The Fubra Blog
Storage Improvements
It’s been a very busy bank holiday weekend at Fubra following an intermittent backplane failure on one of our storage arrays. With the help of our storage vendor, Coraid, we’ve managed to stabilise the failing unit as a temporary measure while we move all of the storage to our other array.
This is taking us quite some time however, as it contains hundreds of gigabytes of production storage. We hope to get this process completed later today.
Unattended linux installation
If you ever had to do multiple linux installations you know how laborious it can be. At times like this you may have wondered if it would be possible to carry out a fully automatic linux installation. Fortunately it is not only possible to prepare a fully hands-off installation, but also a one that does not require any discs. You can read how to perform a network installation on Paul’s blog, while in this post we will concentrate on making the installation fully automatic. Having a configuration described on Paul’s blog such installation is fairly easy to set up. There are four things we will have to do:
- Prepare a kickstart file
- Save the kickstart file in a place accessible for the installer
- Prepare an installation source
- Modify the PXE config so it instructs the kernel to use the kickstart file
Pro-active Monitoring of a Network
The Fubra Network has been growing steadily over the past few years, and we now manage over 100 physical servers across 3 geographically diverse sites.
In the past we have operated a fairly re-active strategy to fixing server problems. For example; if we noticed, or someone told us, that a site was running slowly, we would look into it. If a site went down, we would fix it. Of course, in the long run, this isn’t a great way to look after your network. As the sayings go, “a stitch in time saves nine” and “a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. The same is true with server hosting.