I finished sorting the RAID on the second machine last night.

I did a few minutes on the first machine, and decided to leave it.

I found junkyard wars was on, so I went to bed, and watched that. It finished, and I went to put an episode of The Simpsons on, but the tivo mucked up (must have been up for too long) and instead of bringing up the details of the recording, it just sat there with a blank overlay screen.

I turned the tv/amp off, but as happens sometimes, the tv came back on, on to one of the normal channels, and Rage was on.

I turned the amp back on, put the sleep timer on the tv, and lay down listening to music.

The one feature the tivo lacks is a sleep timer. More than once I've wanted to go to sleep with a music channel on or something, but there's no way that I can find to do it (unless I put the audio into the tv, and then into the amp, and I could use the tv's sleep timer).

I got up about 11am.

I went back to work on the machines.

I built a RAID on the second empty disk in the first machine, then I mounted all the partitions, copied all the data over.

I swapped the second disk with the first, so it would try to boot off the RAID. it failed. Weird problems with e2fsck failing.

I mucked around with lilo, and forced it to boot off the non raid disk, then I went about trying to fix the RAID, I had to resize the partitions so that e2fsck wouldn't fail. Weird, I didn't have to do that with the other raid I setup.

I managed to get it all working off the raid, booting without issue.

I then trashed the partitions on the other disk, and tried to add them to the raid.

It didn't work. It recognised the partitions as being part of the array, but the stats didn't update properly, and it thought each mirror still only had 1 disk in it.

I thought maybe I had to raidstop and raidstart to fix it. When I tried to raidstart the /usr mount, I discovered I hadn't edited the raidtab file. I'd added the partitions, but I hadn't changed it to say I had 2 disks instead of 1. I couldn't start /usr back up.

Vi (and every other editor) lives in /usr, so I couldn't edit the file to fix it.

I ended up moving the raidtab, and writing a new one manually using cat. Then I was able to restart /usr, use vi, and fix the original file.

Restarting the raid md devices didn't help.

Rebooting didn't help.

I bit the bullet, pulled the IDE disk out of the other machine again, and put it back in this one.

I repartitioned it, backed up all the data on to the ide disk, in preparation for rebuilding all the raid partitions.

I got all the data backed up. I rebooted off the raid, and redid all the mkraids.

It did what it should have done when I added the extra partitions.. it synced the new partitions with the old ones, and didn't kill anything. Hmm. I don't know why it didn't work like this when I added the partitions.

I mucked around, fixed all the booting again, rebooted off the raid. It came up without issue.

I took a break at this point (about 6pm) and watched a bit of tv.

At some point a little bit earlier while I was mucking around with raid, my brother came in, and gave me an easter egg. I've eaten the whole thing already :-)

After an hour or so, I went back, and got the machine to operate as a transparent proxy, this took a while, and a bit of fiddling around.

I had to rebuild the kernel, when I tried to put a NAT rule in (for redirection for the proxy), it wouldn't go in.

I found I'd left a lot of networking stuff out that I needed, like NAT support. I rebuilt the kernel, and the new modules, then I loaded the new modules in (without rebooting, I wonder what will happen), I was able to put the redirection rule in.

As soon as I tried to access the web, which would be redirected to squid, the kernel crashed.

I rebooted, the machine came up fine, but it rebuilt all the RAID devices, this seemed weird.

After getting the rule in place properly, with the correct interface set (and after getting the second server back on the LAN) I managed to get it all configured properly, and tested it working.

I'm not sure what there is left to do now.

I need to write/find/steal some backup scripts, to get the live customer database moved across to the backup server each night, and I need to get all the user's home directories moved to the other server daily.

I need to get quota in place to, and properly configure the mailserver, get some spam control in.

I really need to find out the live IPs I'll be using, so I can start configuring things properly, working out the firewall rules I need.

Oh yeah, my mate I go to dinner with called me earlier, he wanted to know if I was still going up for the barbeque tomorrow, that's probably a good idea. He was trying to fix the next door neighbour's computer, it had lots of ads and spayware on it. I think he must have fixed it up.

It's nearly 2am. I'm going to bed. I've drunk all the alcohol in the place, I'll have to get more while I'm out tomorrow.