Shutdown postmortem, wikilove

Last night's shutdown went...okay. The turning-off-servers part went well, and I was able to do it all in less than half an hour -- not bad for an orderly shutdown. Turning things on went less well. Partly it's because I should be using IPMI commands instead of trying to SSH to the various ILOMs/DRACs and running commands; I kept getting error messages from Fab even though I could run the commands by hand just fine.

Partly, though, it's because about 80% of the Sun ILOMs needed to be rebooted in order to control the machines, report power status correctly, get a console, etc. That's annoying. In all other respects they're the most consistently good of their sort -- they work right off the bat, they don't crap out and drop off the network (hell, Dell) and they're simple. But they seem to get wedged, and I have to SSH in as "sunservice" (it's actually Linux under the hood -- shhhh) and forcibly reboot them.

And there's the usual assortment of hardware problems/irritations that the first reboot in a few months brings to light, like the second machine in a week with a possibly failing hard drive -- complicated, of course, by not having the tool around to actually query the RAID card to see how things are going. Worryingly, a reboot made (reporting of) the problem disappear. Good, I need another project.

In other news: I've had to abandon my brief infatuation with gitit, a git-based wiki written in Haskell. It is nearly perfect, but its syntax for tables -- based on Pandoc's extension of Markdown -- is bad, non-Orgmode compatible (Orgmode tables are SO AWESOME), and best ignored in favour of direct HTML. And when editing HTML for tables becomes your best option, I'm (sadly, regretfully, heartbreakingly) outta here. So for now, for $WORK, I'm sticking with Foswiki and my awful hack of a Bash function for editing it with Emacs:

wen () {

WIKIPAGE=${@};
sudo chown apache:wheel $WIKIPAGE ${WIKIPAGE},v;
sudo chmod 775 $WIKIPAGE ${WIKIPAGE},v;
rcs -l $WIKIPAGE;
$EDITOR $WIKIPAGE;
ci -mnone -t-none -u $WIKIPAGE;
sudo chown apache:wheel $WIKIPAGE ${WIKIPAGE},v;
sudo chmod 775 $WIKIPAGE ${WIKIPAGE},v

}

The chown/chmod (and thus the sudo) are needed to maintain web-editability for the pages...not that I use them very often, but for an eventual successor/coworker. I really miss Confluence-mode.