2006-10-16 #1

voyager.xdroop.com

So two perfectly good power supplies later, it turns out that the nice Sun racks we have in our datacenter are 230V output instead of 115V; and in a completely unrelated tone, it turns out that the Antec SL300XR power supplies are not auto-sensing on their inputs.

It also turns out that the SL300XR power supply is a special device, and Antec's dealer network does not carry the replacement unit. The last time we wanted a replacement power supply, we had to wait something like three weeks to get it delivered.

Fortunately the hack suggested by Myke worked out better than expected. One simple $35 standard ATX power supply was purchased and installed very similarly to the way Myke's was. My own enhancement to this idea is to add a cardboard shield down the gap between the power supply exhaust fan and the rest of the case; with the lid on, it means that most of the warm air should be forced out the exhaust grate instead of back into the case.

With all that done and tested, voyager.xdroop.com is up and in a nice safe datacenter instead of behind my crappy cable modem. It is currently being used to host snipsnap, and I may move other things to it as well.

I also got the system to do a few things that I have not got to work in the past, such as learning more about munin (always good to learn, even after a year (!!) of using the tool), plus some more about Nagios.

I'm suitably paranoid, so I will probably be rsync'ing the data from wiki back to home base regularly just in case both hard drives fail. And wiki might be a reasonable place for me to put my infrequent backups of home base...

I am not abandoning the tera-byte hosting just now. Being paid up through 2008 means I would really just be throwing money away. Besides, they were pretty good about adding the necessary DNS records to make voyager reachable through the internet, and having them manage my inbound mail means that I don't have to… although in all seriousness I do 95% of what needs to be done when mail lands on saturn.

I doubt I will move everything to voyager right now… since if circumstances change I would be forced to pay pretty good money to have my server hosted someplace. Tera-byte may be less functional than a fully hosted server, but they are a lot more affordable.

All in all a very productive weekend from the computing standpoint.