Yearly Archives: 2010

Grandma Betka

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Rest in peace, you are and will be missed.

HOOPESTON – Florence E. “Floss” (Nelson) Betka, 89, of Hoopeston passed away at 6:05 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010, at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana.

Mrs. Betka was born on Dec. 6, 1921, in Granite City, the daughter of James E. and Florence (Story) Nelson. On Sept. 20, 1946, she married Kenneth Betka. Her husband preceded her in death on April 4, 2006.

Floss is survived by two daughters, Sue Betka of Washington, D.C., and Jean (Tom) Skoza of Champaign; one son, Bill (Melva) Betka of Cissna Park; three grandchildren, Corey (Alisha) Betka of Champaign and Rachel and Warren Skoza of Champaign; two great-grandsons, Robin and Jonathan Betka of Champaign; and two sisters-in-law, Kathryn Nelson of St. Louis and Margaret Hurliman of Martinton.

She was preceded in death by her parents; her husband; a son, Robert; a daughter, Lois; three brothers, Willie, Clyde and Harold Nelson; and a sister, Selma Nelson.

Mrs. Betka graduated from Eastern Illinois University and taught at the East Lynn High School for several years. She and her husband lived on the centennial family farm for nearly 46 years.

Floss also taught Sunday school for the high school children at the East Lynn United Methodist Church. She was also a homemaker who especially enjoyed tatting, sewing, crocheting, quilting, reading and sports.

Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. Monday, Dec. 27, 2010, at the Anderson Funeral Home, 427 E. Main St., Hoopeston, with the Rev. Janet Eggleston officiating. Burial will be at East Lynn Cemetery, East Lynn.

Visitation will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, Dec. 27, 2010, at the Anderson Funeral Home in Hoopeston.

Doctor visits and first Hospital Stay

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So, Jonathan had an elevated bilirubin level while he was still in the hospital, so we had our first doctor visit the day after discharge. His level was still high, so we got another visit for the next day. At that second visit, his bilirubin was even higher, so he was admitted to Pediatrics for a 12 hour stay under a Bili light. He had dropped to 7 lbs even before being admitted, but is up to 7 lbs 1 oz by discharge.

He’s home now and seems to be feeling, eating and pooing much better.

VMware vSphere 4 Environments

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I was on furlough when I started this entry, so I was not supposed to think about work more than 4 days that week, and never in more than 8 hours in one day. So, a summary of what I’ve been doing the last few months…

Housing
New ESX Cluster

  • New Hardware and a new cluster – Housing has added 2 Dell PowerEdge R710s and an additional HP EVA 4400 SAN to be our “Production” virtualization environment. (Production is a bit of a misnomer, as we’ve had production class virtual machines for over a year.)
  • Upgrading the existing ESX 3.5 nodes to ESX 4 is on the schedule for later this semester or early in the summer. To make the reinstall easier, I’ve scripted out the installs just about as much as possible using some excellent examples: Cylindric.net and Ubiquitous Talk.
  • We are working on a fairly aggressive plan to virtualize or retire our remaining test and development physical servers, hopefully to be completed by mid-summer. This should allow us to retire another 5-10 2U Dell 2650, 2850 or 2950 servers. Any new systems we are bringing online are being virtualized unless the vendor refuses to support it.
  • I’ve reduced 5 partially populated racks down to 2 fully populated racks and another 2 less full racks. The key to increasing our density was installing 208V power and in-rack UPSes and PDUs. (Yes, it’s not as efficient as whole room UPS, but it’s better than the 110V solution we had before.) I’d like to repeat this work in our other “data center”, but I’m sure you’ve heard about the campus budget situation, so it’s on hold.

Hoopeston Schools

  • With the knowledge and scripting that I learned at the day job, I’ve started on upgrading our two ESX 3.5 nodes to ESX4. By leaving the upgraded node in Evaluation mode, I’m able to use Storage vMotion for migrating running VMs across storage locations.
  • Shared storage is currently powered by a pair of OpenFiler nodes in an HA/DRBD cluster. I followed a couple of excellent howtos: TheMesh.org and HowtoForge. I’m not completely happy with the underlying OS and package management that comes along with OpenFiler, so the plan is to reinstall the nodes with CentOS and recreate the cluster.