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

[Seth Woodworth]

I configured Laptopgiving.org to redirect to the ways-to-give page on
l.o when I was giving control of the domain.  I don't know why this
would revert, unless we changed the way we handle the dns or IP of the
machine it was pointing to (v. likely).

I'll look into it.

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Sameer Verma<sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Olpc-sysadmin mailing list
>> Olpc-sysadmin at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sysadmin
>
>
> 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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>