November 2015

Out-of-band access to wiki server

It hadn’t been possible to access the wiki server’s management card, which allows “out-of-band” control over the server to power it up, shut it down, get console access and other important things. This turned out to have been unplugged, and was fixed at the last visit to IC.

BIOS update to grisu

Grisu, the new aerial imagery server, needed a BIOS update. This was done remotely.

Grisu heatsink poorly fitted

The heatsink on the 2nd CPU of the aerial imagery server was ineffective, and it was suspected that this was due to poor thermal paste application. This turned out to be true - the thermal paste was completely dry. It was applied and fitted, but it didn’t have much effect on CPU2’s temperatures.

Machines donated from IC HPC lab

Several quad-node high-density servers were donated by IC (thanks!) to OSM. Many of these machines had failed or failing disks, power supplies and possibly other components. These were moved from IC to be checked and refurbished ready for future use.

New nominatim machine

A new machine for running Nominatim was delivered, dulcy. It was racked up and installed at IC. This machine has NVMe disks, which are like SSDs directly attached to the PCIe bus, and early performance tests are looking good.