Power outage

Last Saturday there was a scheduled power outage.

For admins, rule number one is to make sure your servers are configured to come back on when power resumes. This usually involves a switch in the BIOS and of course a simple test.

Office UPS are useless in such situations as they rarely cover the length of the outage.

It is good to have lots of servers in order to distribute services. So if one machine goes down it isn’t the end of the world. However in hybrid networks where samba and nfs run together strange problems can result. NFS and Samba are usually configured to automatically try remount, but sometimes esp. on old servers this isn’t the case. So sometimes the way machines come online, is something to worry about.

I experienced a strange mount: RPC: Program not registered error this morning. Some people suggested it is some race condition between samba and nfs. I fixed it by tailing the logs and retrying the mount. It seemed to want non-IP entries in the /etc/exports for some odd reason. 192.168.0.* should be OK. Anyway I played dumb, added the duplicated entries. Restarted. Remounted and everything was back online at last on one of “those” Monday mornings.

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