Servers

I was running fstrim on a couple of old drives in anticipation of installing them in an even older RAID controller that doesn't support the trim command.[0] To do this, I formatted the entire drive as ext4, mounted it, then ran fstrim -v /mnt/temp to discard all of the unused blocks. I did this using a USB-SATA adapter, and what I noticed was that after running fstrim the adapter activity light was still blinking like crazy. I was curious if fstrim was still running, even though the command had completed already.

Updated 2020-08-10, see edit below

I recently had to upgrade a CentOS 7 server to CentOS 8. I foolishly expected this to be easy since it wasn't a heavily customized install in the first place and most of the stuff I cared about was in my home directory. I was, as you may have guessed, wrong.

The problem was that CentOS 8 removed the driver for the Dell H700 RAID controller in my server. Setting aside the wisdom of that decision, here's how to get around it:

It seems like every time I try to access the remote console on one of my old DRAC 5's, something fails. The latest failure was kind of new and I didn't find any blog posts specifically discussing it, so I'm writing one. The error was the classic "Error when reading from ssl socket connection". But the usual fixes didn't work.

As I mentioned in a previous post, about a year ago I picked up a 1U server from EBay to use as a local single-node OpenStack environment. In general I was quite happy with it, but at some point I got tired of paying for electricity to run a fairly power-hungry server that sits idle, or close to it, about 95% of the time. The fans also picked up an annoying whine somewhere along the line, so once I discovered how much more efficient a modern desktop processor would be, while actually performing better than the old dual server ones, I decided it was time for a new box. This post will be the story of my journey to get Tempest running in an acceptable fashion on it, and what I learned along the way.

A little less than a year ago I picked up an old Dell CS24-SC 1U server from EBay. It's got a ton of power - dual quad core, 24 GB of RAM, 4 146 GB 15k SAS drives, and an integrated BMC. That last is something I've struggled with though. Because this is a server, I really don't want to leave a keyboard and mouse plugged in to it all the time. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the remote KVM functionality working. Until now, that is.

When I was out in Raleigh for orientation I was belatedly introduced to the wonderful world of used server hardware. Like most computer geeks (or is nerds the more acceptable term? I can never remember, which probably tells you how much I care about the issue), I believe in owning as many overpowered computers as possible. Up until recently I had been falling behind somewhat on that, but the discovery of EBay servers went a long way to changing it. I'm sure a lot of people already know about these, but if you're reading this I'm going to assume you don't.