all things cbl

I had ordered two new servers (non-RAID, diskless) to replace two servers that like to crash and reboot whenever they darn well please. (see previous post).

Early this morning (12am to 1.30am) I swapped them out. The first server was ‘Zahara’, one of our mailbox storage servers. It’s where 1/4 of our mailboxes reside. A quick RAID card change, and disk swap and it was back up. No issues.

The second server was ‘Cobre’, our CPanel hosting server. This one was running an older (3ware 8506) RAID card, and I wanted to upgrade to a newer (3ware 9500S) RAID card to get better everything. Luckily for me 3ware released a ‘convert.exe’ file that will convert your old 8500 series RAID arrays into 9500/9550SX arrays. All it took was downloading the convert.exe to a floppy, making a boot floppy, and rebooting the box (before I swapped chassis and RAID cards) and running ‘convert *’. It marked the RAID array as workable on the new 9500 card. Yeah, I know. Too technical. But it was pretty amazing that it worked. I had tried it earlier at the office to make sure it would save my data, and it did.. but there’s always that chance that it might not work and then there goes my morning.. rebuilding a server from backups. Ugh.

Anywho.. after I ran the convert.exe script, I swapped the 4 drives into the new server, powered it up and all was good. Until it kernel panicked. Yeah, I know. It sucked. Sucked hard. I was worried that it’d still panic on startup each time. So, reboot into single-user-mode, fsck my drives, did a ‘make installworld’. I had not done that since installing my new kernel with support for the new RAID card. After that, another reboot and all came up. Well.. except my big Catalyst 6513 had some weird ARP issues with the IPs that the cpanel server was asking for. It just didnt end, really. Well.. it did.. around 1.30am. After a fun hour and a half in a cold room working with hardware.

Sometimes I just want to be a chef.