Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
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A shout-out to SuperMicro
I’ve been a computer enthusiast since 1991 and a systems administrator since 2001. In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work/play with a wide variety of hardware and software, which has inevitably led to the formation of opinions about various vendors. There are the good (e.g. Seagate, Crucial/Micron, 3ware, Asus, Texas Instruments, Cisco), the bad (e.g. Dell, D-Link, IBM, Gateway), and the downright ugly (e.g. Microsoft, Real, SCO).
Recently, I’ve discovered a vendor of servers and server-class components that definitely belongs in the first list: SuperMicro. The name is a little dorky, but I’ve been impressed with the quality of their stuff.
At work, we have four servers using SuperMicro parts:
| Hostname | Chassis | Motherboard |
|---|---|---|
| fortress | SC833T-R760 | H8DAE |
| universe | SC833T-R760 | X7DBE |
| archive | SC833T-550 | Other |
| quasar | SC743T-645 | Other |
I personally plan on buying an SC733T chassis and a PDSLA motherboard in the near future. I’ve been meaning to build a RAID-5 media & backup server for a while now… 
If you can’t or don’t want to home-build, check out Silicon Mechanics, a Seattle-based integrator of SuperMicro products. They built-and-burned the first two machines in that table. We’ve been quite pleased with them as well.
I have no stake in, nor affiliation with, either company. I’m just a satisfied customer, and since the computer industry is teeming with crappy products from crappy vendors, I wanted to take a second to recognize some exceptions.
Backhoe for the win!
Major road construction + T1 line + Internet-addicted sysadmin == bad.
After lunch today, I returned to the office and was greeted by a storm of “host unreachable” whinings from Nagios and a blinking “WAN” LED on the T1 router. A few phone calls later, it was confirmed that our local loop circuit had been physically cut. Wonderful.
How am I supposed to survive without Google, to say nothing of IM and email? I actually had to dig out a physical, dead-tree book to look up the answer to an (unrelated) technical issue today. Argh!
Worst error message ever?
This gem from Xen is the most obtuse, unhelpful error message I’ve seen in quite a while:
Error: Device 768 (vbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working.
One of the top Google results for this text is a PDF file of the official Xen 3.1 Release Notes. According to these notes, you should check whether your CPU load is abnormally high, and configure Xen such that the host domain (dom0) is assigned fewer CPU cores.
When that didn’t work, I continued Googling. It turns out that this is the error message produced by Xen when you configure a guest OS image to use a non-existent device (block device, LVM logical volume, loopback file, etc.) as a virtual disk.
Compare the aforementioned error message to the following suggestion:
Error: invalid device /dev/vg0/blah specified in /etc/xen/foo.cfg, line X.
I guess that would have been far too easy.