Möllitz is the German name for the sea trout, ''Salmo trutta trutta''
History prior to arriving to UCC
Lost to the mists of time...
UCC machine history
The Faculty of Arts kindly colocated Manduba for us for some time, but with it becoming less useful and them wanting their rack space back, we decided to use the 2 RU that they were willing to let us keep for an offsite backups facility. In late 2013, Arts contacted us and said we would have to move Mollitz soon as the server room it was in was being centralized. It was briefly relocated to the machine room before being permanently moved to another educational facility.
Current machine tasks
Backups
Current software configuration
- Debian Linux 10 or newer
- rdiff-backup
rdiff-manager, a custom Python tool to manage lots of concurrent rdiff-backup jobs
MegaCli to administer the Dell PERC 5/i RAID card
Current hardware configuration
Dell PowerEdge 2950
- DRAC 5 remote access card
- Gigabyte 120GB SSD for the boot drive
- PERC 5/i hardware RAID for the backups array - 4 x 2 TB in RAID-5 (LVM and ext4)
- 24GB RAM - thanks to SPARE1 for giving up some of its FB-DIMMs to boost Mollitz's working memory
Future plans for the machine
The PowerEdge 2950 has been a good demonstration of the almost-but-not-quite experience that is remote server administration. For example, running the Dell OpenManage data server from within the OS stops the remote access card from responding. The Virtual Media tool almost - but not quite - works under Firefox, and the remote management interface doesn't load at all under IE 9. The firmware upgrade tools from Dell sort of work, but provide highly variable results under varying operating systems (the automatic upgrade tool finds a lot more things under Debian, but not the BMC - and the manual upgrade tools only work under RHEL or CentOS).
Having all the drives in hardware RAID is playing with fire. Unfortunately, the PERC 5/i doesn't support JBOD mode, and if you try and fake it with multiple RAID 0 arrays, timeouts occur because of how long the WD Greens take to spin up.
Thanks to:
- Faculty of Arts for continuing to support our server use!
- [MRD] and [JCF] for brokering the initial agreements
- [BOB], [MRD], [DAA] and others for setting it up
- Everyone who made the trek over to Arts to push the reset button if something dies.