the Trailer Journal

Maintained by Abby Ge.

If you don't find something you are looking for or you have something that should be posted send me email.

6/11 - 6/17

Wrote a script to generate user info for cleaning purpose, including last interactive access, last mail access, disk usage on /clients and /var/mail

view the report

6/18 - 6/21

Network capacity through ftp

view the report

Things to know about running proftpd over crossover cable

  1. Disable DHCP, setup static IP/Name pair on the local machines
  2. Change /etc/proftpd.conf to run proftpd as a standalone daemon
  3. Insert the foreign IP/Name entry in the local /etc/hosts file
  4. Be careful of the firewall issue

Got Folding@Home to run under Debian. Migrated to all 16 Athena machines. User name: athenaX (Earlham CS)

See the team statiscs

See individual machine statistics

6/25 - 6/29

  1. Wrote jobmon.pl to monitor processes on clusters; inserted /root/jobmon.pl -p fahclient in /etc/crontab

    Add "proc ./fahclient" in the snmpd.conf file to tell snmpd to watch for the processes we care about. To add extra MIBS, we need to 1), add the text file in the MIBS directory; 2) export the environment variable MIBS to load the additonal mibs

  2. Prove the max capacity of the swtich
  3. Check Quark's health. Make sure no mystrious process is running
  4. Prove the accuracy of IOStone.

6/30-7/6

Figured out how to double check the numeric file nodes and text file name are the same: 

psql -d test-pvfs
\d pg_class
select relname,relfilenode from pg_class where relname='a100000';

Make the diskIO mib work under FreeBSD

Clean up dba code using qq::

7/8-7/14

Make the diskIO mib work under FreeBSD

Clean up dba code using qq::

Switch backbone capacity test - without VLAN

Modify the fahclient script to start logging

7/16-7/20

Got diskIO mib to work!!! - continue to work on configure and getting ready to submit the patch to the snmp group

CVS-HOW-TO.txt

Submitted patched diskio.c to net-snmp group, use the following line to configure snmp: ./configure --with-mib-modules="net-snmp/diskio" --with-ldflags="-ldevstat"

Installed Postgres-7.1.2 on Quark. Note for future: backup up existing databases before the upgrade with pg_dump

7/21-7/26

Did the switch testing. View the report

Finished installing Postgres. A small note

Figure out whether the PCI bus or the IDE disk is the limiting factor of the Athena cluster

Installed Pg.pm and DBI/DBD for Postgres, remember to put 

ldconfig -m /etc/ld-elf.conf
in /etc/rc.local for FreeBSD

7/28-8/3

Did more testing on the switch with the athena cluster. It turned out that memory swapping was what slowed down the network traffic. View the updated report. Here is a little document describing how to do the test with ftp.

8/6-8/11

Adding logging to jobmon.pl

Learned about VPN. In a nutshell, it's a security feature that builds a virtual private network over internet, so that users can get rid of the modem pool.

Quick and dirty fix for the trailing domainname problem: turn off the search option by putting .nslookuprc containing "set nosea" in homedirectory

Questions about dd/iostone 

	1) dd_file.pl goes file system
	2) Why fork - $total_time doesn't carry back to the parent process
	3) dd - I/O error?

7/28-8/3