Archive for the 'Work' Category

Hydra: Biotest’s New Setup

Let’s see.. what have I been up to?
Work has been hellish.. way too many problems with servers, then finally those get sorted out, and I have problems with the site in the new config. FINALLY got that sorted out (I think!, cross your fingers).. so I can take a breath.
I’ve got too much other stuff piling up.. need to get that taken care of. Then maybe I can relax for once and take a day to just veg or something.. I’m looking forward to it :)

I’m pretty excited about this new config for t-nation though. We’re using ultramonkey (which is a package based around the LVS project). It’s running on 10 of the super awesome rackable systems C1000 servers. Each of those is configured with 2 AMD Opteron 250s (64bit monsters!), 4Gb RAM, one 250Gb SATA drive, and dual gigabit ethernet. These are all plugged into two gigabit switches (from d-link). I’ve isolated cluster and LVS routing traffic to the internal network (eth1), leaving the external net for communicating back to the main apache server on titan. These are serving all of our (on average) 10-20k active sessions without breaking a sweat! load is rarely over .1! I did have to rewrite major portions of the code to handle such a large cluster efficiently, but the rewrite seems to be holding up well so far.
In the future I might move apache onto each cluster box too, depending on how much of a bottleneck it proves to be on titan. As for titan, now that he’s not running java, he seems to be very happy. He’s found his true calling as a mysql server.

Blogging with Gaim

So I’ve had this plugin installed for awhile, but I haven’t used it before. I’m posting this using gaim’s blogger plugin. Gaim is awesome btw, you should check it out!

In other news, been busy with work alot. Just finally released the rewrite of the store for my company. It uses all kinds of dynamic classes and javascript on the client end for a rich user experience. It’s probably the most we could really do with our simple store. This way it’s also way more manageable. You can see it in action by putting something in the cart on T-Nation

Still house hunting. I’ll be happy when we’ve found something, but it might be awhile still. ah well.

silence is golden…

except when it’s in a blog, then it’s just boring.

Haven’t had much to write lately, or time to write for that matter. Work’s been keeping me very busy. Hopefully we’ll (finally) launch this new store soon! That and lots of little changes add up.

Gentoo is awesome! I’m using it full time now instead of Fedora. Partly because it’s stable (woo!) although not for the reason I thought - I think there’s a problem with my wireless card drivers and ndiswrapper and the fglrx stuff? anyway when I have all of them loaded stuff crashes. When I’m using my standard eth card, everything is fine. Who knows.
Besides that, portage is awesome ;D

burnt day

I don’t know why, but today was a total burnout. I did manage to finish the promotions engine though, so yay. I’m not looking forward to bitching at the Blug member tonight, but it will be nice to leave the house :)

Sometimes looking at other people’s lists of accomplishments motivates me. Other times it really depresses me thinking I could never catch up. Today was the latter.

Current Events

Trying to organize the Berkshire Linux Expo is really hard when members don’t get off their butts and work. I’m pretty upset about one lug member’s failure to send the notes he took on to the list, like I ensured he knew was important during the meeting. Due to his failure to cooperate, we’ve now lost 2 valuable advertising weeks, and might have to push back the Expo. Moreover, far too much hinges on this one member’s follow through. He controls access to the building, and (as of last week) he is supposed to give one of the two vital presentations.

Certainly he won’t be secretary again. He’s consistently failed to perform his duties as required. I’m going to see how things work out tonight as to whether or not he’ll still do the presentation.

Finally got my server back on line, now with new hardware and a working serial cable connection! Also, powercycling now dosen’t leave the machine in an ‘off’ state, so it should be safe to leave there. Knock on wood though.

Work is going ok, trying to finish this new store by the end of the week, but the longish weekend in MD has thrown me off track. As of now, I need to finish the promotions engine, then do the standard actions to fill in the jsp pages. After that, I’ll get into testing. Hopefully that will go well (more knocking), then I’ll release it to dev. Matt can then test, then (again, assuming things work) we’ll finally publish the damn thing. I’ll be able to move onto more exciting things! woo! and we’ll have a working, maintainable, non-crashing store! yay.

Next (big thing) up on work agenda is learning actionscript. I’m looking forward to this, and I have a pretty neat idea of a project to get up to speed with - there was this game we played last week at game group that I think would be simple enough to implement. Its original title was ‘42′ but we subsequently renamed it ‘mondrian’ and then ‘gerrymander’. You’ll see why if I ever put it together :).

Anyway, enough procrastinating. Better hunker down back to work.