my exciting evening.

[solipsistnation]

Tonight I shall go see a movie with awfief and then I shall return to WPI for a lovely midnight maintenance.

I shall be backing up everybody's email, reformatting the disk with a journalling file system, and putting everyone's mail back.

This begins at midnight. The backup will take approximately 1.5 hours. Recreating the two disks that need to be rebuild will take approximately 30 seconds. Restoring the backups will take another 1.5 hours.

In the meantime, I will be reinstalling the McAfee virus scanner, a process which takes approximately 10 minutes and which a trained monkey could do.

Otherwise, from midnight until 3:00 or 5:00am eastern time, I will be hanging out in the server room.

If anyone is online and would like to help amuse me, I will attempt to be on AIM the whole time.

Comments

[lyadann.livejournal.com]

That sounds miserable and while I have no intention of being awake during that time window, if I am, I'll come chat. :)

[saintnobody.livejournal.com]

that's a lotta mail...

just out of curiosity, what file system is it on now, and what file system are you going to?

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

ext2 to reiserfs.

and don't talk to me about ext3. :P

[saintnobody.livejournal.com]

ext3 was easy to set up from my old ext2 partitions, so i use it at home, but i freely admit that it's a hack.

and iirc, reiser consistently kicks its ass in the benchmarks, so you'll get no complaints from me for choosing reiserfs for a production environment.

(although there were some issues a while back in the linux kernel drivers stemming from the fact that reiser was designed as a general purpose file system, and not specifically designed to have some of the same limitations as the linux kernel itself.)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yup. For this, I think we'll gain major performance, too, since the way the mail server stores mail is as individual messages in individual files... So, TONS of little files. Counted at 1.5million on the current system...

[mephron]

OOK! ook aaaa oook ook oooook!!!!

[awfief.livejournal.com]

heh. I'm doing OS patching tomomrrow night at midnight. We shoulda coordinated.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Will you at least have cheese?

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Maybe.

I'll definitely have coffee, I can tell you.