Servers

FSTrim Trimming the Same Amount Multiple Times in a Row

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.

Installing CentOS 8 on a Dell PowerEdge R610

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:

DRAC 5 Remote Console on Fedora

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.

Host Filesystem Impact on Tempest Performance in OpenStack

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.

Dell CS24-SC Remote KVM on Linux

My working BMC Hotkey settings

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.

EBay Servers

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.

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