Had the usual outage today (weekly mysql database reorg/backup). I also took this opportunity to do what I mentioned yesterday: the remaining last bits of NAS-box shuffling. This included breaking a (currently unused) RAID5 array, putting in bigger drives, and rebuilding it all as a RAID10. However, I quickly came to find the command line utility doesn't allow me to delete single logical drives - it's all or nothing. Not wanting to destroy the root logical drive, I was forced to go into the RAID BIOS, which meant the server (and the web site) had to be brought down temporarily.

Temporarily became a couple hours - after doing the reconfigure the regular BIOS surreptitiously changed the boot drive sequence. This meant the system wasn't booting after that, leading to much confusion and panic (and many long, slow reboots) until I discovered this tricky, pointless switcheroo. Anyway, everything was fine after that and I brought up the new partition and started moving things back to where they are supposed to be.

This included the beta download directory, which uncovered a "bookkeeping" error on our part which meant beta downloads of the new client were broken for the past few days. Oops. That should be fixed now.

We turned on query logging bringing the project back up in order to do an inventory and determine any need for more/different indexes. I had to bounce the project again later in the afternoon to turn that logging back off (it eats up too much i/o to just leave on indefinitely). I also spent a lot of time helping the CASPER gang reconfigure their main web server. I'm also supposed to be working on donation drive stuff. Oh well. I'll get to it tomorrow.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Wow been a busy bee today!

Hopefully on your part things will run a little smoothly now.

Good work as always and if you have time in your busy schedule could you add some updated pictures of the server closet sometime? Not a big deal if you can't.

Will be a making a donation sometime soon.

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Yeppers...

The downloads for applications and verification files at Beta are back up and running. I was finally able to get started on Astropulse v5 testing about an hour ago.

Thanks Matt and crew ... keep up the good work!

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Cruiser
Gateway GT5692 L-f-S Edition
-Phenom X4 9650 CPU
-4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
-500GB SATA HD
-Vista x64 SP1
-BOINC 6.2.19 32-bit client
-SSE3 optimized 32-bit apps

... after doing the reconfigure the regular BIOS surreptitiously changed the boot drive sequence. ... pointless switcheroo. Anyway, everything was fine after that and I brought up the new partition and started moving things back to where they are supposed to be. ...

Most distros now UUID all the drives and use that to search for them. Your partitions get mounted regardless of wherever physically they might be. I usually LABEL each partition with something human understandable so that /etc/fstab stays human readable.

Avoids losing whatever was /dev/sda after a BIOS/system/OS upgrade!

Good luck,

Regards,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Most distros now UUID all the drives and use that to search for them. Your partitions get mounted regardless of wherever physically they might be...

True, and the UUIDs have been useful, but my problem yesterday was we weren't even getting to the distro because the motherboard was incorrectly choosing to boot the first disk on the wrong controller card - the UUIDs didn't come into play at that point in the boot process.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Matt,

On Friday, in One More Daemon, you posted:

In the meantime, the Astropulse splitters are disabled for a reason - Eric and Josh want to fully drain all those workunits before releasing another client.

Yet the AP splitters restarted at 7am Saturday when Vader was 'worked around', and have been running near enough ever since: there are 196,554 results out in the field according to the SSP.

So the queues are not - indeed, are very far from being - drained: yet we now have a Report in the Astropulse FAQ thread that the AP v5.00 application is being issued 'in the wild', and probably has been since before dawn this morning.

This is going to become a very, very frequently asked question before the night is out: could you let us know the project's official position, please?