May 07, 2005

NFS problem fixed

I fixed the NFS problem on image that Charlie noticed. It turns out that nfs-utils links against the kernel, and something got munged when I downgraded the kernel. I rebuilt nfs-utils from source, and it works now.

Posted by skylar at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

Jabber

I've got Jabber configured on image. I just have to work out some kinks wrt authentication.

Posted by skylar at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2005

Digi Driver and Software

I've gotten the Digi driver and software installed on Image.

For future reference, the files and documentation can be found at http://www.digi.com/support/productdetl.jsp?pid=2253&osvid=103 This is the download site for Fedora Core 2 packages, although there are packages for numerous Unices, minus *BSD.

I downloaded the kernel source from Red Hat because the documentation claimed to need it, and I followed the instructions about cleaning the version files (although the would have already been clean since it was a new download). So I guess they were just linking against it.

I installed using the SRPM since this is an RPM based distro. After doing the rpmbuild in /usr/src, the RPM it built was placed in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386. I then installed this with rpm.

I could go on longer, but I'd just be reading the documentation.

Posted by arvesda at 08:15 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2004

MRTG

I've gotten MRTG running on image, and am monitoring both the Cisco routers and both the Extreme switches. Go to mrtg.cs.earlham.edu to see the graphs.

Posted by skylar at 09:19 PM | Comments (1)

October 11, 2004

SCSI card

I've moved image's Ultra3 SCSI card into quark, to accomdate our plan (hope? dream?) of having our tape backup gear hook directly up to quark. All appears to be good. Kudos to Matt Hogan in helping me get quark in and out of the rack.

Posted by skylar at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2004

Backup scheme

Here is the procedure for doing an image dump to quarkprime's DDS-III drive:

1. Label a fresh DDS-III tape with the current month.
2. Pop it in quarkprime's DDS-III drive.
3. Run this command on quarkprime as root:

RSH=/usr/bin/ssh dump 0aun -f 192.168.1.2:/dev/sa0 /var/lib/systemimager/

Posted by skylar at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2004

Nagios

I've successfully moved Nagios from millie to image, leaving millie available for cluster work. I installed all the plugins from RPMs, and then copied all the configuration stuff to image. I made sure to change the paths where necessary.

Posted by skylar at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2004

FAH

I've restored FAH on image from backup. It appeared to have gotten lost in the shuffle.

Posted by skylar at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2004

Working!

Image is now working. Apparently rsync requires a group with the ID 'root' to have rsync work, so I created that and updateclient is now working on the ACLs.

Posted by skylar at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2004

Image/acl0

I modified Quark's dhcpd.conf so that option-100 points to the new image's IP address. I then imaged ACL0. It ran into a problem in not being able to find /usr/share/systemimager/boot, which it needs to boot off of, so I scp'ed the files over from the new image. The image then went smoothly, except for one error:
2004/06/25 13:53:46 [5096] rsync on scripts/hosts from acl0.cs.earlham.edu (159.28.230.10)
2004/06/25 13:53:46 [5096] link_stat "hosts" (in scripts) failed: No such file or directory
2004/06/25 13:53:46 [5096] rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(397)

I don't have time to look into this further, but I'm guessing that this is a configuration problem on the new image.

Posted by arvesda at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2004

The new image

Well, I installed Fedora Core 2 on Quarkprime this morning as the first step in our transition of swapping Q' and image. I did an NFS install off of office0, and it was fast and painless. The entire installation was pretty much a breeze. Some things I should point out about the install:

  • The partitioning is basically with / on the entire first drive, and /var/lib/systemimager on the second. I thought this was reasonable at the time, but looking at it now, the current image server has a lot more space in its /var/lib/systemimager partition
  • I was unsure whether the Poweredge has RAID or not. I'm guessing it does, since it has hot-swappable drives, but from what I've read about that, that seems to be a feature found on hardware RAID cards (which I'm guessing we have)
  • I chose the setting of 'No firewall' mainly because I am not familiar with the firewall settings on Linux. I thought that it might mess up the entire imaging process if it blocked some ports, so the firewall is disabled at the moment.
  • GRUB is the current bootloader. There was no choice for LILO, but GRUB's fairly painless once you understand it's hard drive naming convention.

    The aftermath:

  • I tried doing the hot-swappable hard drive thing, and it didn't work. I got SCSI read access failed errors, and errors about writing to the journal. Restarting seemed to clean it up.
  • I had a hell of a lot of trouble finding out where to set the hostname and NIS domainname once you exit the install. The way RedHat/Fedora handles initscrips bugs me. I still don't know how to make it reset the hostname without having to reset the box.
  • The current hostname is image.cs.earlham.edu, but its IP is still 159.28.230.91 (Quarkprime's)
  • /clients is mounted and NIS is working. Sudo seems to be working as well. I had to edit the /etc/group file manually...I thought this was one of the files that NIS took care of. (?)
  • I haven't messed with any of Quark's DNS settings yet. I figured I'd make sure everything is working well, and probably finish the image -> Q' transition before changing the IPs.

    Systemimager

  • Systemimager is installed, and ready to go (I think), but I don't really know how to use it. I popped the CD into ACL0, hoping that it might ask me the hostname or IP of the image server, but it's completely automatic. So....acl0 is getting reimaged right now off of the old image server.

    Posted by arvesda at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

    • May 28, 2004

    OpenSSL and OpenSSH

    While I was upgrading everything else, I thought I might as well upgrade image, to keep things consistent. It now has OpenSSL 0.9.7d and OpenSSH 3.8p1.

    Posted by skylar at 04:26 AM | Comments (0)

    February 25, 2004

    Kernel upgrade

    I've upgraded image, backup, and proto to kernel 2.4.25. No problems detected thus far.

    Posted by skylar at 05:21 AM | Comments (171)

    November 21, 2003

    Hard drive failure

    image's system drive failed today, probably due to spindle failure. I've swapped an identical drive, and have installed Red Hat 9. Hassan has installed the C3 tools, SystemImager and setup passwordless authentication to the ACL machines. I have also installed another 18GB IBM UltraStar, and have setup software RAID 0 between the previous UltraStar and the new UltraStar. There are some cooling issues that still need to be resolved before the machine can be moved back into the rack.

    Posted by skylar at 12:10 AM | Comments (29)