tech.sweetnam.eu

It’s been absolutely ages since I last wrote here and I had been meaning to do so for some time. Since my last entry I have been tinkering away with my setup as I do on a regular basis and plenty of things have changed here on the back end. I suppose I will begin with my my connection and move up the chain from there.

First up is a new router. I picked up a nice Cisco 837 for a very reasonable price. I had a bit of fiddling to get it up and running with eircom broadband but I got there in the end and I have documented the procedure over on my wiki.

Next up is my reverse proxy. It is still running on the same hardware but I decided to move from Linux over to OpenBSD. My primary reason for this is that I was getting sick and tired of Linux iptables. In addition I concluded that Squids performance wasn’t optimal either. A move to OpenBSD seems to have resolved both those issues for me. PF on BSD is very configurable and easy to understand as well. Needless to say I have documented my experiences with PF over on my wiki also.

I’ve also gotten my hands on some new hardware. Well new hardware to me that is. I picked up three Sun Netra T1 servers, a Dell PowerEdge 1750 and two Symantec 5420 Firewall appliances.

So far I have been busy setting up the three Netras. They don’t have CD-ROM drives or display adapters so I had to install them over the network which was a process that was actually relatively simple. However it was only simple in that I already have a couple of other Sun machines here one of which I was able to use as an install server. Of course I have this process documented on my wiki also.

I haven’t decided what I will use the Netras for yet. One of them seems to have CPU problems and has been cannabilised to increase the specs. of the other two. They have 500Mhz UltraSparc IIe CPUs so by todays standards are not at all that powerful but they do draw very little power, certainly less than a Pentium IV machine so I may set them up as file servers. Initially I was hoping to install OpenBSD on one of them to use as my reverse proxy but unfortunately an OpenBSD network install does not seem to be as straight forward as Solaris.

The Poweredge 1750 I had hoped to set up as a webserver running either IIS or Apache. Unfortunately it only has 512MB of RAM so until I get some more for it that rules out Server 2008. However it is incredibly loud and that rules out keeping it running in my computer room. I am currently planning on setting up a dedicated computer room as it were in another part of the house so check back here for update on that.

I have a disk that is about to fail on my Active Directory domain controller. The system event viewer is rapidly being filled with bad block errors and it does indeed look like that I will have to replace the offending disk. That is no major problem, however I only have one domain controller so I’ve just finished configuring another Windows 2003 server here as a secondary controller for when I take the other one off line. As soon as replication is complete I will promote it to become the primary and take the other off-line.

There are a few annoyances though. My PDC is also my DNS server and primary file and print server too. It is configured with two disks, one 160GB and the other 40GB. It is the 40GB disk that is on its way out and that is also the system disk. Luckily it only has one share which I’m currently moving the data off of as I type. The DNS is going to throw me slightly I think so it looks like I might have to replicate that over as well. Ah well, rarely a dull moment.

Update – Using Norton Ghost, I have successfully cloned the dying disk to a new 160GB one. Only took an hour

Microsoft is getting a lot of flak lately for the speed of their website. It seems to have reduced itself to a crawl. What have they done that could have caused this? They migrated their web servers over to Windows Server 2008 is what.

It is a fairly big assumption to make if you think Server 2008 is solely responsible but it seems to be a case of coincidental timing too as this started around the same time as they started trying to foist their Silverlight technology on us.

Information Week had an article recently that delved into the nitty gritty behind their site where they seem to think the problems with Microsoft’s site lies squarely with the developers. However what about those of us who actually have to administer servers sometimes numbering into the hundreds? I came across an open letter to Microsoft that deals with exactly this.

Since Vista was released into the market exactly a year ago, I made an attempt to use it as my day to day OS which lasted approximately two days. Whatever its shortcomings at least I could fall back to XP. However with server 2008 almost upon us I’m starting to feel the same dread all over again that I had with Vista.

The thought of having to work with both Vista and Server 2008 on a daily basis is actually enough to make me reconsider working in IT. So far the only exposure I have had to Server 2008 has been by way of a 90 minute demo on a virtual machine on Microsoft’s rather excellent Virtual Labs site. From the 90 minutes playing around, it doesn’t look good.

In it’s original incarnation this site was runnning on a virtual Windows 2000 server. However since the hardware it was hosted on has been nothing but unreliable, I have moved it over to a Windows 2003 Server. Reliability should be much improved and hopefully I will manage to update this on a more regular basis.

I’m still playing around with themes too so it may take a while to settle on one that I like