Archive for March, 2008

How theplanet.com adds a new hard drive to a server

I ordered a new server from theplanet.com (whom I really like, so don’t take this as a dis — I’ve been a customer for over 5 years, and plan to continue with them). So the new server is supposed to have 2 hard drives. Turns out the provisioned it with only one, and then told me, oops, we need to order the hardware. A few hours later (yes, really–I think they must have run out to Fry’s), they said it was in stock, and needed to take the machine down to install it. Fine, I said do it anytime. They actually did start about 30 minutes later (and this was the middle of the night), while I was online. While I was yum-installing packages. Sigh. Here’s from the lastlog (remember these are in reverse order, and some data removed for my protection :)

reboot system boot 2.6.xx Thu Mar 6 03:46 (00:01)
root pts/1 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:37 - crash (00:09)
root pts/0 63.xx.xx.xx Thu Mar 6 03:29 - crash (00:17)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Wed Mar 5 07:26 - 07:26 (00:00)
root pts/0 spyglass.dllstx4 Tue Mar 4 11:55 - 12:02 (00:07)

Hmm, if they could log into it the previous day, it really doesn’t take much longer to just log in and run ’shutdown’, huh? Apparently flipping the power switch is a lot easier. Alright, I can deal. Anyhow, they did install it, so I log in and happen to do ‘history’. Looks like the tech wasn’t too sure of him/herself:

1 fdisk -l
2 exit
3 ls
4 exit
5 fdisk -l
6 reboot
7 fdisk -
8 fdisk -l
9 reboot
10 fdisk -l
11 df
12 mke2fs ext3 /dev/hdb1
13 ls
14 mkdir /Backup_drive
15 mount -t ext3 /hdb /Backup_drive
16 fdisk -
17 fdisk -l
18 reboot
19 fdisk -l
20 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 Backup_drive
21 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb0 /Backup_drive
22 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
23 df
24 reboot
25 fdisk -l
26 ls
27 cd ..
28 ls
29 fdisk -l
30 reboot
31 fdisk -l
32 cd ..
33 ls
34 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb /Backup_drive
35 mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /Backup_drive
36 fdisk -l
37 history

Wow, that’s a lot of fdisk’ing. And kind of a lot of tries to mount it, considering you just ran fdisk so much. And hey, you didn’t add anything to my fstab or similar… but you did create a silly directory in the root of my other drive. Feh.

Ah well, at least it’s installed and seems to be working fine, and the turnaround was really quite fast to get it done.