Time for another Fozzolog.

Guru stuff

My productivity at GuruLabs has been up and down the last couple of weeks. I’ve been doing some really cool stuff and learning a lot as I go, but it’s been so incredibly easy to get distracted and diverted to other stuff. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon is occuring with some of the others I’m working with. That said, I have been getting a lot done.

I don’t think anyone knew how much work the scripts for the troubleshooting class would be to get done. But, we’re closing in on the end. I think we’ll probably be done next week.

Iodynamics

We’re in the process of moving all our servers to XMission’s data center in Salt Lake City. Currently, we have one server at XMission and that server hosts our “premium” websites while our other servers host our “standard” websites, e-mail, and other services.

After this weekend, all our servers will be at XMission. In the end, we’ll save a little on overall colocation cost, but our bandwidth will be burstable to 100Mbps and our servers will be much more accessible to me since I’m usually close to Salt Lake City.

The server currently at XMission is a SuperMicro 6010H which is a 1U rackmount dual Pentium III system with two Ultra160 SCSI drives. This will be replaced by a 2U AMD Athlon based system with two SATA drives and the old server will get some hardware upgrades and take over other duties.

I got the hardware components for the new server earlier this week and got together with Adam — my brother in law — on Wednesday to help him solder a Jamma Board while he helped me put the server together. We got the server put together fine, but it had trouble with a Fedora Core install. It seemed like the SATA controller was the culprit as the Fedora Core installer was generating kernel error messages regarding writing to the SATA drive devices. For example, one error said data was attempting to be written beyond the physical address space of one of the hard drives.

After work on Thursday, I set up the server at Guru Labs and tried to get Fedora Core installed using a different PCI SATA controller. The first attempt to install Fedora Core went fine, but then I got wondering if it was because I was using a different CD-ROM drive (one I borrowed from the Guru Labs surplus inventory as opposed to one I had borrowed from Adam the night before). So, I reconnected the drives to the onboard SATA connectors on the motherboard and tried to install Fedora Core again. Midway through the installation, I was having drive errors again.

This again suggested the onboard SATA controller was the problem. I was ready to do a final install with the other PCI controller, but I wondered if an update to the motherboard BIOS would resolve the problem with the SATA controller. The only problem with doing the BIOS update was that the BIOS update application was designed to be run from a DOS boot diskette. The server did not have a floppy disk drive connected to it, but I could get a drive out of the Guru Labs hardware surplus pile. The next problem was creating a DOS boot diskette.

Several months ago, Adam gave me a USB “jumpdrive” that he had replaced with a bigger and better one. He told me he partitioned the USB drive with a 1.44MB bootable DOS floppy image which I could use if a motherboard supported it. I tried, but it didn’t work.

Making a bootable DOS floppy is easy if you have Windows, but the only Windows machine at Guru Labs was a Windows Terminal Server in the server closet and it was locked up in the rack. I had Windows 2000 on my laptop, but no floppy drive.

In the end, I used one of the new Dell desktops that had arrived the day before and were running Linux to download a Windows 98 second edition boot disk image from bootdisk.com and used the Linux dd program to write to image to a floppy diskette. This worked great. I unzipped the BIOS update application to the diskette and booted off of it.

After flashing the BIOS on the motherboard, I tried installing Fedora Core again using the onboard SATA controller.

The result: disk errors. AGHGHGHGHGHG!

I went back to the PCI SATA controller. Disk errors.

Now I was really frustrated. The next thing I did was booted off the Fedora Core installation CD and typed memtest86 at the boot prompt to run the memory test suite that the Fedora project includes on the CD-ROMs. After 10 minutes or so, the errors started popping up on my screen. After it had found 19 errors in the same spot in the RAM, I powered the machine down and took out one of the two DIMMs. I ran the test again and found no errors. I put the DIMM I had previously removed back in and found errors. Bingo. Bad RAM.

I installed Fedora Core using the onboard SATA controller and only one stick of RAM and everything worked great.

The last side of the moon

Tonight, Sons Of Nothing will play their last show of 2004 at Liquid Joes in Salt Lake City. This will be a pretty low-key show for me as I’m just running projections and sound effects (as opposed to running video cameras, lights and whatever else too).

This show has been heavily advertised, so we’re hopeful it will be well attended.