Server Update!

After some wrestling with FTP, NFS, SMB, and all other sorts of file transfer/sharing protocols, I managed to get the data I want to keep from the old server box backed up. It wasn’t pretty. For some reason (to the best of my knowledge), an old session of nautilus (the file browser in RedHat and Gnome) was hung up…and un-killable. Then for some reason the NFS shares from the NS (old server) box were also hung up. A restart of NFS on both sides quickly took care of that problem, but nautilus was still being a bitch.

The idea was to copy/paste from within Gnome, saving keyboard typing and such.

Anyway, I revert to the console bit of cp -r [source] [destination] — not a problem, right? WRONG! The nautilus thing had hung another process…and NFS had also hung up (as nautilus died when it was trying to view NFS shares). So I restart both NFS processes on both sides, assuming it’d work. Of course not. After much tinkering, I finally gave up in the hopes of using FTP quick.

FTP worked for about half of the data I wanted to transfer, until my Windows FTP client decided to crash. As I didn’t want to use FTP in the first place, I decided to do something else instead of even bother with that again.

So I decided to manually copy files to a windows share on NS, then grab them from the SERVER (new server) side. This worked great after messing with alls sorts of permissions issues. The next task, however, was more daunting.

MAKING SENSE OF WHERE FILES NOW RESIDE…

After all this random copying stuff (of course, each copy had to go in a different place due to file permission/access rights), I had (in some cases) three copies of the same file. I only need one. So, I spent some time messing with organization, which I finally have finished to an extent I’m pleased with.

After all of that was done, I still needed to open both server cases for the installation of new fans. Each server (of the two) got an additional exhaust fan. This will hopefully help keep them in a more stable, cool environment. At that time, it seemed a Good Thing to probably restart the SERVER box. After messing with some permissions on NS, I really decided it best to leave that beast run as-is for the time…

Of course, by now…it’s nearly 9pm. As I have to be to work by 7:30am tomorrow, and the reinstallation of RedHat that I will do on the machine will take several hours (especially with the P-233MMX processor), I have left the reinstall part until tomorrow afternoon. Especially because I need to make some changes with the number of drives in what used to be the main server box on the network…so I’ll be messing with that kind of stuff…which only adds to the total time.

Call me a geek (and that’s okay), but even though I could get the NS box back up if I really wanted to tonight, I also value sleep…and know that Beth will be pissed if I wouldn’t get it done, meaning that she could do local network stuff, but not Internet stuff.

Ah well, such is life. But I still have to say it was a productive evening.

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07