Once again we had a long period of rather stable uptime and thus little drama and stuff to report about. We've also been quite busy preparing for the big move to the colocation facility next week! I posted about this on the front page already, but brace for a long 3-day outage starting on Monday during which we'll unrack most of our servers, schlep them to the colo, hook them up, then battle a hundred expected network issues, and then a hundred unexpected network issues. Brace for unreachable servers and web sites! (I'll put up some stub web sites best I can.)

Earlier this week we already brought one test server down there and hooked it up, and we've been getting our feet wet with the various remote connectivity and network managements tricks and tools. Fun stuff!

So I have little to report at the moment except I'll see y'all on the other side, hopefully with improved uptime and network bandwidth! And unless I forget to take nicer pictures on Monday during the big move, here's one last iPhone 3GS version of the server closet taken a few minutes ago...



- 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

hopefully with improved uptime and network bandwidth!

*fingers crossed*

Thanks for the update.

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Grant
Darwin NT

And Happy Easter!

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Thanks for that Matt, Happy Easter, and Good Luck for next week.

Claggy

Make sure you take good photos before you pull it apart. For sure more than one cable will lose its tag!

See you on the flip side.

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As for cable arrangement, there's a really simple trick that I've used for multiple pieces of equipment that's dirt cheap and very intuitive.

Electrical tape comes in lots of different colors, is strong enough to bundle cables quite nicely, can be written on with most ball point pens, holds ink decently if you let it dry a few seconds before touching, and won't damage cables.

So you remove cables from your machines, using color coding to mark them, and write port numbers and connection data on the color coding tape. Each cable will have a tape marking at each end, indicating both connections.

Tag creation is pretty easy too. Write on the roll of tape at the end of the roll, then fold over the tape so that it adheres to itself along the entire length of the text, then pull off another two inches of tape and tear it off. Wrap the sticky side of the tape onto the wire half a dozen times.

Put your color coded tape on the server closet boxes as well, and record the colors just in case.

That way you can throw all your cables into a box and as you are pulling them out, you know immediately what boxes connected together with the cable you pull out by color coding.

Being visual creatures by nature, this sort of color based labeling works extremely well for us. Even for color blind folks, provided the color blind person chooses the tape colors that contrast with each other despite their color blindness.

The only thing to worry about - choose tape colors that you can read ink on...

If you have more boxes than tape colors, use two tape colors for each cable, but you only have to create tags with one of the colors.

For a rough estimate of how much tape you will need, I always counted five inches of tape per cable end, or 10 inches per cable. You should need significantly less than that, but you can never have enough electrical tape, and a couple rolls almost always end up walking off somewhere.

I am always amazed about how much you do with so little gear. Best wishes and hope you don't have to pull any all nighters getting it up and running on the flip side.

John

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Enjoy your Easter weekend before you guys dive in to the big project!

And there were a couple of questions asked I believe in NC that I am not sure were answered.

I had wondered if there will still be a Cricket graph available that will reflect and monitor just Seti traffic.

And Richard Haselgrove had asked if the server IP addresses will remain the same as currently.

Thanks if you have the time and know the answers....

Meow.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Even if the changes are all positive, change is stressful. May it go smoothly and permit your energies to be better used.

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Janice

Enjoy your Easter weekend before you guys dive in to the big project!

And there were a couple of questions asked I believe in NC that I am not sure were answered.

I had wondered if there will still be a Cricket graph available that will reflect and monitor just Seti traffic.

And Richard Haselgrove had asked if the server IP addresses will remain the same as currently.

Thanks if you have the time and know the answers....

Meow.

I was thinking that myself the other day but decided not to voice my questions. Mostly it was aimed for those who still use the HOSTS file to pick just one download server. I used to do that, but have found that it really doesn't make a difference now that the window scaling/timestamps issue was discovered.

I'm pretty curious to see what the new cricket graph will look like. See if for the first few hours after coming back if we can max gigabit out. :)

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Enjoy your Easter weekend before you guys dive in to the big project!

And there were a couple of questions asked I believe in NC that I am not sure were answered.

I had wondered if there will still be a Cricket graph available that will reflect and monitor just Seti traffic.

And Richard Haselgrove had asked if the server IP addresses will remain the same as currently.

Thanks if you have the time and know the answers....

Meow.

I was thinking that myself the other day but decided not to voice my questions. Mostly it was aimed for those who still use the HOSTS file to pick just one download server. I used to do that, but have found that it really doesn't make a difference now that the window scaling/timestamps issue was discovered.

I'm pretty curious to see what the new cricket graph will look like. See if for the first few hours after coming back if we can max gigabit out. :)

Not sure if we shall have a dedicated Cricket graph for Seti or what the link will be if we do.
And nobody has said Seti will have access to a Gig of bandwidth yet. That remains to be seen.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

There was a time when such a footprint was not enough for only ONE server with an internal 64MB RAM, flanked by a same sized IOP unit and NOT including two separate washing machine sized cabinets with each a huge 80MB HD in it (67 formatted)... Memories...

Wish you a smooth transition and transfer!

Ah, remember ...


Good luck guys.

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Thanks for the heads-up Matt !
Good luck for the move !
All the members of the french team {BDC} have their fingers crossed ! :)
We look forward to seeing what the new facility will...

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Thank you for this big job !
Happy Easter.

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Grade : Illusionniste

Hello !!

thank you for your job and time for us!

if I can help you I have an old fan that I don't use...

;)

Thank you again !

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Grade : KGB

Thank you and good luck !

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May the Force be with you !!

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Let me be the first to say, congrats on bringing the project back up smoothly and ahead of schedule!

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

The wu download rate is...awesome!

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