I had to reconfig my dysfunct home office network today but now everything is setup and talking correctly.
I received a 16 port unmanaged switch and 3 USB lan adapters today and all is working correctly with my 3 Server 2012 R2 boxes. The cluster can move forward as soon as I have some more time to work on it!
Hooray!
Not much else needs to be said… If you manage your box from the shell (which is the proper way to manage a linux server… shape up!) then you need to be using screen. Especially if you are getting ready to kick off some long process and want to make sure you can get back to it if your connection dies out.
You can learn all about it here: http://www.rackaid.com/blog/linux-screen-tutorial-and-how-to/
And for my own quick reference, here is a shortened list of commands:
screen #starts screen…
Then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:
[ctrl]-a c #create new screen
[ctrl]-a b #bounce to next screen
[ctrl]-a d #deattach screen
Other screen commands:
screen -list #shows all open screens
screen -r #reattach a detached screen
Won’t say much, just wanted to drop a couple of links here as this site is a repository for stuff I don’t do extremely often and then find myself looking up again. Today I am cataloging these items…
Here is an excellent article on how to update modules. Simple and pretty much to the point!
How to Update a Module
Here is an equally useful article on how to apply patches in most linux operating systems:
How to Apply a Code Patch
These are two things that annoyed me to no end early in Drupal as there is a general assumption you know what to do. I will note on the patching one thing that might be confusing is where to place the file. I have found usually it should be placed in and ran from the directory of the module it is patching.
So lets say you have code patch for the “captcha” module. The patch file would then go in:
/drupalsiteroot/sites/all/modules/captcha/captchapatchfile.patch
Hope that is helpful!
This tutorial assumes you have some experience with Linux administration although I try to hand-hold as much as possible. If you are on a shared hosting solution and don’t have root access, you can easily modify the shell script we will create later to target your user’s home directory on the server.
You also need to know the address of your SQL server. In my case, I am working on a VPS so the SQL server is local (so I just use localhost) but you might need to use a URL or IP where your SQL server is located.
Okay… digging in. Here is the gist’ of it…
1. Create a new user for your MySQL database that will be just for backups
2. Create some folders on your server to store your backups locally
3. Create a script to actually create the database backups, compress them, clean up backups older than 30 days
4. Test the script
5. Setup the script to run as a cron job.
Here we go!
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So part of my “poor-man’s hyper-v cluster” experiment in my home office here has led me to start looking into storage options for virtual platforms. Hyper-V is apparently quite flexible, however fail-over clustering limits your options.
So for those of you who are just joining us I am doing research on clustered Hyper-V for work. This was a self started project so I grabbed whatever I had available. I am therefore building an Active Directory managed network and a three node Hyper-V cluster using the following components…
Dell Latitude D830 Laptop – Intel Core Duo + 3 GB of RAM + 150 GB HD
Dell Latitude E6400 Laptop – Intel Core 2 Duo + 4 GB of RAM + 230 GB HD
Dell Optiplex 990 Mini-PC – This is my “top of the line” unit lol… Core i7 – 4 GB RAM – 160 GB HD
Ancient TP-Link N150 router – 4 wired ports of 100 mbit bliss… (no gigabit :(…)
Surprisingly enough, even the ancient D830 has a processor that is new enough to run Hyper-V 3.0 on Windows Server 2012R2. This will only work with the server version of the OS though because of no support for SLAT which is an added requirement of the CPU if you are going to run Hyper-V on Windows 8.1. Only the Core I7 has SLAT built-in.
Another interesting note, the E6400 with the Core 2 Duo was by far the biggest pain to get working. Hence I am noting it here for anyone that comes searching…
–NOTE ABOUT DISABLING TRUSTED EXECUTION ON DELL LATITUDE E6400 LAPTOP–
Can’t enable hyper-v role service on Dell Latitude E6400 laptop? Here is why… Trusted Execution needs to be TURNED OFF in BIOS. This is definitely a Dell specific glitch. So, reboot into bios, turn on the TPM, reboot, go into BIOS, ENABLE the TPM (two separate steps) and then under virtualization options turn on everything except for Trusted Execution. Then it will work. Okay… moving on…
–END NOTE–
Okay… this was supposed to be a post about storage. So lets talk storage.
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