Jacob's Insidious Ramblings

Well, so far getting ESXi installed on my IBM was rather easy once I got a CD drive hooked up to install it on the server. I am thinking there was maybe a compatibility problem with the SATA controller and the Dell. It could have been a voltage incompatibility because it started having issues when it was originally hooked to the IBM and it was in a 64bit slot. I don’t think the 64bit was the issue but the voltage could have been it on the IBM. I plugged it into the IBM on the single 32bit PCI slot and plugged a 500GB drive into it, for VM storage. I had NO problems getting ESXi installed on the two SCSI drives acting as a mirror and then creating a datastore on the WD Enterprise 500GB drive. Since everything on the server is now development and testing work I am not too worried if the 500GB drive crashes. I will be irritated of course but that will be it. The IBM currently has 4GB of RAM in it so I may take the 2GB of RAM I pulled from the Dell to put in the IBM. The Dell only needs 4 even with all that it does. Anyway, hopefully I will continue to have decent luck with this new configuration on the IBM.

Original configuration
Originally I had a desktop computer running Windows 2003 Server as a DC. I ran it in ’2000-Mixed mode’ for Samba’s sake as I was told it was important to do so. I eventually used the VMware Converter to make the DC a VM to run on my IBM as a guest. Samba ran underneath it authenticating off of the guest DC. That was not the most ideal solution but it worked mostly well. Due to some recent drive troubles on the IBM I had to come up with another solution. It was the SATA drives, not the SCSI, starting to have problems.

Dell Server status at the time
I was trying to get everything working on the Dell as a VMware ESXi Server. Most of the things were working right but a storage solution for the data was not coming up properly due to the limited driver support of SATA controllers and of course my budget. I still needed to have a workable solution so I could try to keep my data safe.

New configuration for the Dell
Finally I got tired of the whole BS since, at the same time, I was trying to make sure my backups were good that I had pulled often enough from the IBM. I backed up the VMs and then installed Windows 2008.

Once I had it installed and updated I tried the SATA controllers that I had and had to use the Vista drivers as I could not find official 2008 drivers. When the controller would get saturated it would cause a weird memory error and that would make Windows do a blue screen. As soon as I removed the controller everything else worked fine.

Once I got the machine updated and removed the offending hardware things started to calm down. I attached it to my domain and then created the shares and all that. I copied the data to the server in the specific shares and altered my VB login script to point to the new server. Once I made sure things worked properly it was then time to make it a DC.

As I said earlier, it was running in ’2000 Mixed mode’ so there was more work to do. I changed it to native and let things calm down. I then updated it to 2003 on both the forest and domain. Once I did that I ran the deploy script, from the 2008 Server DVD, on the schema master and that updated the schema. It took a good ten minutes or so since it was running as a guest and not doing too well due to the hard drive problems. Once it was updated I set the 2008 machine up as a DC. Once I made sure any possible errors were ironed out I then removed the old DC after a day of running. Once the old DC was removed I made sure no errors were popping up and then changed the Forest and Domain to 2008 mode.

After ironing out any lingering issues on the DC I went ahead and installed VMware 2.x Server and put two of my backed up VMs on the server. Once is a Linux Shell server with 512M of RAM. The other is a Windows XP Professional SP3 running 512M of RAM. They both seem to run fine as guests on the server and do not load it up too much.

There are a few possible changes coming down the pipe. I want to move my data storage from my IBM server to my Dell server. The problem that I come up with is trying to store the SATA drives in the case of the Dell. On my IBM I have three 5.25″ drive bays and so I put one of those internal SATA drive bay enclosures that hold 4 drives in the space of three CD Drives. Well, it has been working fine but when I got the Dell I noticed I only have two 5.25″ bays to work with and so I was thinking that I could either find another enclosure that fits in the two bays and holds 3 drives or have the SATA drives in an external case of some sort. Well, The fastest way I was thinking was purchasing a case that would hold the drives and provide 4 or so esata ports on the back and I could get things working proper. The issue I have with it is that it costs some good money to get a case like that and that is money I do not have. Another way was to get an old case, rig the power supply to always come on when power is provided, and then just house the drives in there and still do the eSATA method. The third was to throw iSCSI at it. I have played with it once before and while it worked I was not terribly impressed with it. The reason was that there are more points of failure that I do not have money to fix. Instead of just the links between the units as with eSATA I have another OS(iSCSI host) to take care of which is something I don’t want. Along with that is a even more hardware that puts out a lot of heat. Anyway, I am still thinking hard about this fun stuff.

It looks like it has been a while yet again since my last post. I am still doing great at Glacial Energy and keep finding more to tinker with. My son is doing well, it is nice to be a Father. When I am not working or trying to spend time with my family I try to sleep a little. I have not had time for any real side projects in a little while. I plan to make some time for some, in other words… less sleep. Nice thing is, I usually can go a while on little sleep before I crash and burn. Up at work I have been playing with DRAC cards on the Dell servers. I have seen them before and know of the Compaq/HP version of it but never got to install and configure one before. Anyway, time to end this post… later.

I had the chipset fan on my motherboard go out a few weeks ago which started to cause rebooting issues every few days on my main desktop. I found a replacement the day before Thanksgiving. It is a huge heatsink without a fan which seems to be doing the job. I think that the job was done to Windows before I got a chance to fix the problem. Before, the reboots were so sudden Windows could not do a BSOD and now Windows seemed to be doing BSOD’s on me. After debugging the dump file it looked like it was the network driver(I hope). So far things seem to be stable after updating all the chipset drivers and network drivers. While I was at it I went ahead and updated my video drivers. I will be hoping that things are stable this coming week. If not then I may have to reinstall Windows. If that does not fix it then I think my MB may be crap and I will have to rip hardware from my secondary workstation. That is something I really do not want to do. Anyway, later…

About a month or so ago I learned how do something on a Cisco Router called ‘IP Unnumbered’. The neat thing about it is that if I have two of them hooked together over a connection with the CSU/DSU WIC card in it I do not need a set of WAN IP addresses. It uses the ‘fastethernet0′ as it’s pseudo address. It took me a short bit to wrap my mind around the routing for it but once it clicked it became easy. I learned it as we hooked up a T1 connection between the main San Antonio location and a location in Webster, TX. I found out about the command when I was hooking up a T1 for an Internet connection and the ISP told me to use that command. When I learn a new command or trick I have to figure out all aspects of it if time presents itself. Luckly it did so now I am versed in that method. You know, if I was rich I think I would buy a bunch of routers and bridges and other devices just to tinker with them. Alas, I am not flush with the green so I just learn as I get chances to.

So far this week has dragged on. Oh well, the weekend is coming up and it will be a long one at that. No work on Monday means good times. This week up at work I got the Cisco 1721 router talking to the new T1. I even got the Cisco PIX 505 almost totally configured. I still have a few items to set up on the PIX and it will be all done. I enjoy how easy most of the Cisco stuff actually is to configure. Of course I never use a GUI or anything like that. Command line all the way as usual. Much easier that way it is…

Most of my growing up years I was not a fan of Apple. It is widely known by friends and family of my thoughts about not just the company but the awkwardness of the OS. That was until OSX came along. I have found it to be mostly clean and not too bad of an Operating System which brings me to the title of this entry. A few months back I had the pleasure of test driving a couple of these units. I found that the Mini is worth the sticker price. In fact, I may one day soon get one of my own. w00t!! Below is the specs of what I want.
• 1.25GHz PowerPC G4
• 512MB DDR333 SDRAM – 1 DIMM
• 40GB Ultra ATA drive
• 4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card
• 56K v.92 Modem
• Mac OS X – U.S. English
Those options jump it up to $748.00 but I would still find that worth it…

It is a DVR-A09XL Pioneer drive with a black front. The max writes are below for each format it can handle.
DVD-R 16x
DVD+R 16x
DVD-RW 6x
DVD+RW 4x
DVD+R DL 6x
CD-R 40x
CD-RW 24x
The link to the page showing the specs for this unit is here.
So far it is pretty sweet. I am starting to do backups with it and plan to learn how to compile dvd movies one day. I got some DVD-R and DVD+RW blanks. I would have gone with DVD-RW blanks but I could not find them in more than 10 in a pack unlike the +RW blanks. I would have gotten some Dual Layer blanks but they are a bit costly right now. I even noticed that my burner can go faster than most of the media I was able to find can handle which is kinda neat. Anyway, I plan to waste a few DVD-R disks toying with the DVD movie functions. Gotta go… Later.

No, not the bug spray. RAID means “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks”. It is a term used in the computing world for a collection of hard drives with fault tolerance so if one drive were to die, you could just replace it without downtime. Up here at work we just got a new server with 2gigs of RAM, two Pentium 4 Xeon 3.06Ghz processors, and two 36gig drives for a RAID 1(mirror). The second RAID device is 7 146gig drives acting as one which happens to be running RAID 5. This is fun stuff at least to me…anyway, gotta go…

If I get time this weekend I plan to throw two 30gig drives in an older computer I have sitting around and use one of the Promise RAID cards for binding them together. I then plan to Install Windows 2000 Professional. It will be a backup server and backup workstation for my Dad to use. I have been meaning to get this done but time has not always been available to me.

I recently got a 3.5″ hard drive enclosure that has both Firewire and USB 2.0 connections on it. I did not want to use the usb side of things for a perm. solution so I went ahead and got a Firewire card. One thing I can say is that it may not be hooked directly to the IDE chain but it works damn well. I am pretty much sold on Firewire. I think all external enclosures that I purchase will have both types from now on. I know, it took me long enough but it is fun in any case. I like this enclosure because if I decide to put a 250gig HD into it the unit will take it. It currently is housing a 80gig drive which is plenty for now. It is acting as my tertiary data drive. I have 4 drives hooked to my computer. I have the main SCSI 9.1gig acting as the system drive. A second 9.1gig acting as an application drive. The third which is housed in a 5.25″ removable drive rack which is a 40gig acting as my games drive. I then have the Firewire drive for graphics and other misc. stuff I want. I plan to redo a bit of it but for now this works fine. Yes, if you have not figured out by now, I ramble a lot. Later…

Earlier this week I took a Cisco class. It taught me how to do subnetting and the like on the first day. After that we dove into Cisco routers and learned the in’s and out’s of them. We also learned a lot about the switches and some about the PIX firewall. I am jazzed a bit from that class and hope to try and get my CCNA(Cisco Certified Network Associate) cert. soon. Anyway, later…

I know I have not updated in a while but life has in fact kept me busy. Tomorrow I will be finishing my move from my old apartment to the one my wife and I live in now. My computer room is still a mess because I have not had the time to clean it up. Today as the title suggests I have been playing with a Cisco product. The Cisco 1721 Router to be exact. I think I am getting rather decent at configuring it. As of this writing I have almost figured out how to upload a different binary IOS version that supports more than just TCP/IP. Anyway, time for me to get back to it for now…later.