I have here 3 things that need to be installed in the colo. I'll be
there in about 2 hours, which means around noon Florida time.
1. SCSI RAID Card - MegaRaid SCSI 320-1LP with battery backup (neat!)
I'm a bit nervous about this, because the driver installation
instructions are very strange and un-linux-like. There's a program
called RWFLOPPY.EXE that I might have to use. What is this, 1981?
2. 1U rackmount keyboard/monitor 16 port KVM switch (nice!)
3. APC powerport, donated during our pledge drive, new in box
The installation of the SCSI RAID card will mean some downtime today
for suda (the new database server, 2U opteron), while the powerport
installation will mean a few minutes of downtime for the others.
The new facility is staffed 24 hours so, in theory anyway, we don't
need the powerport, as we can have a human do it. But adding people
to the list of authorized contacts is harder than giving people access
to the power port, so it's still worthwhile.
The power port has 8 outlets, but we have 9 machines and 10 plugs. We
therefore need to prioritize what is on the powerport.
1. suda (database server)
2. suda (database server)
3 ?
4 ?
5 ?
6 ?
7 ?
8 zwenger (mail server, right?)
The prioritization has to do with (a) liklihood of the machine
actually going down and (b) how desperately important that machine is
to the running of wikipedia.
We're going to have failover protection for the webservers and the
squids, so maybe that's it.
Remember, here's the chain of events that has to happen before we
experience major regret about not having the right thing on the APC:
1. A machine has to die in such a way that a hard boot is necessary
2. The 24x7 staff at the colo has all vanished
3. I am out of town and can't drive over there (but I guess if there is
no staff there, I can't get in anyway)
4. The machine in question is not on the power port.
We could experience minor regret, though, if the machine isn't on the
power port and someone has to call a human to reboot it, which takes 5
minutes instead of 5 seconds.
--Jimbo