Memory Is Here

Finally got the last (physical) piece for the blade servers (120GB RAM [60 x 2GB DIMMs]). I’m a swell counter because I counted them 5 or 6 times, and each time I counted them, I came up with 40, so I thought they shorted me 20 DIMMs for a 10 minutes or so. 🙂

So I was messing around with init.d, and wrote a script for it to automatically start the memcached daemon on boot. No biggie there, but this is a newer init.d than I had worked with in the past, and you can put comments in your script to easily enable/disable it for various run-levels. For example insserv -d memcached will configure init.d for the default run-levels defined within the script. Sweet, that’s pretty handy. I also got rsyncd (along with it’s init.d setup) up and running, so keeping the servers in sync should be cake.

Oh yeah… I had an interesting idea last night when doing all this stuff… why not configure all 10 blade servers identically (for example database servers have Apache and web content locally and web servers have database server processes installed). Then set an environment variable within /etc/profile.local along the lines of SYSTEM_TYPE = "database" (for database server). Then when the server boots, have it automatically configure itself as needed based on the SYSTEM_TYPE. That would make it super easy to change the job of a server on the fly. Just change the SYSTEM_TYPE variable and viola!, a database server could become a web server and added to the web cluster instantly. It would be even more interesting if the servers all monitored themselves, and if they were under heavy web load (but light on database), have one of the database servers automatically reset it’s SYSTEM_TYPE variable. Basically it would be automatic reallocation of servers/resources to whatever was needed at the time. Could be cool…

I’m an f’ing dork BTW. 🙂

5 thoughts on “Memory Is Here”

  1. Your such a dork. TY god I have no idea wtf your rambling about. Just fire the fucking thing up.

  2. Wouldn’t you have to reboot the server so the changes would be a) Picked up and b) Used to start the relevent services? Unless you had a script shooting down and starting processes based on that var.

    What’re you using to create the cluster anyway? Like, how does a server notify XYZ that it’s available to serve pages

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