I woke up about 10.30am. lay in for a bit, put the telly on.

Got up a bit after 11am.

Tivo's getting very close to full. I haven't had time to archive any of the stuff it's getting filled with.

When I ran out of stuff to watch (other than the archiving stuff). I started going through it, because I have 2 copies of each episode (in case the sat stuffs up, more often than not).

I got through 2 episodes (4 recordings). I couldn't delete any/either of them, because each episode had a video blip or dropout in it, and the other one didn't, so eventually, I'll pull both copies across to the PC, and be able to get one good episode from 2 with errors, with a bit of copying/pasting.

Dad came in, to ask how the setup was going.

I said I was having issues with freeside.

(I'm mainly sick of the bloody thing just giving errors, or even worse, not giving errors, but not doing anything).

I showed him that it doesn't create accounts, there is no errors or anything.

After a few minutes, he went out again.

I really need to put a bit more effort into this stuff, I haven't touched it for a couple of days (although I have been busy doing other things, most of the time).

I fiddled around with it again.

Aha, it wasn't creating accounts because you had to manually set it to.

The documentation is very poor. Getting the thing working would be ok if it explained why you were doing something (and what to do), since it leaves big things out. I had to work out that you actually need to setup an "export", and then I found (eventually, after reading a bunch of support emails) that you then need to go and reedit your actual services, and tell them to use the export.

After some fiddling with name resolution, file permissions, directories existing etc, it eventually worked.

I decided to start getting the RAID working.

I finished building one of the other servers (hardware wise). It needed a video card, disks. I put them in.

I recompiled the kernel on the working box, for large memory support, so I could use all of the ~1.03GB of memory, instead of just the 960mb currently available. I rebooted, it failed to boot, with cryptic errors like "mounting an ext3 partition as ext2" uh oh, that's not good.

I then went back to my old known working kernel, to see if for some reason ext3 support had been left out of the one I just compiled, it didn't even boot properly back there, it claimed the lost+found directory didn't exist, created it, and then rebooted.

I wasn't feeling very good at this point, thinking it had just corrupted its filesystem, but it hadn't, and it booted up.

I checked the kernel, ext3 was a module for some reason. weird. I compiled it in, recompiled, rebooted, it came up ok. Good. I had a few issues with modules, but a make modules/make modules_install fixed that (issues with have modules available for things that were compiled into the kernel etc).

I copied my new working kernel, and the modules, over to the ide disk I used to run the machine before I got the SATA support working.

I shut the machine down, took the ide disk out, and rebooted, it came up fine.

I put the ide disk into the second server I had just finished building. Plugged it in, it wouldn't boot. I had to hold the power button to shut it off too. Hmm, something weird going on. I tried to boot it a few times, unplugged the disks in case they were stopping it (I've seen that before) but it made no difference.

I pulled the machine out, and started checking it. CPU is in, and in properly, then I checked the memory, hmm, seems a bit loose. I pushed the levers to pop the memory out, and the levers just moved, very easily, and the memory didn't.

Hmm, the memory was just sitting in the top of the slots, it wasn't even pushed in. Thanks Dad. I pushed the memory down, into the slot properly. Plugged the disks back in, plugged the machine back in, and it booted up.

Cool.

I tried to find my crossover cable, I could link the 2 machines together with their gigabit interfaces, which should make the file copy fast. I found the cable, eventually, it was stuffed. I doubt some unknown piece of flat ribbon cable that I changed into a crossover by cutting and resoldering wires is going to run at gigabit speeds anyway. I dug out some cat6, rj45s, crimped up a corssover cable.

When I eventually worked out which was the gigabit interface on the mobo, plugged them together, and brought the interfaces up, they automatically negotiated gigabit, and all the required settings, that was cool.

I grabbed the raid tools, read how to set up raid, and went about doing it. Oops, I did it wrong.. I put the disks into a raid, but you are supposed to do it with partitions. It wasn't too bad though, I found I could partition the raid, of the raw disks, and it passed the partitioning to each of the disks in the raid, so it saved me having to partition both of them manually.

I stopped the raid, edited the raid file, to add in the new raids, made them all up. That took a while, I started formatting them while I waited.

I started copying the files across with scp, but I forgot that it destroys symbolic links. Hmm, how to copy the files with trashing the links.. I put samba on both the machines, tried copying the files across, that didn't really work either. I think the symlinks were working, but there were some filenames (like with "*" in them) that samba chucked a wobbly about when I tried to copy them.

I found details of how to use tar across a network link. Good, I knew you could do this (I used to do it when I was looking after the servers when I worked for CSC), but I couldn't remember how. I chained tar through an ssh link, untarring it on the other side, but the issue here is that I couldn't specify the directory on the other end, so it was untarring in /root.

I changed the home directory in /etc/passwd, so root's home dir is /mnt/raid, so the files untar in the right place.

That works, but I though the symlinks were still failing.

I killed the copy, and when I looked, the links were there, and right. What's going on here?

I kicked the copy off again (this must be about the 6th time I've copied the whole thing across).

It's just finished, complaining of a couple of errors. D'oh. Oh well, at least it didn't try to copy the samba mounted directory back over into itself again, that would have been clever.

This stuff is taking far too long.

I started working on this about 1pm, so far all I've achieved is getting freeside to create accounts, and setting a soft raid, and copying the machine into it.

I haven't even configured it to boot off the raid yet, that's the next bit of fun.

Once I get that going, I have to put the ide disk back in the first machine, rebuild it as raid, and copy all the files back again. There must be a better way. Maybe I can partition the second unused disk the same as the one I'm using, and then build it as a raid, and have it copy the running disk over the blank one.