Category Archives: Rendrag Networks

Sigh, why don’t people pay on time?

I don’t understand why clients don’t pay on time? I mean, they get an invoice on their invoice date.. Then one with ‘OVERDUE" in big red letters at the start of the next month. Then again a fortnight later.. Then again at the start of the next month.. Then again a fortnight later.. Then one at the start of the third month, with ‘SUSPENDED’ on it.. At which point I’ve also redirected their website (or domains) to our http://contactaccounts.rendrag.net.au/ site, and taken down any other services (SSL Certs, re-billing services, etc) on the overdue invoice..

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Diversity at last!

What a whirlwind couple of weeks it’s been! Relocating the office interstate, setting up colo’d servers in Sydney and Canberra, but it’s all settling down now! We’ve got a couple of big beefy compaq boxes in Sydney, running vmware with a bunch of virtual machines on them, as well as our primary DNS, and our secondary is sitting in canberra. Next step is to start migrating services currently hosted in the US down into Sydney, and decomission our US boxes.
Of course there’s some US services which will always stay there, such as email, as that just has WAY too much bandwidth overhead to be economical in aus, but the plan is to get all our webhosting servers migrated back here by the end of the year 🙂 Our colo provider likes the sound of that too 😉
And of course, I’d always rather be putting my hosting money into .au business rather than overseas!

Well that was easy!

So just finished upgrading the Law Foundation’s FirstClass server from 8.2 through 8.3 to 9.0. Seven and a half hours to back the bastich up (pointed out it needed a damned good defrag.. have fired that off..), then FIVE MINUTES to do the upgrade! Gotta say I was bloody impressed!!
Couple of hitches – most notable being it removed ‘WWW Client’ access from the ‘All Users’ group.. That would have caused a few hiccups, but sorted now.. Also, will be interesting, it remodelled all users desktops to force them to their group’s model desktop layout… Will see if we get any complaints about that!
Gotta say I love the automatic client upgrade feature.. Finished the upgrade, and then logged in with my 8.2 client, and bingo, it goes ‘you need to upgrade your client, click OK to continue’, and voila, 5 mins later it’s downloaded and upgraded me to V9.0!
You know, this month, it’s 13 years since I first started using Firstclass – originally on version 2.6 on a 300 baud manuall-dial modem using the IEAust’s EOL BBS!

Woot terra is back

Ok, it’s back to 30 now, and hopefully will get cooler as the night goes on..
Terra came back to life – i’d put a new primary HDD in and gone to install 2k3 server, and got the same stop screen.. At least this time I could read it, and discovered the scary MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION.. That’s the one the CPU sends to the OS to tell it that there’s a hardware failure… Pulled EVERYTHING out, and put the original primary HDD back in, and it booted XP just fine… OK, add first raid card and disk stack.. Yep boots fine.. Add second raid card and disk stack… Yep boots fine.. Add third raid card and the extra disks.. Yep, boots fine.. Although I notice that as I access disks, the three fans on front speed up and slow down (you can JUST notice the beating of the blade rotation against each other – yay for lit fans..).. AHHHHHH Power is JUST at the limits… OK, so finally plug in the second PSU (it’s been sitting there not being used), and move one disk stack off the main ATX supply onto the second HDD-dedicated supply (it only has 12+5v HDD molex’s coming out of it..).. Bingo, she boots, and the fans all stay at the same speed… YAY!!

Busy day.. waaaay too hot!

Spent the monring typing up yet more Summernats Awards results pages.. – Almost done now 🙂
Then terra (see gallery for pics) crashed, so I headed out to the server room (see gallery for pics) to find out why, and got a bit of a shock.. Aircon unit had turned its compressor pump off due to overheating, and it was 36 in there! this was at 2pm.. Went straight to bunnings to get a second unit.. Found they didn’t have any more arlec’s, so I had to buy a sunbeam 1HP unit (instead of the 1.5HP arlec), which I’ve put in my bedroom, and then moved the arlec 1.5HP from my bedroom to the server room.. By the time I got the holes cut in the wall and had it all plumbed in, it was sitting just over 39 degrees in there.. ouch! turned both aircon back on, and the temp started to plummet.. after 10 mins it’d dropped to 37, so i headed back inside to wait a while.. Have just been back out, and found BOTH the aircons have shut their compressors off due to overheating and it’s sitting at 36 degrees.. hmmmmm…. Will see if it comes down another few degrees when they cool off a bit.. Hopefully..
And terra won’t start up.. passes memory tests (and it’s ECC on an intel server board so I’d expect big errors on POST if there were any faults) ok, and then goes on to load all the raid cards (2x IDE raid 1x SCSI raid), and then gets to windows booting, gets part-way through and gives the blue STOP screen, then reboots before I can see what the error was… If I can get the temp in there down, hopefully it’ll come back up… If not, I’ll put another HDD in it as the boot drive and upgrade it to 2003 instead of XP (have been wanting to for a while anyway), and see how it goes…
If I can get 2003 on there, then I can start my AD+Exchange migration project – aim is to get exchange and AD master off the current ‘earth’ machine, and make ‘earth’ a dual PIII-1.4 dell 1RU server.. – should clear up 3RU in the rack, and save a little more power..
Oh plus it means the old earth (P4-2.4, 2gb ram) can be pulled apart and used for mum’s new computer – the only spare motherboards I have are all AMD chips, so I can’t just transplant her HDD… :