greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • 4200 minus 2700 equals Headache

    For most of the calendar year so far we at work have been plowing through a massive reorganization, upgrade, and consolidation of our servers. One of the last stages of this consolidation & upgrade process involved upgrading our Kaseya environment. During the shuffle I found some quirks. For instance, the UserProfiles directory contains roughly 4200 subdirectories, one per agent in the system.

    Problem is, we only have about 2700 agents. The other 1500? Old agents.

    I asked vendor support about this, as the impression I had was that there was an agent archive process. I mean, there’s an archive directory configured in the system, what else is it for if not to archive these agent directories? Heck, the archive directory has agent directories in it.

    Apparently, nope. This isn’t something Kaseya does. I must archive those 1500 directories manually. How did the previous archive directory become populated? No idea at all.

    “Okay,” you might be saying right now, “Just look for the oldest directories.”

    Problem! We just migrated the front-end and database back-end parts of Kaseya to new servers over the last couple weeks! All the directories have brand new dates, all in numerical order, dating from when they were copied off of the old server.

    4100minus2700So this is my life now. Comparing the list of directory names with a list of agent IDs from a report, moving anything not in the report into an archive directory, by hand, one by one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Fun.

  • It’s a Very Monday Monday

    This week is getting an early start on kicking my ass:

    • Sunday Night Insomnia with a vengeance.
    • Remembered to do dishes and take out garbage this morning, forgot to grab lunch.
    • MAX train broke down one stop away from where I needed to go. (The operator had to be talked through cycling the breakers. That’s right: They rebooted the light-trail train.)
    • BurgerVille’s closed today, so no high-octane breakfast to boost my energy levels.
    • Half the office is on vacation or out sick.
    • The link between two of our key work systems is broken for no reason I can determine.

    Is it too late to throw my hands up and head back to bed? (Yes. Yes, it is.)

  • End of an Era

    Farewell, Node1 server.

    Long live Node2.

    Email has been on Google Apps for a couple weeks now with no problems, websites are all migrated to the new box, and nothing remains of any use on the old system. So, I just turned off and removed the Linode VM of the old server. Had to do it by month’s end or get dinged for another $75, so today was a good day to make that happen.

    It’s always a bit of a downer, shutting off a server you worked so hard to build in the first place. But that’s the way of things.

  • WordPress and comment email

    I… may have only just a few minutes ago fixed a setting that prevented WordPress (and anything else PHP-based) on this new server from sending email.

    Whoops. No comment notifications, for instance.

    On the upside, if this is the worst mistake I make throughout this process then I’ve done pretty damned well.

  • New Server, New Email Service

    If you can read this, then the website migration worked.

    If I get email notification of any comments left for this post, then the email migration worked.

    Okay, the email migration worked and I know it, because I got my daily Ello “inspirational” email newsletter today. Oh, Ello, when are you going to become something people other than froofy artsy-fartsy types will actually want to use?

    Anyway. The email accounts are over on Google Apps now, and all but one of the hosted websites are migrated to the new Linode server. Hopefully I’ll have the last website and the NTP Pool configuration done in a couple of days and I will be able to turn off the old server. Huzzah!

  • Migratory Fowl

    It’s been a bit quiet here because this month I’ve started on a long-overdue project: Migrating the webserver to a… new webserver.

    I’ll try to sum up.

    The current webserver, aka Node1, is a legacy Linode system. It’s a 6GB virtual Linux server of a configuration they don’t even offer anymore, and it started life as an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS system. I upgraded it a while ago because 10.04 LTS went out of support… last year.

    I’d like to get to the current PHP and MySQL versions, but that means either doing a lot of crazy backporting or doing an in-place upgrade. Considering I upgraded from 10.04 to 12.04 and had… issues… I don’t like the idea of performing yet another in-place major OS upgrade. So, I’ve purchased a second Linode system, a 4GB rig this time, and if I can get everything moved in the next two weeks I won’t need to pay the full monthly price for the old box and new box combined.

    We’ll see how that goes.

    Since the 4GB box costs less, I’m using the cost difference to fund getting email into some kind of hosted environment, because damn me but I’m tired of wrangling mail server configurations. Pay someone else to handle that headache? Yes please.

    So that’s what I’m up to. Once this is complete, then I’ll be looking into a couple of creative projects. Honest!

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