Dee-Nee going down at 6pm

[Gantry]

I am going to install a new UPS today at 6pm.  To do so, I have to shut dee-nee down and plug it into the new UPS.  After that I want to test the battery on this bad boy, as well as the shutdown software.  It's a cheap-ass noname chinese UPS and the software has me worried...

Hell, at this point I'll be happy with 5 minutes of uptime and a safe server shutdown if the battery runs out...

The biggest downtime issue with dee-nee right now is power problems.  More specifically, my current UPS (a low-end APC powerstrip with a battery) has terrible battery life and I don't have the equipment to properly shutdown if the battery is low.  What happens as a result is that the server just turns off two minutes into a blackout.  The problem is that, upon getting power back, the server has to check the filesystem because of the bad shutdown - it takes a good 5-10 minutes to do so.  Even worse, it sometime prompts me for something during the check - meaning if I'm not at the office, it just sits there until I come in and press enter...

All in all a shitty system that hopefully gets resolved today with one of the lowest-grade hardware/software combos ever.  But it's a free UPS and hopefully will do the trick...

[Big Hath]

what will brown do for us?

[Gantry]

Oh yeah!  In case you have non idea what I'm talking about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply

Basically a power strip with a battery that will keep the server up for an extra 5-15 minutes in a power outage.  This particular unit comes with a cable that attaches to my computer and talks to the UPS.  If the battery gets too low, the software properly shuts down the server so everything is kosher when power returns and it's time to come back up...

[Mike D.]

Don't you dare shut down Dee-Nee.

[Gantry]

It's for the greater good, like peeing in the radiator to avoid those pesky Soviets...

[nightwulf]

The problem is that, upon getting power back, the server has to check the filesystem because of the bad shutdown - it takes a good 5-10 minutes to do so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

[Gantry]

We had that discussion before and it's on the todo list.  Still needs a working battery backup system in place regardless.  But it will get done, oh yes it will get done...

[Gantry]

Oh yeah, server now going down at 6:15...

[Gantry]

On battery power now, so exciting!

[Gantry]

New battery lasting like a champ!

[Gantry]

OK, we are back up...  The system shut down properly and the battery lasted the full 500 seconds it was configured for before it shut down.  Since it also has a "shutdown on low battery" setting, I'm going to bump that "standard #" up to a full 20 minutes.  If the battery can't last that long, the low-battery shutdown should kick in.  This will be a big help for future power outages, the biggest scourge of dee-nee...

Next up, figuring out if I really have ext3, backing everything up and converting the filesystem over...

[nightwulf]

You have /sbin/fsck.ext3, so I bet all the utilities are installed. Next step is to check the kernel ...

[Gantry]

See the other thread, ext3 is not in /proc/filesystems yet fsck.ext3 is present.  Heck, I'll dig a little deeper now, post if you find out anything...

[Gantry]

BOOYAH!  I had to load the ext3 module first before it showed up in /proc/filesystems.  Now to do a quick emergency backup of the databases, websites, etc onto my laptop...

[Gantry]

If you can save me time and have the mechanism in place, go ahead and backup your site nightwulf...

[nightwulf]

Back up to where? Over the internets?

[Gantry]

That's what I was thinking, I though maybe you had an FTP/Rsync backup already in place.  Don't worry about it, I'll backup to my laptop.  I'm on the same switch as the server so I'll just do a mass copy of /home...

[nightwulf]

I can do it, if you can wait for bzip2 ... tar archive is 567695360 bytes ...

[Gantry]

You can go ahead then and take care of that (is that for your folder or all of /home?) - I'll starting workingn on dee-nee proper.   Databases backed up...

[TempoGL]

so if dee-nee is the city...is nightwulf's site a suburb?