Tollef Fog Heen's blog

This is my last day at Hardware.no this summer. It feels a bit weird, going back to university again after this long. It feels like a long time, even though it has just been about two months. I've been working a lot on registrar stuff, and I hope it will end up going the right way. NORID's not too happy, which I kindof understand, and cleaning up after other's not any fun, but it has to be done.

In addition, I've fixed numerous small items on the servers, such as gotten a working apt repository, fixed the backup a few times, worked on moving the servers from one hosting centre to another and so on. It has been quite eventful.

I'm looking forward to getting back to Trondheim and my studies, and also seeing Karianne again, it being about a week since we saw each other last time.

Yesterday and today has mostly been chaotic. Lots of small things to be taken care of, including more registrar work. Most of that should now be up-to-date, and I hope to keep it that way. Ate shrimps by the dockside today, which was nice.

We were going to move all the servers from our old ISP to a new one, and in order to prepare a bit for all eventualities, we moved a single server on Thursday. It was a good experience, and we discovered stuff like the fact that the network was broken. Or rather, it wasn't up yet. One of the people from the network provider was there and we chatted a bit before deciding on we would leave the server in the rack and he'd call me if he had any problems getting the network up and running. It was up sometime on Friday, so that was nice.

Friday, we ran about finding missing pieces we needed for the move. In addition, I got some more registrar work done. An SSL certificate was ordered but it got hung up somewhere in Thawte's system.

Monday, we ran even more about, this time actually finding the parts we needed. The servers were shut down at 2200, we finished getting them out of the rack and into the trunk of Amund's car a little after 2400. Getting the servers into the new rack didn't take too much time, but configuring everything correctly took a while. We had some issues with Apache's virtual hosts and DNS, but it got worked out. I also managed to misconfigure the mail server (or rather, its DNS entry) somewhat, so the route ended up somewhere in Italy. We finished at about 0730, and even though everything wasn't triple checked, we were so tired that going home was the best option.

As I came into work at 1300 today, Tuesday, I got a pile of stuff thrown onto me: the mail server didn't work properly, a few hosts were misconfigured and so on. Fixed this and sent in the two change requests to NORID so we ended up with three DNS servers operational again.

Had some food with Anders and Amund at Peppes before fixing tying up some loose threads. Ended up discussing my fan control project with Amund before going home.

Most of today was spent helping webdeal with one of their Opteron servers. They are more used to Intel hardware and *BSD, while said machine runs Linux. They have had some performance problems with another one, so I helped them tune this one a bit, and it ended up with fairly nice performance.

After some food, I went to the server room and continued to work on the server, now reinstalling it with Debian (we had done the tests in a Debian chroot inside a Mandrake installation, since that was the CD I had available). Unfortunately, I had to cross-install using the already existing installation as the Woody CD didn't find the RAID controller. It worked fairly well, but during this process the whole circuit breaker decided that the rack had overloaded it, so it threw itself and the whole rack went quite silent quite fast. After a few phone calls and running about, I managed to get it all running again, just a few systems needed a manual fsck.

Got the system installed and left the server room, tired but happy.

This hasn't been the most productive of days, I've been doing a little registrar work and cleanups, but not very much. A bit tired after last night. Apart from the registrar work, I've written a draft requirements spec for a project, which will be quite interesting once it goes live.

Today was just spent doing registrar work. Tedious work where you have to get it exactly right, else you get the application refused (though, with an explanation). All the domains we administer should now be in order, but I believe I'll need at least another day to clean out the last small problems. We are going to change ISP in a few weeks, which means lots of work if the DNS isn't set up properly. (Or rather, it means even more lots of work if the DNS isn't set up properly.)

As always, we discussed around a bit and I begun helping out another guy with a broken file system, but I didn't get around to actually fixing it, so I'll have to look into that tomorrow or so.

Friday, I managed to actually get some work done. Anders brought back one of the servers from the server room on Thursday, and the reason for it being broken was one of the coolers having come loose. The cpu was fairly burnt, and after a short while, I gave up getting it to work. Left work early to meet up with Karianne.

Monday, I've been mostly in a board meeting. We discussed for some hours, slowly getting through the list of items we were to process. Due to an oversight, we had to cut the meeting short, so we'll continue on Wednesday. Will be fun, I guess..

The rest of the day, I spent doing registrar stuff, going through the huge pile of mess that is our current set of domains. It'll be good once it's cleaned up, but right now, it's a huge pile of work, just waiting for me to go through it tomorrow.

Yesterday, I was mostly working on domain and registrar stuff. Fairly simple stuff, but it takes a lot of work to get everything working properly and the infrastructure set up. It seems like most parts are coming to the right place, even though it feels like I'm doing nothing at work for the time being. I think I'm fairly efficient, but most of my work goes into making others be able to get their work done, which is a good thing, but it's still fairly frustrating for me, as it feels bad getting paid for doing "nothing".

Today, I started out with a general assembly in Opera Software. Then, I got to work; I nearly got into the office before I had other work to do and ended up in some discussion or another. We had a small emergency when Anders plugged a computer into the non-crossed uplink port on the switch as well as the uplink itself. Everything died and we used about thirty minutes to track down the problem. Then, it was lunch, and after that, Stein Magnus came in and we went out and discussed some work he'll be doing for us this summer.

Got back in, then headed off for the server room where we moved a few computers out of one of the racks and into the next one. Went fairly ok. I also debugged why mju (actually, she's called "my", since that's the Norwegian spelling) didn't seem to come up properly after a boot. It seems like 2.4 and 2.6 number the network interfaces differently. Anders picked up alfa and took a taxi back to the office while I headed off for the NUUG barbecue, which was nice.

I've been meaning to blog about what I've been doing each day at work, since it will make my life a lot better at the end of the weeks and end of the summer. Of course, I haven't done so far, but I'm trying to start now.

Last Friday was my first day of work this summer. Most of the day was spent trying to set myself up, getting DHCP working, saying "Hi" to everybody and so on.

Yesterday, Monday, was spent in meetings. We met about what we're going to do this summer, the future direction of the company and so on, and so on. Not too much fun, but still fairly needed to do. We're going to have both a board meeting and a shareholder's meeting the first Monday.

Today, we got access cards to the new server room, which was good. Talked a bit with everybody, and we have a huge bunch of work to do, both work to be done, and it also seems like there's a shadow hanging over us, something which we have to fix and talk about. It sucks and will take time, but it's absolutely necessary.

Worked a bit on registrar stuff as well, which was good to get started on. There's a bunch of work there as well, and a nice, big backlog to start with. Will be fun tomorrow.

Had a drift meeting on IRC where we discussed the crack of epsilon last week. Good to have everybody catch up. After dinner, I upgraded Advertpro and run the evil localhost proxy hack on the forum, which should speed it up somewhat. Also fixed up various other small stuff. Tired now. Sleep.