Sysadmin day

Today was ano­ther sys­ad­min day. Our pri­ma­ry file­ser­ver at the office has been run­ning out of space for some time now—hardly sur­pri­sing, with the shared file­sys­tem being only 40GB. It had been run­ning RAID­frame in a RAID1 con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on quite hap­pi­ly, but new tasks for the machi­ne also made an update advi­sa­ble. So we got a won­derful Seri­al ATA Enclo­sure Kit by Adapt­ec, which includes a decent SATA RAID con­trol­ler and a 4 disk Hotswap-Enclosure. 

Last week, I instal­led a new ver­si­on of Net­BSD onto the disks in the enclo­sure on ano­ther sys­tem and we copied the latest ver­si­ons of all files on the ser­ver onto the new set yes­ter­day. Today was the big day: first thing in the mor­ning, I shut down the file­ser­ver, we rip­ped out the old disks and instal­led the new con­trol­ler and disks. It turns out that instal­ling the enclo­sure is a bit of a hass­le in our 19″ machi­ne, but it work­ed out in the end. At the same time, we also repla­ced the crap­py Real­tek ether­net card that still was in that machi­ne with a decent Intel Pro/1000 that, among­st other things, can do checks­um offloading. 

And after boot­ing and con­fi­gu­ring the ser­vers IP address, lo and behold, ever­y­thing work­ed! Fixing up the con­fi­gu­ra­ti­on with the things I had for­got­ten last week took about half an hour, and even during that time, the cru­cial ser­vices had all been restored. 

After a work­day of having the ’new‘ sys­tem up and run­ning, I’m decent­ly hap­py with the thing. I still have the sore fin­gers from all the muck­ing around with non-fit­ting hard­ware, but other than that, things just work.