Facilitating

So it looks like we’ll be moving to CoSentry up north in KC near the airport for our new hosting facility, since the location we are at now will be closing down in a few months. That means as the newly appointed sysadmin I also am plotting out the move to the new hosting facility. I’ve been involved in our move from Boston to Sprint in south KC and then from Sprint to Switch and Data ( I was the first guy on the scene pulling wiring and taking down servers in that move) this time I’m ultimately responsible though and the man who’s ass it is if things don’t go well. I’m getting a little nervous about the whole thing but I’m also looking forward to it. If my database migration for MySQL4.1 to MySQL5.0 this weekend was any indication of how things will go, then the gods are smiling upon me.

I’ve put a whole new slew of remote management devices on the list for the new server racks because my living location and the hosting facility will be on almost opposite side of Kansas City. With the new remote controled power distribution units and remote console servers I should be able to do about everything from the office/home. If all the pieces don’t play nicely though I’m in for a world of hurt and there are going to be some long trips involved. Cable management and making sense of servers and location are a number one priority, well after having everything working that is. The goal is for the area to be showable location and something to impress clients and show them we know what we are doing.

I’ve been playing around with the new RHEL5 and Xen and I’m suitably impressed. I’ve gotten it up and running with a few virtual servers on a desktop but haven’t had enough time down at our current facility to get it up going on a server and see how well it runs there. I’m interested in seeing what it will do on one of our DL360 G5s with the virtualization extensions built in and if Ubuntu will run well with RHEL being the hypervisor, it should all work in theory. The ability to run virtual machines in the manner Xen allows will have a huge impact on our business and allow us to do a number of things we previously couldn’t, mainly in the area of segmenting servers by application so we can better see what is going on where and how resources are best used rather than lumping it all into one area to such a degree that it becomes one mass of uncontrolable goo.

I’ve been sending off notices at work and cc’ing about everyone in the world and I hope they aren’t taken as being to commanding or taken in the wrong light. My goal is to keep everyone informed about what’s going on because we do have a dreadful lack of communication and rather then complain about it more I suppose I might as well just start giving everyone info, they can read it or toss it out unread if they want. In either event I passed things along and maybe others will follow the example and we can all get on the same page, additionally I think there is a stigma that the programmers are uncooperative and I’d like to remove that.