[Olpc-sysadmin] Machine status of OWL and proposed reconfiguration

[Sameer Verma]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Ed McNierney <ed at laptop.org> wrote:

> Folks -
>
> If anyone is interested in following up on the wiki work being done to
> accurately document our physical servers, virtual machines, DNS names,
> services, and the connections/relationships among them it would be
> immensely valuable to OLPC.  Even getting a firm answer to questions
> like "on what hardware is the www.laptop.org site hosted?" is not
> easy, and the wiki documentation is sometimes misleading or simply
> wrong.
>
> I am trying to tackle a tiny piece of that puzzle by understanding OWL
> well enough to reconfigure it.  Here's the motivation.  Our large,
> production servers seem to be generally configured with RAID 5
> arrays.  This is not an especially good choice for database storage,
> especially with concurrent writes and reads, and I've learned that our
> wiki generates a surprising amount of database updates and deletions.
> Our wiki server itself (separate from squid and download links to
> crank) is having performance problems under load.  In addition, we
> have several MySQL instances floating about.  I would like to set up
> one, solid, well-designed and well-documented MySQL server machine,
> and migrate the wiki databases to it.
>
> OWL is both a good physical candidate and lightly used.  It is
> configured as a RAID 5 array and I would like to reconfigure it (or at
> least part of it) as a RAID 10 array for database storage.  This is a
> much better performance choice, and even with a RAID 10 config the 8
> 750 GB drives in that machine will give us 4 TB of storage.  Since
> that will blow away everything on the machine, I'd like to move
> carefully.
>
> As far as I can tell, there are basically three things happening on
> OWL.  Please take a moment to review these and let me know if I'm
> missing or misunderstanding something.
>
> 1. There is a virtual machine called TEST and it appears to be the
> machine that serves http://test.laptop.org.  That site seems to serve
> only the page "It doesn't works!".  I cannot log in to this VM and
> cannot learn anything else about it.
>
> 2. There is a virtual machine called WWW2 that was alleged to be (see
> http://vig.laptop.org/wiki/index.php/Machine:www2)
>  the machine hosting www.laptop.org, but it's not.  I have suspended
> this VM and I can't figure out what it does.  I cannot log into it, as
> I don't know its IP address, DNS name, or whether I have any account
> on it at all.
>
> 3. There are 40 GB of backup files in the directory /home/sugarbackup/
> backup/sunjammer and more are added daily.  There is no documentation
> whatsoever on the internal wiki or the VIG wiki about these files,
> this directory, or what is supposed to be happening here.
>
> The documentation at http://laptop.org/internalwiki/index.php/Machine:owl
>  claims this machine hosts VMs named wwwseth and vm_test, but it
> doesn't.  The VM test seems to slightly resemble the machine vm_test
> documented at http://vig.laptop.org/wiki/index.php/Machine:vm_test but
> it's not the same.
>
> PLEASE look over this information and - especially if you know
> anything about 1, 2, or 3 above  - let me know what you know.  It
> seems to be that #1 and #2 are indeed unimportant and can just go
> away.  I'm not sure about #3, but no one seems to have written
> anything down about it so I can't tell.
>
> If you have thoughts on the topic of creating an optimized MySQL
> server machine (see http://laptop.org/internalwiki/index.php/
> Machine:owl for the hardware specs) or on the proposal to create a
> single MySQL server to serve our various needs, I would appreciate
> hearing them.  Thanks!
>
>        - Ed
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> Olpc-sysadmin at lists.laptop.org
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>


Speaking of domains, http://laptopgiving.org/ is parked with GoDaddy, but
still shows up on the letter from NN, shipped with the XO (I just got one
replacement XO today and noticed it says www.laptopgiving.org/start in the
letter). Are we going to keep this domain?

Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
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