Tristan Findley

A report on the recent server outages, and the recent server rebuilds.

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After the scheduled power-down on August 2nd, services have finally been restored. There was a small issue with the boarder firewall not booting one of the ethernet cards when the power was restored, and thus the site was offline until 1030 today.

The server power-down worked flawlessly, and the server backups were not needed. I will start scheduling regular downtime for server and OS maintenance, which will help keep the OS Kernel up-to-date, as well as allow for hardware upgrades.

This site will be offline between 0600 and 2000 on August 2nd, 2009. This is due to power-maintenance at the hosting location. Prior to the power-down, backups will be taken of all crucial domains & subdomains, as well as all running configuration files.

This downtime will mark the loss of 390 days of uptime. Equinox (the hosting server) has been running non-stop ever since it was reinstalled in mid 2008.

Well, I suppose I should make a start on my ‘blog’.

Unlike previous blogs, I don’t plan on this one being a report on my day-to-day activities. I’ll publish website updates, major events in my life, and professional content.

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Over the last week, we’ve been running the KPMG course for the students. This has involved setting up an entirely new streamlined lab environment for the students use. After a few small technical issues with the VM deployment system on the first day, I devised a new way of pre-loading the VM’s to the machines. We plan to use this method to deploy the Foundstone lab next week (Thursday / Friday). I will need to secure the OS further for use with new lab sessions. I also plan on offering this system to the staff, so they can create VM appliances for student use, then they are able to run fully customized lab sessions.

I finished my first VOME contact, which included setup and deployment of three desktops and three laptops to the new VOME staff, and also the setup of their Moodle E-Learning space. The next piece of work I do for them will hopefully be website design. I plan to use Wordpress for this due to its simplicity and multi-user capability. It will be perfectly suited to their needs.