Checksum Arcanius

This summer will be a time of great transition for me. I will be finishing up with school (for the time being at least), going on several trips, and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to start a new job. In addition to planning the trips, I have been thinking about the other aspects of the transition. One of these aspects will involve the moving of the servers that run silverfir.net.

Currently, the computer that runs most of silverfir.net is called Frankenputen (a well deserved name — it is literally a server scraped together by Dan from various ebay purchases). It is housed at my parent’s place, and it makes a lot of noise and heat (and probably consumes a lot of juice as well), so I thank them for being so long-suffering with the beast. Alongside Frakenputen is oasis, my old desktop, and what ran silverfir.net before Frankenputen, but after sf2, which came after wadi.

As part of this transition, I plan to move away from Frankenputen and transition entirely to nexus, the fileserver I currently use in my Seattle home. It is much smaller, quite quiet, and is, overall, a much more capable machine: it currently runs an Ahtlon 2600+, but will probably soon be a P4 2.8GHz. While it is not server-quality hardware, it is pretty, quiet, and small, which is really what I’m looking for.

Along with this transition will come some silverfir.net downtime, and probably a massive dumping of unused-but-still-available websites hosted on silverfir.net. This is just a warning that if you are looking to control your own website’s fate, and it is currently hosted on silverfir.net, you might want to evaluate your options and see if you want to stick through the transition period or not.

It is an interesting idea, but it appears to be incredibly slow. Indeed, a few hundred add operations bring it to its knees. Lame.

UPDATE: See comments.

A few of these in the past few weeks:

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on nexus

A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.

Faithfully yours, etc.

P.S. The /proc/mdstat file currently contains the following:

Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md0 : active raid1 sda[0]
732574464 blocks [2/1] [U_]

unused devices: <none>

Followed by the real downer:

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on nexus

A FailSpare event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.

It could be related to component device /dev/sdb.

Faithfully yours, etc.

P.S. The /proc/mdstat file currently contains the following:

Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md0 : active raid1 sdb[2](F) sda[0]
732574464 blocks [2/1] [U_]

unused devices: <none>

Led quite quickly to this:

1 x ($59.95) CASE ANTEC|THREE HUNDRED BK RT – Retail $59.95
4 x ($109.99) HD 750G|SAMG 7K 32M SATA2 HD753LJ – OEM $439.96

Which should be arriving from NewEgg sometime next week.

I plan to reuse former roommate Dan’s old motherboard and power supply in the upgrade. probably I will build a RAID 5 array from the four just-purchased disks and keep the good 750 that is still in Nexus around as a spare. The flaky drive will probably become available for cheap or free if anyone wants to risk it.
The new case will hopefully keep the new drives cool and comfy, lowering the risk of any future issues.

I finally got around to cleaning up the Arcanius 2.0 theme a little bit, tweaking some little bits that were bothering me, and trying on moving the menu to the bottom. At some point, if I decide to keep the menu at the bottom of the page, I will divide it into two or three columns.

Don’t worry, there isn’t a man-in-the-middle attack going on — rather, the recent news about a large security hole in all Debian-based systems spooked me enough to regenerate all of the SSH keys.

After a long absence that began with the great file corruption of 2008, the Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery is back. Now powered by the much-derided (by me) Gallery 2, I have come to terms what what seems to be the best photo hosting software out there.

Four and a half years, four servers, three jobs, two schools, and one small sampling of a life.

Today, Checksum Arcanius celebrates its 1,000th post.