A busy weekend filled with being availab ... / 2008-11-24

A busy weekend filled with being available to fix the network for Nwerc 2008. But the network decided to behave and most of the work was just in making all the computers return to their normal state as soon as the competition was over. Funny how thoroughly re-imaging all the systems helps availability: this morning we have a 100% availability of student computers. That does not happen very often: 86 computers with an issue where they shutdown their network card from time to time will usually show a few missing ones.

The other thing I managed to find some time for was work on the new home server greenblatt. In the previous week I spent some evenings migrating all my nameservices to a new configuration where the old homeserver is primary and I duplicated this structure to greenblatt so this stuff will keep running once I swap systems. In the weekend I copied and tested all the configs for web sites running at home such as webcam.idefix.net. Lots of little details show up in the configs which don't work out of the box. I do use the ubuntu package for apache2 now because everything I want in a webserver is available in the package. And trying to squeeze the last bit of optimization from it is not necessary with gigahertzes plenty and upstream bandwidth probably the first bottleneck.