[volunteers] qualified success installing new server

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Reiber (reiber at gmail.com):

> Mark Weisler and I installed our new server over at Via.net today!
[...]
> I'm able to contact it via ssh 157.22.20.228

Good job!  Better than you thought, because:

> I got basic networking going by hacking on /etc/network/interfaces
> and /etc/resolv.conf - I'm sure I missed something though, because
> I'm not able to contact it by hostname - brie.svlug.org - only by
> IP address.

That's only because there's no such entry in the svlug.org DNS.  ;->
(More below.)

So, you just did the hard part.  I now get to do the easy part.

> The 1/3 terabyte JBOD drive array didn't come online correctly -
> the server complained about a termination problem when we
> tried to use it... so, for now, the external JBOD drive array is
> mounted in the rack there, but turned off and not plugged into
> the main server.

Not complaining, but:  You would have been better off taking it with
you, so we could connect it to something else and figure out what's
wrong.  With it in the rack, diagnosis can occur only there (or at least 
requires going their before it can start).

> The machine's barely configured right now.  It's got a baseline
> debian install with SSH on top, nothing more.

I'll be taking care of that Real Soon Now.  (It's a busy day, so I'm not
saying right away.  And there's the thrice-accursed BayLISA Board
meeting I have to drag myself to, this evening.)

Anyway:  "brie" and "gruyere" are names not in the DNS.  They exist only
in those machines' local configurations.  That's not a bug; that's a
feature:  We assign roles to machines, and give those _roles_ names in
the DNS, pointing those names to the desired IPs.  That way, we can move
"www" (a role name) from one machine to the other by just editing an "A" 
record in the zonefile, transparently to the user.

We _could_ also put brie.svlug.org and gruyere.svlug.org into the
svlug.org zonefile -- the way somebody did with svlug.svlug.org (the
current production host) -- but that's really a bit pointless.