New Hardware
Jun/090
Recently bought new stuff for our server (named scortum). One of our RAM chips stopped working, and nearly gave me a ‘eart ‘ttack.
So went out and bought some new stuff for it:
- An APC UPS rated 2 kVA.
- 4 GB RAM
- a DVD writer
The sweet (and unexpected) part was how the UPS came with a usb interface cable, and an apt-get install apcupsd later we have UPS integration into the system software. So the server can shutdown when the UPS is down to 15% or 5 minutes of capacity.
Gave the defective 2 GB RAM DIMM for replacement and should have it back in 10 days or so. Then we’ll run the full 8 GB the mobo supports. Here are the specs for scortum:
- Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q6600@2.40GHz
- 6 GB RAM (as of now after the additional 4 GB)
- 500 GB 7200 rpm disk
Scortum runs ubuntu 8.10 x64, with vmware server 2 on top of it. There are around 12 vms configured on it, with 3-4 running at a time. The big ones are the three RHEL4/5 images running Oracle 10G. There are smaller VMs running our bugdb, qa and staging servers (mainly ubuntu 9.04)
For performance reason we’ll probably move to ESXi on the host. The CPU performance is pretty good, but the disk is so-so, even though we have a 7200 rpm disk. ESXi is rumored to give vastly better I/O performance, but the range of hardware support is limited. We’ll see.
Another plan is to plonk in another 500 GB 7200 disk and either go for full disk mirror, or spread the write-happy VMs on them.
windows xp license and IE
Jun/090
Just bought off a windows/xp license off the web. Didn’t realize it was still available for purchase.
Somehow my windows validation key wasn’t working, under vmware fusion. And it has been ages since I booted up windows anyway. Was easier to just give in and buy a new one.
This is needed for testing Lambda against IE6. On first glance most of the things work. I think mainly because we used YUI js and css. And IE8-compat library helps with other things.
On a (somewhat) unrelated note: IE6 sucks. EPIC FAIL.