Hills and Valleys (Feb 10 2011)

First the good news. I have thumper all configured and ready to roll as our mega file server. In fact it's already rolling. Note this isn't a public facing server, but will indirectly help the various public services in many ways, including making the sysadmins working on SETI@home/BOINC a lot happier in general. Lots of really fast disk storage for database backups, raw data transfer buffers, doesn't randomly reboot itself like our current home account server, etc.

Mmmkay. Now the less good news. Looks like gowron is having some fundamental RAID issues. The issues has been whittled down to one RAID1 pair tagged as degraded that won't rebuild no matter what we do. THe guys at Overland have been super helpful - but this is actually an old SnapAppliance (not a box that Overland sells) and running a (very) old version of the OS. So it's looking like our best bet to move forward is to upgrade the OS on the thing. However to do so we need to copy the workunits on the system (about 2 terabyte's worth) elsewhere temporarily. How about... thumper! That copy process is happening now.

Meanwhile, we'll be off for the foreseeable future. Like at least until next week, I imagine. Bummer.

- 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

(...)
Meanwhile, we'll be off for the foreseeable future. Like at least until next week, I imagine. Bummer.

- Matt

Thanks for the update Matt, well done on getting thumper up and running, good luck on getting gowron running properly,

Claggy

As they say, the next work unit in the splitter has ET on it.

Thanks for the update. Dang my cache will be full of other projects by then and everything will go into EDF mode.

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Can't we do better then that. About 6 hours to copy the data one way. You should not have to copy it back as it shouldn't be distroyed.

Thank you Matt! It seems like we will be in a much stronger position once the OS is upgraded and the problems fixed. This sounds like a good solid fix that will get rid of a long standing problem.

Steve
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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Dang my cache will be full of other projects by then and everything will go into EDF mode.

It's a shame to hear that that we will be down until next week, but if it has to be then it has to be. However, if as a by-product, Thumper is now helping to keep SETI@home/BOINC sysadmins happy, a daunting task at any time, then that is worth a few brownie points on its own!

I don't know about anyone else, but until fairly recently I thought the sum total of Seti's kit was as listed on the server page. I didn't realise there were other non-public facing machines like Gowron behind the scenes. Clearly the Seti project is even more complicated to Admin than I had previously thought.

Could we have a similar list of backroom kit, saying what they are and what they do?
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Damsel Rescuer, Uli Devotee, Julie Supporter, ES99 Admirer,
Raccoon Friend, Anniet fan, UAV Free Zone, PETA, IFAW

explains the lack of reporting i had. out of WU on my pc but the work server still has a day or so....
Will do some rosetta while you get things back up.
Will be here when you get things back up.

take your time and thanks for the update.


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It's a shame to hear that that we will be down until next week, but if it has to be then it has to be. However, if as a by-product, Thumper is now helping to keep SETI@home/BOINC sysadmins happy, a daunting task at any time, then that is worth a few brownie points on its own!

I don't know about anyone else, but until fairly recently I thought the sum total of Seti's kit was as listed on the server page. I didn't realise there were other non-public facing machines like Gowron behind the scenes. Clearly the Seti project is even more complicated to Admin than I had previously thought.

Could we have a similar list of backroom kit, saying what they are and what they do?

I have a feeling that your download servers are gonna be slammed the second they come back up. I have over 2100 tasks ready to be returned on all my computers combined and my RAC is a pittance compared to the big boys, who will have many many times more. I hope that doesn't crash everything again. I'm sure y'all are clever enough to prevent that though.

As always, thanks for all that you mighty admins do to keep things up and running and I'll be here ready to crunch more tasks when you get everything back online. :)

Also, have a nice weekend!
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-baron_iv
Proud member of:

I can top all of ya - I've got one computer with 4 down projects! (out of 7...) CDPN, MilkyWay, SETI, and SETBeta are all either down, or giving me the random "Servers not available" (CDPN)
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