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Computers & Biking
Mar. 10th, 2010 11:53 pmA bit of an annoying week computer-wise. I've been down at the Skotos co-lo facility every day this week (thus far) because of problems with RPGnet. Monday morning, RPGnet suffered a pretty major disk crash. One drive was wiped out, another one was damaged, and the RAID failed as a result.
Fortunately, Erwin has done a great job maintaining our backups, so we had the filesystem available from Sunday evening and the databases were pretty much up to date. Unfortunately I haven't done as good of a job making sure that we have parts for what's really our most critical machine (because most other machines, we could move their services to a backup server, but RPGnet does too much for that to be particularly possible), and so we didn't have replacement hard drives on hand. We got things back up and crossed our fingers that the second drive wouldn't fail again before morning.
So Tuesday morning I got delivery of three replacement hard drives and swapped #1 for the dead one. Then once that all got synced into our RAID, this afternoon I swapped #2 for the suspicious one. And now we've got an extra #3 sitting around. We could actually use it as an offsite backup, since it turns out the RPGnet RAID is hot-swappable, but I'm not sure I generally get down to the colo often enough to make that make sense.
So, everything is hopefully dealt with now, but it played havoc with my work schedule this week, taking out much of Monday and a few hours on Tuesday. Today I was able to do the final swap on the way to EndGame, so I got a decent amount of other work done today.
On the good side, I do have cards displaying correctly in High Society (my next iPhone game) as of this afternoon, but there's still lots to be done. Having a functionally complete game by the end of the month is looking less likely, but we'll see how it goes. I'm putting more work in tomorrow, then backing off to other projects on Friday.
I got to bike to EndGame by a very different route today, and that's more exciting (to me at least) than it sounds, as I love seeing different routes and what's on them.
Oakland and Berkeley have kind of weird geographies, because of the way the bay slants off to the sides, and thus I'm sometimes surprised by how close things are to each other when I'd otherwise think they were far. That was the case today when going down to the colo (which is 90-degrees different from how I go to EndGame and about 2.5 miles from my house) only took me a mile out of my way.
The route over to EndGame from the colo was via some bike boulevards in Emeryville, then some routes in Oakland that took me to San Pablo, which heads almost straight to the store. The bike boulevards in Emeryville, which run just east of the railroad tracks, were great. It was a nice, quiet back route that I didn't know about.
But then when I got into Oakland I realized that the area I was cutting through was the kind of empty ex-industrial area in the northwest corner that I don't really like, then past that there's a pretty poor area. I guess I kind of should have guessed it wouldn't be a great area because I was coming up from the wrong side of San Pablo. I was happy when I got through it.
San Pablo was a bit busier than I expected. Then, when you get to historic downtown, the traffic just evaporates and from one block to another inner city becomes affluent. Weird. (It's been a real effort to gentrify historic downtown, mind you, unfortunately set back last year by rioting and by Bush's recession.)
Great gaming at EndGame tonight: Lost Cities, then Ra: The Dice Game, then El Grande. I won the Lost Cities, but I was playing a newbie, and I'm a pretty good shark at the game, so no surprise there. I pretty much sucked at Ra: The Dice Game, and the El Grande game ended 99-98-98 (to something, to something; it was 5 players). I've never seen quite such a close game. I was sadly one of the 98s.
Fortunately, Erwin has done a great job maintaining our backups, so we had the filesystem available from Sunday evening and the databases were pretty much up to date. Unfortunately I haven't done as good of a job making sure that we have parts for what's really our most critical machine (because most other machines, we could move their services to a backup server, but RPGnet does too much for that to be particularly possible), and so we didn't have replacement hard drives on hand. We got things back up and crossed our fingers that the second drive wouldn't fail again before morning.
So Tuesday morning I got delivery of three replacement hard drives and swapped #1 for the dead one. Then once that all got synced into our RAID, this afternoon I swapped #2 for the suspicious one. And now we've got an extra #3 sitting around. We could actually use it as an offsite backup, since it turns out the RPGnet RAID is hot-swappable, but I'm not sure I generally get down to the colo often enough to make that make sense.
So, everything is hopefully dealt with now, but it played havoc with my work schedule this week, taking out much of Monday and a few hours on Tuesday. Today I was able to do the final swap on the way to EndGame, so I got a decent amount of other work done today.
On the good side, I do have cards displaying correctly in High Society (my next iPhone game) as of this afternoon, but there's still lots to be done. Having a functionally complete game by the end of the month is looking less likely, but we'll see how it goes. I'm putting more work in tomorrow, then backing off to other projects on Friday.
I got to bike to EndGame by a very different route today, and that's more exciting (to me at least) than it sounds, as I love seeing different routes and what's on them.
Oakland and Berkeley have kind of weird geographies, because of the way the bay slants off to the sides, and thus I'm sometimes surprised by how close things are to each other when I'd otherwise think they were far. That was the case today when going down to the colo (which is 90-degrees different from how I go to EndGame and about 2.5 miles from my house) only took me a mile out of my way.
The route over to EndGame from the colo was via some bike boulevards in Emeryville, then some routes in Oakland that took me to San Pablo, which heads almost straight to the store. The bike boulevards in Emeryville, which run just east of the railroad tracks, were great. It was a nice, quiet back route that I didn't know about.
But then when I got into Oakland I realized that the area I was cutting through was the kind of empty ex-industrial area in the northwest corner that I don't really like, then past that there's a pretty poor area. I guess I kind of should have guessed it wouldn't be a great area because I was coming up from the wrong side of San Pablo. I was happy when I got through it.
San Pablo was a bit busier than I expected. Then, when you get to historic downtown, the traffic just evaporates and from one block to another inner city becomes affluent. Weird. (It's been a real effort to gentrify historic downtown, mind you, unfortunately set back last year by rioting and by Bush's recession.)
Great gaming at EndGame tonight: Lost Cities, then Ra: The Dice Game, then El Grande. I won the Lost Cities, but I was playing a newbie, and I'm a pretty good shark at the game, so no surprise there. I pretty much sucked at Ra: The Dice Game, and the El Grande game ended 99-98-98 (to something, to something; it was 5 players). I've never seen quite such a close game. I was sadly one of the 98s.