sean's place

episkey Upgrade

So, it’s been over a year since I racked my server (episkey) at its data center. I done such an enormously successful job of remote management that I haven’t had a need to make a visit until today.

So, with Myles help, we headed out to the data center out in the middle-of-nowhere (really, it’s pretty out there) with a new (bigger! better!) hard drive in tow and a software upgrade staged.

My overwhelming skills at FreeBSD management paid off once again. I had the upgrade in its final state (“install and reboot!”) and the data backed up. In the end, episkey ended up running FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE (from 7.0-STABLE) and a 1TB drive for user data (up from 80GB). The whole process took about 45 minutes and included unracking and reracking the box for the disk install. This was the very definition of smooth.

The sad statistic: 45 minutes of actual work and 3 hours of driving. Like I said, the data center is pretty far out of the way. It even has a cattle gate.

Really.

In other news, I’ve been working with Rory on a web front-end to ircservices. My part has been to refactor the ircservices httpd module to export XML (parseable) as opposed to hackneyed HTML. Rory’s been working on a PHP front-end. So far so good; I hope we can prove out some useful functionality for our users.