Upgrading the office servers

Upgrading the office servers. These are actually more effort than my production servers, which have remote consoles.

In our production environment, everything is installed from FAI and git - literally <10 minutes from blank machine to production-ready (as in, press one button to start fully-configured production services and start taking traffic).

In the office we have three hand-installed squeeze machines. Its a crappy way to manage things. So I’m rebuilding them as a miniature “datacentre” (currently our only concept of “group of servers in a location”).

Unfortunately, the one limitation we have is that each datacentre has to have a “root” server which does a bunch of stuff to support the other machines, included serving DHCP, NFS and FAI. So here you’re seeing a hand-constructed FAI on one of the other machines being used to install the root server. Once its up, I’ll install the other ones properly.

This is it booting but failing to mount the NFS, then me checking MAC and IP addresses before rebooting. It was easily fixed at least :)