Life is Full a Vit

I posted Monday that the rack server had arrived. Well after a couple of snags on setting it up, it is now up and running making my apartment sound like it contains a small jet aircraft. Before I post up some pictures let me post the details on the Virtual Machine layout on the server.

3 Linux VM’s. One will contain a “live” MySQL install along with exim, dbmail and spamassassin. The second one will contain Apache/PHP. The third is just a test install to play with. All three are running Debian 5.0, long live Linux !

1 Windows VM. And a legit license too… passed WPA and everything! Why was this installed? Just because we can!

Now onto the photos!

Arrived:

Unpacking:

Upgrades:

Now just to load VMware ESXi….

Loaded!

And the VM’s have been created and loaded with running operating systems:

That is all for now… now to provision the systems…

And it’s resting comfortably at parents’ place… Only 1 1/2 hours left to go at work….

I have received the first shipment of toys that this site as well as a few others are moving to. This is to be my official announcement to the TeamZX2 crowd about the pending server and site migration. The time has come to ditch the dedicated host I am currently paying out the butt for and move onto our OWN server purchased and built to MY specs, not some old Athlon 64 X2 with 320gb of HDD space and only 2GB of RAM running everything from web server, to a database and CVS server.

I’m not saying this current machine is bad (it’s not, it works great for what we’re currently doing)… but instead of paying $130/mo for that server  I’m moving to a $50/mo co-located host that is running a server built and owned by us (and by us you know who you are… thank you for your contributions j0hnZ, powder, CJW and Myles).

BTW, I’m drinking tea as I post this.

If you don’t like tea… well… LOL screw you.

But anyway, I just strayed off topic. Let me post the new server specs:

• Dual quad core Opterons 2.3GHz (that’s right, 8 physical cores!)
• 10GB of RAM (2GB in the server, 8GB additional ordered)
• 1TB HDD space (2x 500GB, server comes with 2x 160GB that are being replaced)

Those are the specs pertinent to a server, everything else is insignificant. The new host that will be co-locating this machine is providing 5 IP’s and 5TB (5000GB) of bandwidth. This server flat out rocks and was designed to be future proof (well, for a while at least) so we can possibly expand and add more applications to it. In fact I’m working on a couple… But more on those at other times. The server is scheduled to arrive at my doorstep this coming Monday (2/23/2009).

Now some pics of the goodies that arrived today.

8GB of DDR2:

2x 500GB HDD’s (Seagate Barracudas)

Slim-line Optical drive (Dell wanted $100 to include it in the server build, forget that, I got one for half that price)

That’s all for now… more updates to come as soon as I have them! J0hnZ and Powder are driving down to my place next weekend… they will get to see the rack server in person.

PS: Tim (CraZx2ing) is a flamer.

PPS: Shout out to all my homies on TeamZX2!

Well lets say that at least my trip to Portland wasn’t uber boring. As much as I tend to hate all things Apple (ironic given I own an iPhone, iPod and MacBook Pro… but that’s another story all together), I gotta say their customer service is great and they honored the warranty on their iPhone.

However this makes it my third iFail… err.. iPhone. The first had a wonderful FAIL of it’s own, again, another story. Now I’m left “customizing” this current iPhone. Wonderful.

And now to the point… at least I had a blast in Portland. It’s 11:21pm and I just got home. Wewt!

… FAIL.

And it just sits there indefinitely….

… but in the end… FAIL. Spent over an hour on the phone with AppleCare to come up to the same results… I have a lovely iPaperweight. Something even Tim pretty much chuckled at. I mean what more can I say? I spent that time on the phone doing the same restores I had just previously attempted… but now it encompassed two machines with the same results… FAIL.

So now I have an appointment in Portland at the Apple Store to deal with this at the “Genius Bar”… yay. I get to try the restore one more time on my MacBook Pro at home… probably to watch it fail (I mean statistically if it’s failed 100% of the time I attempted the restore on two different PC’s, what’s the likelihood it will be successful on the Mack?).

Does anybody notice the PATTERN HERE? Maybe I should bring my camcorder with me to the Apple Store…

That is the ultimate question as I sit here at work ticked off beyond explanation. But another question might be…. why does Apple suck? Oh but where do I begin?

Today started out like the average day. Got absolutely no sleep last night since it was Sunday night and as always I was out way later than I should of been. Then I get home and watch a movie. Get to be around… oh 3am. Roll out of bed at 6am groaning and cursing the world. Do the usual junk, grab my spiffy iPhone and unplug it from my MacBook Pro (which I’ve also handily named the HDD to ‘Apple Sucks’, but I digress). So all in all… a fine morning.

Yeah right.

I get to work, everything is dandy. Send a few texts to certain people you don’t need to know about (maybe I’ll tell you one day). Send a few more texts to my sister then ultimate start ignoring her. She claims I’m driving her crazy. I don’t believe that’s possible as I believe she was crazy to begin with. Ok… I do some of the usual work that involves… well, work.

Around 11:30am PST I look at my phone… and it’s complaining. WTF. “Unknown” ICCID and IMEI. WTF does that mean? Well it’s simple really… it means my iPhone is a dandy iPaperweight. I grab a copy of iTunes and the latest iPhone 2.2.1 firmware from Apple’s site. Do you see where this is going? Yeah… I have to “restore” my dandy phone. Un-f’ing believable. It was just working FINE, then out of the blue… it doesn’t work? WHAT? I did absolutely NOTHING to the phone.

Way to go Apple. You SUCK.

Now it doesn’t end here… this is still just the first nuisance. I launch the restore and yeah, sure, it runs. The status bar on my phone is full… however the PC still things it’s restoring my iPhone firmware… and the phone still thinks it’s restoring my firmware… for the past HOUR. WTF?

Ugh… if I have to take this thing to the Apple store I’m going to be that much more ticked off.