All entries for December 2007

An Operating System Joke…

Writing about web page http://www.tensionnot.com/jokes/operating_systems_and_airlines

Ohhhh the amusement…

Christopher Hinds : 21 Dec 2007 09:19 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Stress: A definition

Stress is the feeling of mental confusion arising when the mind over-rules the body which badly wants to beat the crap out of some asshole who REALLY deserves it.

Seen on a toolbox at work

Christopher Hinds : 10 Dec 2007 21:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Servers and support

I’ve been toying with Virtual computers using both Microsoft Virtual PC and VMWare Fusion for a couple of years now, I’ve even experimented with VMWare Server and each time it’s allowed me to test out a scenario that I wanted to look at, be it learning MS Exchange 2003 or testing Windows Server 2008. I’ve play Solaris, Fedora Core and more as virtual machines and each time it’s worked perfectly reliably. Herein lies my problem though, I have a business with a server, it’s fairly reliable but it does tend to go down now and then due to the extreme number of services running on one box.

It’s a Dell PowerEdge SC420 with 1.5GB of RAM, a 2.66GHz Celeron process, Gigabit Ethernet, a brace of Western Digital 160Gb Hard Drives in RAID-1 and a Seagate STT3401A tape drive. Currently it runs Windows Small Business Server 2003 SP2 having started life as SBS2003 just after its launch. The network has a few clients, a maximum of 3 laptops, 5 desktops and a Mac but generally only a couple of people hitting it at a time despite the number of machines.

What this means is the server runs in peaks and troughs and it kind of is a “do everything” box and that means at times it’s quite slow and prone to falling over. A number of tasks that it was doing to start with it no longer performs to the same extent and now half the features of SBS2003 are redundant but still consuming power.

At present it’s running Exchange, Sharepoint (unused), IIS/Internal Website, public site and Sharepoint, SBS Remote Access Services (never used, RDP works faster), DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Print Serving, Tape Backups, File Serving and more. In short if that box dies the whole network and all who sail in it die with it. Thus I have a devious plan to reduce the load and hopefully keep this old box ticking on for a good while yet.

1. Email is being offloaded to 1&1 hosting, this is a good thing as due to the reliability of the ADSL link to the property it can be unpredictable. If it’s sufficient for the business owner I see no reason to keep an Exchange server running to duplicate another service. For myself I would always want me email internally either on a Mac or Exchange server but in this case I believe it would be better outsourced.
2. File storage is moving off to a Buffalo LinkStation Network Attached storage unit which has two 250Gb drives in RAID-1
3. SBS Server is departing, it’s a good Swiss Army knife but it’s harder to tweak than plain old Windows 2003 Server.
4. The internal website is never used so that’s going, the external website is being moved to 1&1 hosting along with the email.

That’s not enough though, because the main problem I have with the Server is that it’s the sole point into the network. All the remote admin is done using that server. If the server dies then you are screwed and have to make a site visit, ok when you live 35 miles from the site, more challenging when you’re over 4000 miles away. So my plan is to relieve things a little further. Unfortunately the Server was bought before I knew much about remote administration, that means unlike my current server love, the HP DL range, there isn’t an integrated lights out controller. So my plan is to make things better by hosting the Windows 2003 Server in a VMWare Virtual Machine running on a variety of Linux.

As the server will no longer be holding critical data I’ll be taking the drives out of RAID-1 and making them both discrete drives. The Linux machine, with 512mb of RAM at its disposal will handle

• DHCP
• Tape Backups
• VMWare Server hosting
• Remote access via VNC

Meanwhile with the balance of the RAM will be allocated to the Windows 2003 SP2 server running

• Active Directory
• DNS
• Print Serving
• RDP
• System Center Essentials 2007 network management

The virtual machine will start from the local hard drive of the Server, but every night will duplicate to the NAS for safety, so that any other machine on the network can take up running the server at a moments notice should the Windows server die. Likewise a backup of the Linux server will be provided too – making it easy to bring back the DHCP server.

In order to do the migration I plan to do a P2V migration of the current server and keep that running on another box temporarily while rebuilding the actual server as a Linux machine, then I will migrate a single client from the SBS domain to the new domain. Thus in theory 0 network outage, more redundancy and more efficient use of the resources. There are some questions though…

1. Which blend of Linux… I’m tempted to try Ubuntu or Fedora Core?
2. When will I get the time to do the change over?
3. Any precautions anyone would take?

Opinions welcome…

Christopher Hinds : 02 Dec 2007 19:17 |  Tags: Computers Linuc Vmware |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem