FreeSide On The Web

Part of Reboot! 2008 was to get some form of server monitoring installed and online, so we can work out whats what, rather than just poking in the dark.

So nearly, 2 months later, this is really only just starting to be properly implemented.

Phoenix made a start a couple of weeks ago, but then didnt have chance to finish it.

Putting a new server on nagios is certainly a treck round the houses (unfortunately, we cant just do a basic apt-get install nrpe nagiosplugins :()

So, after phoenix finally giving me some basic instructions on how to setup a box for monitoring, and also a link to the proper manual, i gave it a go

And it took ages! Loads of commands to enter, 2 guides to partially follow - Not Fun!

The logical answer, was therefore, to write a basic bash install script (to at least semi-automate the process). A bit of fiddling, and combining the 2 guides, has brought about a shell script that works

It is listed at http://wiki.freeside.co.uk/index.php/Admin:Nagios_Plugin_Install

So, copy and paste that into a script on the server, make it executable, and run it

Currently, unless something goes wrong, you’ll only need to enter 2 bits of detail, 1, being Y to accept the extra apt-get package installs, and the nagios user password (enter it twice)

It will then do all the client side configuration (to a basic form). Any other services to be monitored, must be manually added (see wiki for more details)

Then, when thats done, you’ve just got to hop onto gaia, using a copy of the basic client monitoring config, change the few needed parameters, paste into the config (as root), check it, and restart nagios

Give it a few minutes and you’ll have the server listed as monitored in Nagios

Jobs a good ‘un

Reedy

First off, not quite a new addition, but the version of WPMU that FreeSide uses for its blogging system how now bee updated to version 1.5.1 which has quite a lot of new features. For those of you who have used it before, the most notable change is the admin panel which has had a lot of work done to it.

If you find any issues / bugs etc. with the update, please tell us in the #freeside IRC channel.

Main new addition is the installation of Outcast. A new webserver which is being prepared for ASP.NET application requests. This server is still in the installation phases as we try to work out what the best way to get it to work is and how to properly roll it out to all of our users. This may take some time, however, we hope that it will be sooner rather than later.

Watch this space!

Over the last couple of years,  FreeSide has grown substantially both in production machines as well as the amount of consumed space. Also, by adding and removing servers and terminals over that time, the network (and the room) has become a bit of a mess both physically and systems wise.

As such, Reboot!, the total FreeSide rebuild “event” will be taking place in the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, this will cause some major downtime over the space of a few days (probably a weekend), while we rebuild each server system and tweak server hardware to be more efficient, add new (and some improved) services and sort the general infrastructure of the room using the new server/network racks.

Anybody who is part of FreeSide is welcome to help out (http://www.freeside.co.uk/content/join), however, keep in mind that there is limited space in the room as it is, let alone with  lot of people shifting things around, so if you would like to help out, pass us an email to admins[-at-]freeside.co.uk to say, and we will see what can be arranged.

The day should be quite fun, but there is a lot of work to be done. This will be good experience for anybody who enjoys (or has an interest in) Linux servers, network infrastructureand generally how things fit together.

See http://wiki.freeside.co.uk/index.php/Reboot!_2008 for more information on what specific changes we will be making to FreeSide.

 Reboot! is now taking place this weekend (weekend starting 11th April), we will be meeting in the Sun Cafe down Cottingham Road at 10am, have a coffee and head in to get started.

From my last post, you will know we gained some SpiderPort Atoms which we intend to roll out as soon as possible. However these spider ports run on 10BaseT network connections, which is to slow to use them as part of the network backbone. So, we’ve decided to add a second network card in each server and use that for the SpiderPort.

Unfortunately, our spare network cards are not always that reliable and as such, it may take time to get each server back up and running. Service will therefore be somewhat sporadic, to keep up with what servers are up and which are down, check out our Twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/freeside.

Many thanks to Radius Solutions (http://www.radiussolutions.com) for their donation and thanks to John for setting it up. Unfortunately, (in the loosest way) we couldn’t fit everything in my car and will require a second trip. Out of the haul, items to note:

• HP tower server
• HP UPS
• 9 Ethernet Hubs
• 3 SpiderPorts
• 3 Other PC
• 1 laptop

These will all come in very handy in the near future. Once again. Thanks.

A lot of time this year (as well as a fair bit of money) has gone on system redundancy and data backups. Setting up FS based data was easy thanks to a couple of new hard drives and a bit of RAID goodness. MySQL however, has always caused a bit of an issue.

MySQL AB, came up with 2 forms of data backup and redundancy. The first one we tried was MySQL cluster. Even though this is now included in the main distributions of MySQL server, Cluster itself seems to be years off having a usable product(especially for Not For Profit projects such as FreeSide), however, it has an excellent base to move on from and has many advantages. Unfortunately it requires too much hardware and cannot support some of the packages we use as they are not compatible with the NDB engine at the time of writing.

The second is replication, basically a copy of all databases from one Master server to a slave server. This may sound no better that simple copy and paste, however, there is a lot more depth than that which is beyond the scope of this post. As an added incentive (as with cluster) it will be possible to use this secondary system as service redundency for MySQL so downtime at any one MySQL failure should be minimal and recoverable.

The servers, Reflection and Refraction, have now been moved from being MySQL Cluster servers to FreeSide’s new Blog servers. These will be in testing until I get back to Hull sometime this week.

Once the switch from testing to production is complete we should see a large increase in loading speed as I remove them from their bottleneck.

If there are any issues with the servers please add a comment.