Posted: February 26th, 2010 | Author: jordan | Filed under: Mac OS X Server | 3 Comments »
I just battled this for the last three days and finally have a solution. If you’re like me, you don’t have 16 different Mac OS X server boxes in your infrastructure. You have one. I was using Lithium as a monitoring tool and recently have decided into install Daylite server so I can keep track of clients, sales leads, and what not.
After installing Daylite Server, the app would not run. Daylite kept exiting saying that it could not initialize the data storage environment and quoting an “error 300.” What I figured out thanks to James over at Lithium and Kamil from http://kamilkisiel.blogspot.com/ is Lithium has a post-flight script that jams a bunch of sysctl options into /etc/sysctl.conf. I erased those options, restarted my Mac OS X server and Daylite began to run afterwards.
I do not yet know the impact this has on Lithium, perhaps I could get James over at Lithium to comment on this.
Yay.
UPDATE: Ok just so you know, once the daylite database was created and setup I placed the sysctl options back in place and restarted my server, both lithium and daylite are A-OK.
Here’s the options to place back in, just copy and paste to a command line.
echo "" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "#Lithium 5.0.0 sysctl.conf additions" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.shmmax=524288000" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.shmmin=1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.shmmni=64" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.shmseg=16" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.semmns=130" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.shmall=131072000" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.sysv.maxproc=4096" >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo "kern.maxprocperuid=1024" >> /etc/sysctl.conf
Hey MarketCircle! It would be really great to get someone on your inside to follow up with me and resolve my unhappiness with your product support. I’d really appreciate a discount on the software because despite this hiccup I must say Daylite is amazing and I would love to deploy it in my infrastructure.
Posted: February 18th, 2010 | Author: jordan | Filed under: Free Geek | No Comments »
This isn’t really a whole post, more like a failure report.
I had such high hopes when I got to Free Geek about getting the rack powered up and connected to our network. No we didn’t get the 30A circuits wired in yet but I do have one 15A that will be able to power the 15A PDU I have installed. I got that all up and running, and quite proud that one of our two PDU’s has remote power management, however when it came to configuring the network it was a different story.
Enter the crusty 3COM switch. We have this old, and I mean old, 3COM switch that I swear to God moans as it passes packets. Our 3COM has one already configured LACP trunk heading the ‘server room’ downstairs in the bathroom, what I wanted to do was setup another trunk to go to the new server rack. Nope, not happening. I fought and fought and fought with that 3COM on web interface, console interface, and smoke/blanket interface but to avail. It just would not allow more than one LACP trunk to be configured. Now I’m back to looking for a switch to replace it. There is a start-up in town that said they would graciously donate their old gigabit switch hardware, I hope they pull through on that. (If you guys do, I’ll give you a good plug here.)
While I’m waiting for the switches to magic themselves over to me I’m going to start with OS install and configuration but that will have to wait for part 3.
Posted: February 11th, 2010 | Author: jordan | Filed under: Free Geek | 2 Comments »
Old Server Room
Welp, so many people emailed me about my last post that I had to include this. Better late than ever, Ladies and Gentlemen! May I introduce you to the Free Geek server room. Now granted, I understand that this photo doesn’t look all too bad, but let me assure you this is its ‘good side.’ If we removed the angry Joshua, as well as a door we would find many horrible scene. Such as two APC UPS 1400, both with missing front bezels, only the PCB and connecting ribbon remains. Be careful, if you at them the wrong way, they turn off! Above them is the sink for the bathroom that has been turned into a shelf to hold up a 5 bay 160GB SCSI RAID box that is our ONLY backup.
So over the last couple days we’ve gotten in a decent 48 port switch built by extreme networks as well as two APC SmartUPS 3000’s. After we put these in I got to work building our new trunk back to an existing switch. As you can see from the pic to the side getting this cable from point A to B is going to be a little challenging. Not only does it have to get in behind that huge shelving unit, but that huge shelving unit is covered by more shelving 6ft deep.
This was the result! My whole body pinned between a crap load of iMacs and the upper shelf, it hurt like hell but at least I got an ab workout! 😉 Eventually I got the cables fished thru, crimped and nicely zap strapped in. At the end of the day Joshua and I were able to install:
2 x APC SmartUPS 3000 XL
2 x HP ProLiant DL360 G4’s
48 port Extreme Networks switch
10 port 1U 15A PDU
LACP trunk
Next up will be network configuration!
Posted: February 7th, 2010 | Author: jordan | Filed under: Free Geek | 2 Comments »
The Free Geek server room is not in the best of shape. It basically consists of about 9 desktop towers of varying speeds stacked in groups of 3 with plywood in between them. Oh! and it’s all housed inside of a bathroom. 😛 The power is being supplied by APC UPS’s with missing front bezels and malfunctioning controls…. they scream randomly. There’s no cooling, or even airflow and when the toilet’s water evaporates it begins to smell like dead fish. The gateway was just replaced with a dual core Xeon (thank you Joshua,) but the old one which ran like a trooper for 3 years was a Pentium II 366. A lot of the servers are beginning to show their age, failing hard drives, dead fans, strange smells. It’s time for a general overhaul.
Our New Rack Enclosure
The first thing to do is to plan power and figure out a location for the new server rack. We’ll be feeding in 2 20A circuits and 2 15A as well. We decided on placing the rack beside the lunch room because it was accessible enough to work on and also allowed to kinda show off to all the volunteers.
We then got this rack graciously donated to us to house all the new server that will be going in. It’s a 42U HP rack enclosure with removable doors and panels. Very nice rack inside, I would say even better than the standard APC Netshelter because the doors come off a lot easier and it’s nice and roomy to work inside of. However the only thing I did not like about this rack was the feet. To level it off I had to get an 11/16th wrench and from the bottom lower the feet where as on the APC Netshelter this is done inside the rack with a handy little Phillips screwdriver.
Now with the location for the rack picked out and rack itself chosen we can now do my favourite part. Cleaning. The first pic is of the dirt swept up in about 15sq ft around and under the rack location. After this is done the HP rack was put in place and then levelled out.
Since this rack was donated to Free Geek it had a lot of stuff in it already, therefore the stuff needed to be removed. These pictures were taken when most of the stuff had already been removed.
Now with the rack in place and cleaned up comes the fun part! Finding stuff to put in it!!! Free Geek has a lot of stuff to choose from. 
Mike and the big ass switch
Normally the first thing I would install and get working is the power and UPS, however we are currently waiting for a UPS to come in through donation and the circuits have not been laid in yet either. Instead the first thing I’m going to do is find a nice switch to install. First on the block was a Cisco 2948G. At first glance it seemed like a great choice. Lots of ports, Gigabit ethernet, however after the password recovery and seeing that the IOS version was 6.1 and there was no way of accessing the flash memory I quickly gave up. I then tried a 10/100 Linksys switch but it had a dead console port so there was no way to configure it. Then fate it seems smiled on me. I found a super high end, low profile, sleek / sexy HP switch pictured on the right! (j/k) No don’t worry we didn’t use this blade style switch. It looks as though we’re going to have to wait for the just the right switch to come rolling in the door. That’s the beautiful thing about Free Geek, at some point what you want will just magically appear! 😀
Tedrek!!!
With the search for a switch being a bust I then went on a hunt for servers. Luckily we’ve been cacheing them over the last few months, we now have many many HP Proliant DL360 G3’s and G4’s that we’re going to put into production. They’re usually dual core Xeon 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz. Also with all the extra carcasses we have plenty of spare parts such as power supplies and hard drives sleds. Yes, they are SCSI and thanks to Jeff up in build we also have a LOT of 18.2 SCSI hard drives. Thanks to all within the Free Geek crew especially the now estranged Ifny who will be missed! Coming up next will be (hopefully) switch installation and trunking to the main network as well as installing OSes and configuring services. Stay tuned!!!