Its been months in the making, but it’s finally done. We have our new filestore ready to go. There’s still plenty to do, like rolling it out for the teaching machines and web filestore, but at least we’ve got the main part done. So why has it taken so long? I spent a long time researching and testing the technologies …
If there’s one thing that drives me completely insane in the modern world of computing it’s spam. It consumes my time, day after day, and devours the resources of our mail systems. In my own mailbox I get a few hundred spam messages a day, most of which I’ll never even see, let alone read. Thankfully most of these are …
Over the past year or so the space usage on our research and web filesystems has pretty much doubled to the point where we’re dangerously close to running out of space. There’s currently about 1TiB of filestore available of which less than 10% remains unused. Teaching filestore, however, has barely grown at all during the last year. I attribute this …