long story short, I just upgraded from kubuntu dapper to feisty, and after the lengthy process was done (not without troubles such as archive.ubuntu.com going slow/not responding, and other upgrade interruptions) I rebooted the server.
This is when init became weird. First of all, it took like 20% of CPU, which is abnormal. Startup processes aren't starting. Manual input commands for background processes are also killed shortly after it ran. Shutdowns are also not working:
root@host:/# shutdown -r now
shutdown: Unable to send message: Connection refused
root@host:/# reboot
shutdown: Unable to send message: Connection refused
root@host:/#
It seems like init is killing off/refusing/ignoring processes.
This has got to do with the ubuntu upgrade... Is there any way to fix this? Or is reinstalling everything again/the OS is the only way to go?
i would just like to vocalise my utter disbelief at how incompetent and dishonest Absolute Design Barnsley aka Smart Merchant aka Absolutewebdesign.co.uk have been.
Our company signed up just over a year ago to their Absolute Design Smart Merchant shopping cart website system.
To overview, this is a pay-monthly service where they host the site and we add products to the CMS style website that Absolute Design have produced.
Being a small family business we opted for this kind of pay monthly service as it would (we hoped) give us some level of support from Absolute Design Barnsley to help with the running of the site.
At first they were helpful at getting the site setup initially but months down the line and after phonecalls or online chats with Absolute Design , the result has been no action being taken as requested.
Simple things like removing the option for other currencies... I phoned in August of 2008 and was asked to email the request to Absolute Design Barnsley , which i did. Did the other currencies get removed? Nope! I phoned and emailed many times.
This year due to the economic climate we have had many price changes to do, so i phoned Absolute Design Barnsley and asked for a holding page to be put up while i changed all the prices.
I was told this would be done within the hour.
I had my doubts that this would actually happen due to past experience, and indeed a WEEK later and the holding page STILL was not up.
During this week we had several people try and buy things at the old prices and we had to cancel orders. This is obviously frustrating for us and the customers.
Due to Absolute Design 's Smart Merchant poor system i since found out i was unable to 'turn off' the shop in any way except for basically deleting the entire payment gateway setup.
Products were also still viewable at old prices via google, even if i disabled them in the CMS itself. BAD Smart Merchant !
Also in this time i managed to decide and almost fully populate a new website for our shop, it seem's Absolute Design Barnsley cannot even produce a holding page in that same space of time.
Now, you may think why didnt i just leave? Well, after that week i rang up and asked to cancel, i was asked why and i CALMLY stated my reasons, which were basically poor support.
This resulted in Andy Clegg from Absolute Design Barnsley saying to email my request to leave and he slammed down the phone.
I emailed my request to change our Domain IPS tag and contact details and within a few minutes our website had been deleted BUT Absolute Design Barnsley decided to delete the IPSTAG for the domain, basically rendering the domain useless, including our email which we use on a daily basis.
I spoke Absolute Design again on the webchat (on a friday) and asked them to change the IPStag again, they said ok, but it probably wont get done till Monday.
I was obviously doubtful as it didnt take them long to delete the IPSTAG....
Monday comes and Absolute Design still haven't changed the IPSTAG. We are shut on mondays so i rang on Tuesday and spoke to Craig. He seemed more reasonable and said he would change it shortly. Several hours later and Absolute Design Barnsley still had'nt changed our IPSTAG and were still basically holding our domain hostage.
I ring up AGAIN, speak to craig, he says hold on for a moment, about a minute later they just hung up the phone again. I ring once more and noone answers...
Instead of swift switchover to the new site, Absolute Design Barnsley have forced us to take action with Nominet to recover our domain.
This just seems ridiculous, I'm guessing Absolute Design Barnsley must be losing alot of customers but to act the way they have is just childish.
What is the point of causing so much agro just because someone wants to cancel?
I hope this post reaches anyone else who is considering taking up services with Absolute Design Barnsley aka Absolute Web Design aka Absolute Web Hosting aka Absolute Shopping Cart aka Smart Merchant and urge you to think twice!
do dual power supplies use more power than a single supply?
E.g. Say I have a server than uses two amps, powered by a single power supply. Now if I switch to a dual supply (and say each supply has the same efficiency rating as the single), does my server use more power? How much more?
My simple view of this is that it probably does, but maybe not much. The second power supply consumes some power itself, but since its not under load, it doesn't consume much. Therefore, my server with redundant supplies might use 2.1A or 2.2A.
I just signed my agreement for 2 cabinets at Internap's Atlanta CoLo. For now, I will just have 1 120V 20A circuit in each cabinet.
At my office's server room we currently have 8 circuits I am powering my 2 racks from. I am just curious how many servers you can typically put on a 20A circuit. I am also considering adding two additional power feeds (1 more for each cabinet) to have truly redundant power for my dual power supplies.
I am hoping that 20A is plenty for my needs. I have around 20 HP and Dell systems. Mostly HP DL380s and Dell PE2950s.
Any ideas? I am splitting them in half, only filling up a half of each cabinet for now, as we are growing quickly and I wanted to overguy space so I would not be forced to add another cabinet later and have it end up somewhere else in the DC.
I wonder if any colocation providers here have any tips for measuring power. Currently I'm using APC 7900 power strips with amperage meter. I'm not a power expert by any means but I want to be able to calculate whats the cost having a server drawing 2 amps 24/7 365 days week.
Our secondary site gave us a whopping power bill, and at our own data center we never considered charging our customers for power.
I need to know what happens when a rack has capped its (lets say) 5A limit. I'm trying to calculate what exactly I can put into a rack and am considering that not all servers are going to be 100% load, as that would be bad performance anyway.
I guess it could do the following (but really don't know):
Cap performance of all servers
Cause system failures
Trip
The rack would have servers, a switch and perhaps a Remote Power Strip and Firewall. I don't know how they would be affected.
how much power the average hard drive would use? (ie a 1tb drive). I was looking on WDC's website and it said 7.5 watts peak durring writing and reading etc, so assuming thats at 110 voltage, would it be safe to assume that 12 drives @ 7.5 watts each would make a total of .81 amps? I am going off of the equation that Amps = Watts/Volts. So amps = 90/110
"Can i host a small forum at a 64mb ram vps with lighttpd and mysql? How many users can i have online?" I said that he can do that.Is this answer true?
We are transitioning from an on-site data center to a collocation facility and are having problems negotiating the right amount of power, the type of connections, and the PDU power strips that we need.
For simplicity lets say that we are going to rent a 10 ft by 10 ft cage area. This should house 4-5 rack cabinets.
The amount of power we are given for this area varies with the lowest being 120 watts/sq. ft and the highest being 175 watts/sq. ft.
With 120 watts per square foot that comes out to about 6.25 circuits that are 20 amps for a 10x10 space.
For the initial setup we would have a Cisco 73xx Router, a HP 26xx switch, an Avocent IP KVM, an EMC CX3-10 SAN, and our Dell PowerEdge 2950 III servers (4).
Using the calculator at: dell.com/calc I show the power requirements for all of the Dell equipment to be:
C13 Power Cord Qty: 12 Amperage on C13 Cords: 26.49 amps System Heat/Power: 2754.6 watts Total Current: 13.24 amps
The way I was envisioning this was Rack 1: Router, Switching, KVM on a 20 amp circuit and Rack 2: Dell Equipment on a 30 amp circuit. Is that right?
Additionally, I'm confused about single phase vs. three phase power in the data center and what most people choose to implement. I've heard talk of getting redundant power in each cabinet but that seems like you limit yourself to half of your space doing it that way.
And the last thing is it's confusing about what type of PDU you need to put in your racks to make it all come together. All of our equipment should be using IEC C13 cords and we're thinking about going with Avocent for all of the KVM/PDU so we can centrally manage it.
It seems to me that if the cost is roughly the same we should be pressing as hard as possible for the highest watts/square foot since that seems to be one of the most important commodities in any data center.
How much does a typical quad core Xeon eat, say an E5410 or a E7320? a 2GB RAM stick? A 500-750GB SATA disk? How much is the system overhead for a 1U unit? I tried to find data on this without too much success. For example Intel says the same number (80W) for an 1.6GHz CPU and a 2.4GHz one -- that does not sound too reliable to me.
If this is too abstract, then I would like to ask aobut the real world power consumption of two boxes. 1 E5410, 8GB of RAM, 2 SATA disk maybe 10K RPM. The other will have two E7320, 24-32GB of RAM and 3 10-15K disk.
I have been interested in setting up my own server for hosting a website and a small online game I created. My only problem is how good of a server I would need to get.
My potential colo provider is saying that a 5A circuit comes standard with a 1/4 cabinet and that they charge $20 per amp over that. I will have (6) Dell 1650's with dual 650W PSU's. Any idea how to calculate how much actual power I will need for this configuration?
Im currently going through my tool box of parts and was thinking of building some cheap dedis for my customers. Unfortuantly the only hardware I can find is SocketA AMD 3200 (Barton Core) processors but Im unsure of the power they pull in amps.
The setup I would be looking to us is 512mb RAM, 80gb Hard Drive, Socket A 3200 XP processor.
I'm working out the power needs for running two Bc's ( each with 10 blades @ dual 2.8 with dual ide disks, 2x mgmt & 2x 4port Cisco sw ) and am quite frankly going in circles!
The rack will also host a 3550 swith, Vyatta fw ( dl360 ) and a TFT slide out job.
Now using the IBM calc i'm getting figures of around 20amps? Which sounds fair enough for 20servers, but is this correct and would have been better off with a mix of 1u's and 2u's?
Seems the cost saving on the blades will be outdone on the power consumption.. if so that's the last time i watch an IBM tv add!
I have just removed my servers and switch from a data centre in london only to find that for the last 6 months since I last visited the data centre some one has had one of there switches plugged into my power strip. When I approached the provider about this they claimed it would have not affected my charges for power consumption because they were monitoring the power of each server.
Is this possible for a provider to monitor the power for each single server on a power strip that I own? or are they just trying to get them selves out of trouble for the fact they have been over charging me for power for the last 6 months?
I maybe interested in co-locating a server but looking from the power max for a 1U server of around 0.3Amps I'm wondering if it will be easy.
Doing the equation 0.3 * 240 gives me 72watts I believe. (Where 240 is the voltage for the UK). So with this, it doesn't give me much choice considering most processors run around 90watts and that doesn't leave any room for the power from hard drives and memory. Does anyone know what the average power consumption is for hard drives and memory?
I'm not looking for a really power system, but I would like something that if I pull it out of co-location that I can still use it one way or another. So was looking at an AMD Athlon 64 X2 where there is a 34watt version that is seemingly discontinued. Or use an AMD Turion X2, which are again hard to find, with a mini-itx board. Running with the mini-itx board, there is also the Intel Core 2 Duo which I can get quite easily.
Does anyone else co-locate and how to you manage the specification?
at building 10 new servers to sell to our customers as dedis but are I am unsure of how power hungry the processors are.
The two options I am looking at are:
# E6600/E6400 Core2Duo Processor # AMD X2 Energy Efficant 5000/4800/4600 Range
All the same setups are using just the one harddrive (SATA2 80gb) with 1GB RAM all on a budget motherboard. While I have seen Heavily used Core2Duo systems pull over 0.7amps (with 4gb ram and 2 hard drives) I am unsure which processor setup will use the less ampage. We are running these at 230v so had anyone got any ideas how much ampage these may pull and which would use the least ammount of power?
Recently Rackspace experienced an outage caused by their generators. I would not open this if its wasnt because in the last 10 years everytime there is a power outage on a DC the generators failed. (this is not a rackspace post, i just took 1 of 100 examples)
I dont want to mention names but I have seen plenty of DCs on which generators fail when the task is loaded to them. Some people said its because the maintaince is expensive and they dont do it on time.
Thats not always the case as I have seen DCs which made their maintainces on shape and time and they also had problems.
Now my question is if putting up generators costs so much money and we see them fail over and over again, are they up the task and worth the investment?
We know network only needs a short time without power and all is lost. This topic is ratter an approach on how to best handle power loads. Im sure there must be some way to actually be sure that when power FAILS, generators will keep up the task. The most sure testing would be to actually shift load to the generators every some months to test them but that would be plain Crazy on a production datacenter. I see that most outages have always the same guilty gear, generators...
Lets take another example, Gmail recently failed big time, because some Google DCs dont have chillers to keep the DC from getting hot (New Europe DC) for example. On hot days they shift the load to other DCs and turn the DC off. That of course failed too on a real scenario. Now Google is not a standard DC, but if they keep such a risky scenario in place they must have a sure way that power will keep up when the load is shifted and there is a big peak.
Will there be a better solution in the next 10 years for power or are we going to keep hoping generators dont fail exactly when we need them the most. Maybe we all should have UPS (plenty)on a rack to keep the power until the DC brings up generators, but thats useless if the network is affected as well and it always is.
I have a client which run an active CMS and the server is utilizing the swap space at the moment. It is running on 6GB memory and a Xeon processor now. Is there anything that I could do before going for hardware upgrade? The apache and mysql keep exhausting the memory during peak hours.
I recently bought a 2nd hand HP/Compaq ProLiant DL360 G3.
I've been checking some places to co-locate, rapidswitch & racksrv both look good but I'm still trying to figure out how much my peak power usage is during start up.
I've been googling to try and find out how, but I have had no luck.
So basically, my question is, How can I measure the peak power usage(in amps) during start up?
Sorry if this has already been asked(I did do a search but didn't find anything relevent).
the specs are: Processor: 2 x Xeon 2.8GHz Memory: 1.5GB RAM (looking to upgrade to 3GB) Hard Drive: HP 36.4GB Ultra320 10K SCSI Hot Swap
I'm thinking about setting up a forum for my school, and I thought it would be better to go with a Vbulletin or IPB script for the forum. I don't really want to buy a lifetime license, so I looked at the IPB official hosting section and I have some questions. Has anyone used them and know how good their hosting is?
My nearest major city is Manchester, so naturally I'm looking for rackspace in the region.
Unless anyone has better suggestions, I'm thinking of going with NorthernColo. They start at £50/month but jump to £70/month if you draw more than 1A of current.
If my basic physics is anything to go by, 0.5A at our 240V means a maximum server power rating of 120 watts.
...are there any dual-core / 2GB RAM box configurations which consume less than 300W thesedays? My own USB mouse for my laptop consumes 50mA.
Otherwise I'm begining to think of their 0.5A pricing as being a bit of a scam, since the 1A price also pays for 2U worth of space.
Is there any such thing as a fused power cord that would trip the offending device instead of everything on the UPS outlet? The only ones I can find are UK form factor.
The company I work for is starting to have some cooling issues in our server area. We have basically doubled our server equipment in the room without upgrading the air conditioning unit in the room. Temperatures are getting really high in the room (sometimes reaching 85F which is just WRONG!) and we are trying to get it replaced.
Since my boss is the one making decisions I thought I would try to help him out a little bit with some of the information/calculations he needs.
My questions are:
1. When calculating watts for a redundant power supply do you double what the power supply is rated for? So on one Dell PowerEdge 2950 it shows that I have a 750W redundant supply. Would that be 1500 Watts?
2. Do you calculate your cooling needs for max wattage or do you calculate a percentage of what each power supply is rated for?
3. What percentage would you multiply your final total Watts by to accommodate possible future additions? 10%? 25%?
We currently have: 2x PowerEdge 2950 - 750W Redundant 1x PowerEdge 1950 - 670W Redundant 2x PowerVault NX 1950 - 670W Redundant 1x PowerVault MD3000 3x APC Smart UPS 3000 1x APC Smart UPS 1400 2x PowerConnect 6224 2x PowerConnect RPS-600 3x PowerConnect 5324 1x Cisco 2801 1x Cisco 2821 3x Unknown wattage servers redundant power(All the same specs) 1x Unknown wattage server redundant power 1x Unknown wattage single power supply Then a few other small devices like external modems, KVM and a small-mid sized phone system.
I am not an electrical expert but I am calculating that it is going to be about 10,000 - 12,000 Watts?
When mysql server is overloaded, Queries are already optimized, sql configuration is already optimized, already upgraded to good server (quad core, 8gb ram and what not) and yet still not enough (high server load).
