*sigh* Well, this past weekend was spent working on helping my friend Louie build his new PC. A week and a half ago, he came over to my house and (with my guidance) ordered parts off of Newegg to build a monster PC. This thing really was a monster: dual AMD Opteron CPUs running at 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Asus K8N-DL motherboard, an AOpen video card w/ an nVIDIA 6800GT chipset and 256 MB of RAM, a DVD-ROM drive, a dual-layer DVD burner, and two 400 GB Serial ATA hard drives. I went over to his apartment on Saturday, and from there we went to CompUSA to buy a new floppy drive and case for the machine. The rest of the day was spent instructing him in what he needed to do to assemble the machine. By about 6 PM or so, he got the machine entirely assembled. So, we took the machine into his study, hooked it up to his monitor and keyboard, and powered it on.

All it did was beep over and over. Bleh.

After spending a bit of time looking at it, we finally gave up for the evening and went out for drinks. I went back the next morning armed with a little more knowledge as to what was going on. According to the research I did, it was either the RAM or the power supply. After verifying the power supply wasn’t the problem, I remembered reading something in the motherboard manual saying that the machine could actually SAY what the error was. So, I had Louie hook headphones into the system, and sure enough, a voice was saying, “System failed memory test.” I did some research, and found that we had gotten the wrong type of memory for the system. After a bit of reading (and a couple of trips later to Fry’s), we finally got the right kind of memory for the system: registered ECC RAM. I got it installed, and the machine booted fine. I then started the install of Windows XP Professional X64 Edition while we went to dinner.

When I got back and I finished the install, I came to something of an unpleasant revelation: the onboard network adapter wasn’t being detected. I wasn’t able to get it up and working before it was time for me to go home, so I’ll have to go back later this week and see if I can find out why it’s not being detected. If worst comes to worst, I have a spare 3Com 3C-905TX network card that’s not being used that I can let him have. I’d rather get the onboard gigabit adapter working first, though.

Still, this entire weekend was spent futzing around with a PC I should have completed Saturday by all rights. This illustrates one of the problems of building your own PC: if you get stuck, you don’t have many people you can turn to for help. This is why I don’t build my own at the office: if something goes wrong, I’d rather be able to call HP or Dell and make it THEIR problem. :-)

In the meantime, I’ll just hope and pray I can get Louie’s PC finished by the end of the week…

*sigh* It’s been a busy week for me at the office, but I’ve also been having to deal with some of the problems involving MK Online’s backup system. After the hard drive crash that occurred back around Christmas, I’ve come to realize that simply backing up the databases like we have been doing isn’t the best option. We need to back up EVERYTHING involving the site. I’d been working on a possible solution for the past week or so, and am on the verge of implementing it. At the same time, I’ve been working on improving the data redundancy on the main D’Arque Cathedral server. Well, the work came to a head last night on both projects.

On the main D’Arque Cathedral server, most of the data storage is on a single 80 GB hard drive. I also had a spare 120 GB drive I had left over from when I upgraded my main PC. The 120 GB drive would have been overkill for the MK Online’s backup; frankly 80 GB is overkill but it’s what I had. So, what I did was get on Newegg’s website and order an identical 120 GB hard drive to the one I had. It arrived Wednesday, but I wasn’t at the office to receive it. So, I brought it home last night and got to work installing it. The idea was to set up the two 120 GB drives in the main D’Arque Cathedral server, and set them up as a software RAID 1 configuration. (RAID 1 = mirrored drives.) It took a bit longer than expected as it was highly recommended that I put the two drives on separate cables/controllers instead of the same one, and I couldn’t get a cable that would reach both the CD-ROM drive and one of the hard drives. So, I had to grab my unused drive controller card and put the drives on that. (The CD-ROM is hooked to the motherboard.) From there, it was just a matter of partitioning the drives, setting up the RAID, formatting them, and then copying the data from the 80 GB drive to the RAID. It’s up and running with the two drives; I’ve also got a program running that monitors the drives and will send an email to my Blackberry if there’s a serious problem.

The 80 GB drive will go into a test server I have. It’ll have to wait until Sunday, though, as the server’s motherboard won’t support the 80 GB drive, and I used my spare PCI IDE drive controller to get the RAID 1 working on the D’Arque Cathedral server. I’ll be going by Fry’s tomorrow, anyway, so picking up a new drive controller card won’t be a problem. What I’ll be doing is setting it up where the main MK Online server will do a secure file replication every morning; all site files (including hosted sites) will be synchronized with the copy on my test server. That way if something happens, we don’t lose more than a day or two’s worth of files. I’m not interested in having another catastrophic loss, and this will prevent it from happening again.

Oh, well. The script for the replication is ready; I just have to get the new drive into the test server so we can begin the actual backups. The RAID 1 on the main D’Arque Cathedral server is working fine now, so life is good on that front. Hopefully this will put an end to any further extended downtimes on either site.

Okay, kids, this is going to be a rather technical post. If you’re not into such things, go ahead and skip this one. :-)

Anyway… I’m probably jumping the gun on an announcement Sean MC probably wanted to make, but it’s kinda integral to this story. A week and a half ago, he asked me if I could host his and Jinny’s sites on my web server. I said sure, and once I got back from Las Vegas, we worked to get his and Jinny’s sites up and running on my main server. We got it all up and running, with one minor problem: the domain names refused to resolve. I had the entries set up correctly on both my DNS server and the MK Online DNS server (which was going to be the slave server), so I was reasonably confident that the problem was with Sean’s domain name registrar. It turned out that the problem WAS on my end… but in the process it not only revealed something I didn’t know about DNS, it exposed a rather glaring error on my part that had been around for over a year. :-/

Apparently, in order for a DNS server to be set up as an authoritative server for a domain, it needs to be “registered” with the registrar. In other words, the hostname and corresponding IP address need to be entered in. I had told Sean to set up his domains with the servers ns.darquecathedral.org and ns.mortalkombatonline.com as authoritative. I had thought that as long as it was a working domain name, it should work. It didn’t. ns.darquecathedral.org wasn’t registered, so it didn’t work. What was frightening, though, was what was happening with ns.mortalkombatonline.com. According to Sean it was coming back as the IP address for MY DNS server. I did some checking, and came to a rather disturbing revelation.

As near as I can tell, when a hostname is “registered” through a registrar, it actually overrides whatever the DNS server for that domain says. Back when I bought the domain name mortalkombatonline.com, MK Online was actually known by the name MK5.ORG. I had originally registered mortalkombatonline.com for something else, and had registered ns.mortalkombatonline.com to my DNS server’s IP address. A couple of months later, though, I transferred the domain ownership to CCShadow, as we had decided then that it would be in our best interests to switch the site’s name to something a little bit more universal. However, I had completely forgotten that ns.mortalkombatonline.com was registered to my DNS server’s IP address… and even if I HAD remembered I wouldn’t have considered it important. So, for the past year and three quarters, every DNS server except the MK Online ones were resolving ns.mortalkombatonline.com to MY DNS server instead of MK Online’s; seeing as ns.mortalkombatonline.com was set as the main authoritative DNS server, everyone was thinking MY DNS server was authoritative for MK Online instead of MK Online’s server. Only the fact that we had secondary DNS servers configured kept us from learning about this screw-up MUCH sooner.

… on the other hand, this does explain why I kept getting so many “cache query denied” errors in my DNS server’s logs. DNS servers all throughout the net would keep hitting my DNS server thinking it was authoritative, but my DNS server wasn’t configured as such, so it kept denying the queries.

So, what have I done to fix this? First of all, I’ve since set my DNS server up as a slave DNS server for mortalkombatonline.com (it’ll accept queries for it, and get the domain information from the MK Online DNS server) in the meantime. Therefore, my DNS server will answer queries concerning mortalkombatonline.com. (I’ve already seen a remarkable lack of cache query denied errors in the logs since doing so.) When CCShadow comes back from his trip, I’ll have him change the registration of ns.mortalkombatonline.com to the correct server. As for Sean and Jinny… I’ve worked with Sean to get it reconfigured where the registered name for my DNS server and Sinc’s DNS server are authoritative, and three of the four domains are already up and running. The fourth one should be back up and running anytime now.

That’s one thing I’ll say about this experience… I can never say I know everything there is to know about a subject, because right when you least expect it something will jump up and bite you in the ass. :-)

Well, Dad is still being driven bonkers by the blue glowy LEDs on the front of Tyrande’s (my main server) case. When I was changing the backup tape a couple of days ago, I noticed he had gone to the case manufacturer’s website, and searched for ways to disable the LEDs. He had left the printout of his results sitting on top of the servers’ monitor. He also made it clear that when we clean up the server area and get it looking nicely, he intends to have me disable those lights. If there’s a way I can do it without affecting the temperature gauge, then I’m all for it. Otherwise, he’ll just have to live with it; I’d like to know ahead of time if the machine is overheating.

On the other hand, Dad did come up with a use for Tyrande’s old case (as opposed to immediately tossing it out, as we’ll never use it again): he’s literally using it as a doorstop for the office door. :-)

Oh, well… I’ll probably throw out a standard post later this afternoon. We’ll see. For now… it’s about lunchtime. :-)

I’ll probably post later today about the actual Las Vegas trip itself, but right now I’m still recovering from two late nights in a row working on server issues.

It started Sunday night, right before the folks and I were to go to Fremont Street. I had pulled the Powerbook out and logged on to see how things were going, and Chan_Ming and Crow (fellow MK Online staffers) mentioned there was a problem with the site. I logged into the server, and about the worst thing that COULD have happened HAD happened: a physical fault had developed on the hard drive, and the partition that held the site was corrupted. Unfortunately, I couldn’t back up any of the data that was on that partition, as that directory was dying. So, I copied off what configuration data I could, shut the webserver down, and called CCShadow to have him contact our hosting provider and get the drive replaced.

Well, Monday night, after I got home, I managed to log into the server after the hard drive was replaced… and to say I wasn’t pleased with the job they did was an understatement. They did a VERY minimal install; they didn’t even install the web server software! Fortunately I had enough information where I could get an idea of what did need to be installed, and I had backups of the site from just after the migration to a more powerful server. Moreover, the databases themselves were backed up nightly, so I had a backup from Sunday morning. I ended up staying up late Monday night getting it worked out, and then finished getting everything working yesterday evening. I’ll still need to talk to CCS when he gets back into the country, but for now everything’s pretty much working.

If the MK Online stuff wasn’t bad enough… on Monday morning, I was working on the main D’Arque Cathedral server when it stopped responding at 9 AM CST. Of course, there was nothing I could do until I got home, but I knew the house at least was still standing and had power, as my DNS server was still online and responding. When I got home that night, I noticed the server had turned itself off. I shrugged, switched it back on, and got back to work on the MK Online server. Less than twenty minutes later, I noticed it had shut off again. I did some investigating and tried a couple of things (including replacing the power supply), only to come to a determination that the machine was overheating. The CPU fan wasn’t going as fast as usual, and the case wasn’t well-ventilated as it was. *sigh*

So, on my way home from work yesterday, I stopped in Fry’s and picked up a new case with a 420 watt power supply, fans on the side and top, and an LCD temperature gauge, plus a new CPU/heatsink combination. When I got home, I proceeded to disassemble the server and throw everything into the new case. It took quite a bit of doing (especially trying to get the new heatsink/fan onto the CPU in the case), but I finally got it up and running late last night. The new case has blue LED lights on the fans, and six of them on the front of the case. Dad took one look at it this morning and said, “Those will have to be disconnected.” My response: “Uhm… whenever you’re in this office working, your back is to the servers. How will it bother you? In addition… I don’t want to screw around with a production server.”

So, both servers are now up and running for the most part. I’ll probably end up going to bed early tonight as a result, just to make sure that I can catch up on my sleep. As I said before, I’ll post a Las Vegas wrap-up a bit later.

OpenVPN is now my friend.

On Friday, Sinc asked me if I would help him set up OpenVPN for his home network. I went through the process of helping him, and got it up and running. Then, he asked me to make his VPN a “bridged” VPN, where connecting clients would become literally a part of his home network instead of having their own somewhat separated network (like I do for my own VPN). After going through a bit of trouble to do so, I discovered his purpose in putting it together: gaming!

You see, we’d play strategy games like Command & Conquer Generals and Warcraft III more often, but we end up having to deal with severe firewall issues. I figured out how to get Generals working with my own WRT54G router, but we could never get it going with Sinc’s and Kanan’s firewalls. Using OpenVPN, we can now play games under a LAN configuration. We ended up playing several games of Generals this past weekend, and the performance was much better than we had expected.

Now that we know we can do that, we can send the OpenVPN configuration files to Kanan, Worff (if he feels like playing), and Missy (ditto) so we can get nice big games going. :-)

I will say this… playing RTS games like Generals is much more fun when you’re playing cooperatively with your friends against the CPU instead of fighting each other. :-)

Anyway, I’ll have a non-geeky post up later today… got work I need to do now. Heh.

This is interesting…

Apparently some people at a company called Bytonic Software have put together a new port of Quake II. A couple of years ago, id Software released the game engine to Quake II under the GPL, which meant anyone now had access to the source code to make their own improvements/alterations. What Bytonic did was port Quake II over to Java. :-) This new port, called “Jake 2”, supposedly runs very well and works under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I’ll have to give it a try at some point…

If you want to take a look, check out screenshots, or even download it, you can find it at http://www.bytonic.de/html/jake2.html.