Servers

So I got a request to install Subversion 1.5 on our master dev server because it has uber merge support. Now Debian admins out there know that Debian doesn't ship with 1.5, it's too new. It shows up in Lenny but not Etch. So I went a-huntin' and discovered the following blog post:

http://www.rooftopsolutions.nl/article/198

This article shows the proper way to build an upgrade for Etch's subversion package. Hope this helps anyone else out there that's looking for a quick hack to get Subversion 1.5 on their Etch box.

(Parody of this clip from the Emperor's New Groove)

I know, I'll turn him into a packet
a harmless little packet.
and then I'll send that packet to a POP
and I'll send that packet to another POP
and then they'll queue that packet on their edge
and when it arrives... hahahahah
I'LL SMASH THEM WITH A HAMMER!
It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant I tell you! Genius I say!
... or to save on bandwidth, i'll just arp-poison them, with THIS!

The humans... they come with packets, they come with issues... phreaking, cracking, breaking, hacking, phishing. Destroyers and usurpers, curse them.

So while doing some reasearch for work today I came across the following article:

http://www.playingwithwire.com/2007/01/why-gentoo-shouldnt-be-on-your-server/

After reading the article, which was remarkably well thought out and considerate of the distribution, I decided to go read the comments (something I rarely do due to the flamewars that tend to erupt).

While perusing the name calling and questioning of intellectual prowess (along with the rare jewel of someone who actually knew what they were talking about) it occurred to me that many people really don't grasp how Gentoo is supposed to work.

Personally I've been a Gentoo user/admin for 3 years now and I'm just now starting to feel like I have a handle on how the distro works. Granted, I've never actually dived into the docs and attempted to 'learn it all!' but what sysadmin does? :) I believe Gentoo has many fantastic aspects and that it's down-sides are equally as glaring. So I've decided to put together a list of Pros and Cons for people who are thinking of switching or just need another bit of input.

Pros:

---

Portage!
Portage is God's gift to mankind in the form of a package management system that actually understands how to track dependencies. Portage is the main reason I (and many other people) use Gentoo. With a few taps of the keyboard we can build a system that works properly the first time, without any need to check version numbers or package compatibility. This makes our lives easier when trying to build whole Linux systems whos components interoperate with stability and speed.

Speed
Now granted, since Gentoo switched away from the 'stage1' style builds 2 years ago (you build the entire system from the ground up, an incredibly long process) the speed aspect has been slightly reduced. However, building software objects against the native hardware will always produce a performance increase and allow you to squeeze that extra bit of performance out of your machines. It also lends another aspect that it crucial to maintaning high-availability servers, stability.

Stability
Okay some people are looking at me funny now, but seriously, a properly maintained Gentoo system is the epitome of stable. Notice I said properly maintained there. It is my belief that many people do not fully grasp how to properly administer the Gentoo distribution. Gentoo provides many powerful mechanisms to block new packages, install updates and in-general, keep your system up to date without breaking it.

Cons:

---

Time
Time is Gentoo's biggest enemy. Time is required to build your system, learn the Portage stylisms, find all the interesting places config files are located, and the list goes on. I've spent countless hours tweaking and honing my systems into submission. The process gets easier and, as a result, faster each time you do it (isn't this true with all OS installs?) however, of all the Linux distributions, Gentoo requires the most time up-front to get running.

Portage
While Portage may be a fantastic package and dependency management system, I believe it could stand some improvement. As many have noted, there are currently no mechanisms to JUST install security updates and the rather routine cycling of the profiles has been known to break the occasional build. However, disruption is usually the result of an ill-maintained system rather than an actual flaw with the profiles themselves. In my history of running Gentoo, I've only had one machine die due to a profile change and that was caused by neglect on my part. Had I done my job of setting the system up properly in the first place, the profile change would have happened transparently.

The Zealots
Linux has it's fair share of individuals who've had a bit too much caffeine and not enough lessons in social interaction whose sole goal in life seems to be defending their distro of choice as if their manhood depended upon it. Sadly, these 'advocates' seem to flock to the Gentoo distribution, probably for it's shiny colors and general coolness factor. The problem is these zelots tend to be viewed (appropriately, more often then not) as loud-mouthed, obnoxious individuals who tend to give the community a bad name. Examples show up quite often in the article mentioned above. The truth of the matter is, the Gentoo community is about 10% zealot and 90% intelligent, helpful (albeit somewhat soft-spoken) people. Unfortunately the 90% tends to get drowned out by the constant snarking and flaming of the zealots.

I'm sure I could wax far more eloquent about this topic and go into far greater depth of how to build a proper Gentoo system, but unfortunately, I'm out of time for now. Hopefully this quick list will help someone along the way during their decision making process. If you feel I missed something major in this list, by all means, tell me!

Cheers!

But only sometimes...

So today I remember that I'm still running Firefox 1.5.08 on my laptop and decide it's time to move up to 2. No problem... `emerge --sync && emerge -u mozilla-firefox` ERRRN WRONG!

/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined reference to `XML_SetElementHandler'
/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined reference to `XML_SetDoctypeDeclHandler'
/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined reference to `XML_ParserFree'
/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined reference to `XML_SetCharacterDataHandler'

... and the list goes on.

ARRG! Okay so let's rebuild the dependencies, but first figure how much CPU time this is going to smack me for:

`emerge -pD | wc -l`
180

Mother of...

Packages to update include (of course) gcc, glibc, dbus (dammit I JUST got it working, quit trying to break it!), etc!

Oy vey... I think I may just stick with 1.5 for the time being, 2.0 seems to require just too many new things.

So today I was having a conversation with a co-worker from our Portland office and the following emerged from my fingertips:

"Yes well you don't have to live with me so it's hard for you to see :). I have to live with me see... although I keep trying to get me to move out. I'm getting on my nerves."

I'm sure everyone's had a point in their life where they have thought something close to this.

Well I suppose it would be good to let everyone know what's going on...

Nothing! BWAHAHAHAHA!

Okay in all seriousness now, I really haven't been doing much of note lately other than work :). I'm currently finishing up a large refurb project on quite a few computers I've inherited/bought. When the machines are (finally) finished, I'll have loads of computing power and absolutely no clues what to do with it! :) Actually I have quite a few ideas, I'm just not sure which ones I have time to implement. Also from the house of Power Consumption: I just aquired three SMC 8624T TigerSwitch(es). These switches are fantastic devices and SMC's warranty on them is wonderful. They replaced a unit which had the password set to something strange and after five minutes on the phone with them, sent me a brand new RoHS model (which I dig). I'm giving one of these units to Devin who set me wise to their abilities. Thanks D!

Beyond the computers I'm working on a couple of solutions for a renewable power system. Right now my server room circuit is pushing 10A and with all the new machines coming online it will probably be near 25A of constant-load power (this is when they're _idling_). Now that works out to a ton of power consumed each hour and while power rates in Snohomish County are better than Whatcom, they're still moderately pricey. So the plan is to try and implement something solar (I have a relatively reasonable amount of roof-space) to supplement my existing power grid. Currently I'm researching the solutions others have come up with in an attempt to find one that will work easily for me and my budget.

I think it would also be nice to come up with a sort of continuous monitoring system for power and heat in the server room. My summer projects include building a rig to hold at least one air conditioner for the machine room and I want the ability to monitor the room environment and if possible, adjust it remotely. The biggest problem with closing a room to outside air is, if your cooling dies, your machines die with it, literally. I gambled on a heavy-duty Kenmore AC unit up in Bellingham (and won... that time) but I really don't want to do that again, not with so much equipment at stake. The biggest problem will be balancing the heat load with the air conditioner's capabilities. 10K BTUs will not work this time around, so I may have to put two 12K units in to handle the heat load. I have yet to do the wattage computations for the machine room so I can figure out how much heat I'm creating.

Honestly I don't have the slightest clue why I'm putting so much work into this (I'm literally creating my own mini-datacenter). But it keeps me busy and I get to play with computing hardware, which is something I'm very good at.

Finally a shout out to Ryan who just moved into his first house (well first house he owns). Grats man, hope it's a wonderful experience.

And on that note I'm going to get back to work! Have a pleasant day everyone.

So back at Gottathink I ran into a slight problem with a customer taking up 11G of our precious 30G spindle on one of the VPS accounts. My boss was (of course) freaking out and wanting to know who it was.

Well unfortunately Gottathink hadn't implemented quotas on any boxes up until that point (I didn't set them up so don't glare at me like that) so I had to whip up something that would tell me the offender quickly.

The following script came to me:

for i in *; do if [ -d $i ]; then du -hs $i; fi; done

What this does is simply find out the size of every directory that exists in the current directory.

It would be really easy to make this recursive so you could pinpoint the problem if need be.

If you need to limit the number of returned records, simply pipe the output through sed or if you're really lazy, grep.

So I've been pondering getting a Dreamhost account for a bit now and I think I just discovered a reason to do so! A Gallery system.

Admittedly I know I don't have a digital camera (oh how I want one though...) however I know plenty of friends with them and they all seem to be trying to host their galleries off their home lines, which isn't pretty. Pictures + Low Upstream = Sad Browser.

So why not get a Code Monster account and install some Gallery systems for my friends to use? Plus it would give me a nifty place to put large things I don't want being served off my home line.

I figure with a 4TB bandwidth limit that increases by 32GB a month it's not likely the account will go over limit (it had better not!) and with 400G pretty much anything can be stored there.

Anyway that's my thoughts. Any of you that would like a free (fast) place to store images or other large things? Let me know!

Those of you who want access to the friends areas will need to sign up (use a username I can recognize or use an e-mail address you know I have on file :)). I'll drop you into the friends role as soon as I see the e-mail from Drupal.

I'm currently tweaking the site and the theme to my preferences so don't be surprised if you see some changes happening in the near future. This theme is nice but I'm not quite happy about how it looks.

Recommendations are welcome! I'll probably be hacking up some modules to do stuff that Drupal doesn't do but we'll save that for later.

Anyway I must get back to my hacking. Enjoy the new site.

PS: The old blog posts are available here http://nickw.stormsim.com/site/aggregator/sources/1