Blogs of the IT Team

A recent challenge facing us at SPRI (Scott Polar Research Institute) was the transfer of the entire library IT infrastructure from one network to another. While a number of aspects of the move (once the processes were worked out) were relatively straightforward, there were a few tricky aspects as well. Most of this centred around the library’s cataloguing system, Muscat a DOS (yes that’s right) program dating back to the early 1990’s. The program lived on a networked share and the database itself was on another. The plan was to leave well enough alone and move the whole thing over as it stood…
 
The library consists of 5 staff members and 8 bibliographers that used Muscat on a day to day basis. This also required careful organisation and two days were booked three weeks in advance so to cause as little inconvenience as possible to the Muscat users both during and after the move. In addition to the Muscat shares, all user accounts were moved to the new network as were two other file shares and two networked printers. All 9 staff PCs were rinsed and replaced with 64 bit Windows 7.
What made this whole project do-able, was two tools we use on a routine basis; pxe and wpkg.  Pxe  runs unattended system installs while wpkg installs applications – again unattended, but also remotely (if need be).  Very handy!  Still a very busy two days but on the next day, all staff were able to login to the new system and view/edit Muscat records.
 
The final phase is to rinse and replace 5 catalogue kiosk computers in the library and it is anticipated that this will be completed around the end of next week.

Do you talk in your sleep?

It’s been a busy week and about 5pm tonight, we were finishing off bouncing some ideas round and contemplating going to the welcome party for new students. Then the new fileserver dropped offline. Completely.

These new file-servers are whizzy, expensive boxes with lots of storage. They’ve been rock solid through all the testing we’ve been able to throw at them. To discover that the live server had become un-contactable was disturbing to say the least. We investigated. And investigated. We would restart one, walk to the other server room to restart the other and find the first had gone off-line before we got to the second. We googled. We read manual pages. Everything pointed to something on the network causing these machines to lose track of what was happening.

We monitored the network – lots of data on the network which didn’t conform to any known standard. It came in bursts of about fifteen or twenty seconds of junk then a pause for a while. We started disconnecting parts of the network to track down the source, one of us frantically typing commands with the other monitoring the flow of junk.

After a couple of false starts, we found the right area of the building and went in search of this errant machine. Perhaps something had been taken over by a particularly nasty virus? Or some experiment control system had been infected by a trojan even now attempting to disrupt nuclear centrifuges. Or an old machine was emitting rubbish as the dying gasp of an aged network card.

What we weren’t expecting was a nice, new, shiny PC in sleep mode. Sending a stream of utter junk across the network. It’s unplugged now and the network is much quieter. Our fileservers are happy once more.

So if you were at the welcome party, sorry for not joining you. We’ll catch up soon, I hope. And in the meantime, don’t encourage sleep-talking.