Tsky Blog

Another day, another batch of hardware death

2010-02-24 (23:23:02)
I feel like a techno-undertaker, seeing the dead arrive on my doorstep to be embalmed, dissected and entombed. The living require more and more attention, desperately clinging to the last gasps of life before heading to the silicon abyss that awaits them around the corner. Starting to wonder if the losing battle we've been fighting for a long time now is worth worrying about so much, or to just realise the inevitability of the whole thing and stop performing CPR on the kit. Sometimes, it's better to let old silicon die gracefully than to watch it suffer and scream in agony day after day.
Discovered the network is in even worse state today after another switch query session - lots of half duplex on our ports across the site. I think only one unit didn't have ports running on half duplex and there's fifty five units out there.
The buzzards are circling overhead and I can hear them moving closer, I just hope they don't start to peck around the single fibre link between the sites.
[Sigh] It wouldn't be so bad, but my number one and I really do care about the systems. It's like watching your offspring mistreated, that's the way computer geek minds work - you'll never understand unless you're one of us, seeing something you've birthed and kept alive suffering.
So yeah.... looking at Sun storage arrays at the moment (50% educational discount they say.. booyah!) to try and alleviate some of the underlying SAN issues we've experienced (well, you do when you only get £1800 to spend on a 3.5Tb RAID 5 server to underpin your virtualisation cluster). I really like a lot of the Sun management system that's in the web console - disk selection and information based on a graphic (yeah I'm a sucker for spangly interfaces) and lots of cool info and easy-set options. Much simpler than OpenFiler and much quicker than Debian with iSCSi or NFS. Hopefully the money will be there to upgrade, or I'll be offered a cool job somewhere ...
Side note: new Doctor Who series is coming, very excited.

Aliz
2010-02-25 @ 13:02:25
This post is awesome. I want some business cards with \\\"Techno-undertaker\\\" on them.