I racked that really big server and I am really impressed and pleased with it. It has quite a few quality of life features that weren't common the last time I was dealing with rack mount gear (which was almost always Dell): internal USB and even an internal SD card slot -- although I don't know if that works as a boot device.
This particular machine has onboard hardware RAID but also has an external hardware RAID in the only currently-usable PCIe slot. The RAID card as a 1GiB NVRAM pack installed, so writes are super-quick. I had forgotten that disks can be fast when you have a battery backed write cache ahead of them. Lovely.
I re-learned some libvirt/virsh stuff at an accelerated pace. Last time I did this, at iWeb, we used libvirt directly for a while before switching over to CloudStack as a management layer. Gotta say: CloudStack hasn't really moved on, it seems, since I last used it. Maybe that's because it's mature? But also maybe that's because it's legacy. Maybe those things mean the same thing 😀
I've also tried out SFTPGo which is a neat piece of open-source software that does most of what iWeb FTP did. (We had to write iWeb FTP, but now anyone could host basically the same thing for free, as long as they adhere to AGPLv3. Progress!).
I caught up with friends at the weekend so there's less to show on GitHub, but between migrating my OmniOS hosts to VMs and testing out live migration between machines in my home rack; I think I've done enough computering. (Also: we're playing House of Ashes from the Dark Pictures Anthology at home, so that's taking up most of the evening after dinner-time).
This is the week I go to Halifax! I'll update this to be in the past tense, after it happens.
Misc:
- Set up PostgreSQL replication for the first time in a long time.
- Just physical so far, logical is up next.
- Put blank Windows 10 installs on the ThinkCentres ahead of selling them.
- Added an RSS feed to thymesheet.
- Moved up to OmniOS r151050 -- exciting because it supports VirtIO SCSI. I'm not using the SCSI driver yet (still virtio-blk) but now that it's possible I'll probably move over.
- Theoretically this could allow hot-adding devices to a running OmniOS VM, although quite a few pieces need to be joined up for that to happen.
- Set up an IPFS node for pinning files.
- I'm interested in the tech, although it is a little cryptobro-adjacent.
- Especially in how it could be used for serving media attached to fediverse posts, instead of the current paradigm of copying them to every server's cache folders.