Upgrades
Posted on August 24, 2007
Upgrading my PC didn’t work out so well. I kept having an error with x11-common, but I think it’s fixed because the PC is updating beyond what it had done over the past few days. In the meantime, I’m writing this from my laptop. I want to get the PC going so I can watch a movie on the widescreen. :-)
The server for work came in today. I was hoping it would be in around 10:00 or so, but it didn’t get delivered until almost 2:00, and I had to leave at 3:30 because of overtime. Overtime requires prior approval, and this wasn’t an emergency. It’s a Dell PowerEdge 2950 rack-mount server with a 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Quad-core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, 3 SCSI hard drives of 146 GB each arranged in a RAID array, and two power supplies. The power supplies and hard drives are hot-swappable meaning the can be removed and replaced while the computer is running. It’s running Windows Server 2003 R2. I couldn’t help but wonder how fast it would do some of my Blender ray-traced models ;-) Since it came in late in the day, I didn’t get a chance to get it fully up-and-running the way it should be. I installed the updates and the anti-virus and got it running on the net, but that was about it. In addition to the two CPU’s there are four powerful fans inside the case. Turning it on, it seemed to roar to life, almost literally. The fans almost drowned out the sound of the air conditioner in my office, which isn’t the quietest thing in the world.
Since my PC was conked out and I didn’t want to bother with it until the weekend, I decided to read up a bit on Windows Server 2003. A week or so ago I bought a book called Windows Server 2003 Inside Out from Microsoft Press, which is a very thick tome that I thought might do me some good. I’ve mainly been reading about preparing and installing Win 2k3, which I probably could have skipped, but it did give me some insights into planning an IT infrastructure. One of the big things I will be concentrating on is backups and recovery management. Even though the server has some redundancy built in, such as RAID and dual power supplies, I don’t like the idea of relying on one computer to hold all that information. If the building got hit by a tornado, there would be no way to recover the data. Backing up the information to a computer at another site alleviates this potential problem. A couple of other LSP’s I know make tape backups of their servers every week and take the tapes off site. I figured losing a week’s worth of data would be difficult, but accpetable in certain circumstances. However, I also realized I could setup a PC with extra hard drives to act as a backup server, and I could put the PC in another location off-campus. Doing it this way, I figured I could hack together a script to make backups daily. However, Win 2k3 has a program called Volume Shadow Copy which does this and more. It takes “snapshots: of the server at set times. If something happens and data it lost, it can be recovered from a previous snapshot, even one that was taken weeks ago. It works a bit like System Restore. Anyway, I will be working on that in the near future.
In other news, I had my first class this week for “Second Language Acquisition,” and I already have a five page paper due by next week. I guess grad students do work harder.
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- “Web technology is social.”
- Unable to map network drive
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