New theme for the blog

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I finally got off my butt and updated the theme for this here blog.  Hooray!

No updates lately, which sucks.  I’ve been busy with the new job, working on my Jeep (driving it as much as I am able), and basically running all over the place now that the kids are out of school for the summer.

Still need to set up the SPARC hardware and do something fun for the BurningServer site.  I’m still trying to decide what to do about the battery backup situation, which will impact some of my SPARC based machines with dead NVRAM modules.

Looking to possibly finish part of my basement, so I can isolate myself from the noise from the dehumidifier, furnace, and computer equipment with louder fans.  I believe it’s time I carved out a section of the house for myself!

Dead batteries and a new firewall

My trusty set of UPS units and their batteries are long overdue for an overhaul.  I’ve had trouble with one dealing with power spikes (it just shuts off instead of holding up the ONE server plugged into it), and the second unit wasn’t much better.  Time to start shopping for replacement batteries, which will NOT be cheap.

Here’s what ONE of the complete UPS units looks like:

Since I was tearing most of my wiring out from behind my server shelves, I decided to revamp my networks.  I now have pfSense running in a virtual machine, and routing all of the traffic for my public facing servers, as well as my wired internal network.  Wireless is now stand-alone on the Mikrotik, and not connected in anyway to my internal wired/server network.

ServerUnderground – Now virtualized!

If you can read this, then I managed to not bungle the migration from physical hardware to a virtual machine.

The plan was to dump the database and set up the blog on a fresh install of Ubuntu server in a VM.  Instead, I used a utility called fsarchiver, which did a great job of backing up my primary partition on the physical box, and dumped onto a smaller partition on the VM.  Much less work!

Once the data was restored, I had to fix grub so it would boot from the virtual drive, and straighten out some networking issues outside of the VM environment.

The old box is powered down!

Change is in the air!

Since there haven’t been any updates for a while, I figured it was time to sit down and write something.

2013 is proving to be an interesting year so far.  I have switched to a new job, with all kinds of pretty cool opportunities to expand my knowledge and experience using some new technologies, as well as honing my existing skill-set in a new environment.  Looking forward to what the rest of the year brings!

This past Black Friday’s trip to Fry’s Electronics yielded a new server for the basement.  I now have an eight-core AMD system, loaded with 32GB of RAM and a small software RAID array for local storage.  The new server is currently running Proxmox VE, and hosting a small set of virtual machines.  One of those VMs is actually my Zimbra server, which has been performing flawlessly, as well as much faster than the old physical box I used previously.

In other news, I have reacquired some domain names that I had originally registered back in 1999.  ServerUnderground is gaining a sister site, BurningServer!

BurningServer systems will be made up of my motley crew of SPARC based hardware running NetBSD.  I have to get the hardware sorted out, RAM purchased for those systems that were donated last summer, and storage set up.  It’s been pretty chilly in the basement lair this winter, so I haven’t spent a lot of time on this project yet.

Another project is to virtualize the web server currently dishing out content for this site.  I will attempt to load up a fresh VM running Ubuntu, and migrate the data over for the blog.  The older hardware will most likely be used for a NAS based off of FreeBSD so I can use ZFS.

I’m still a huge fan of the AMD Trinity line of processors!  After building the dual-core system, I ended up going all out and built a top of the line A10 based system with 16GB of RAM.  Super quiet, runs cool, and great support for the FGLRX driver under Ubuntu 12.10!

I hope to have more frequent updates on the blog in 2013 compared to last year.  That’s all for now!