Linux-Blog 3.0

The OpenSSI group has done the bulk of their development on RedHat Linux. OpenSSI currently supports Fedora Core 2 and 3, as well as a deprecated version for RH9. Additionally, OpenSSI is distributed for Knoppix 3.6 and Debian Sarge. Others in the community are working with SuSe 9.x, but there's no official distro out for SuSe as of now.

I wanted to stay away from the source and use a packaged version of OpenSSI, so that put the choice down to FC or Debian. I've never been a big fan of RedHat--I've used SuSe for years now, and am comfortable with it. That meant going with Debian.

I downloaded the ISOs for Sarge from debian.org, burned the CDs, put in the first one, and fired up snowmane. Instead of a Linux boot/install screen, I saw Win2K come up (the seller left winders on to show that the system boots). Ugh, problem with the CD. Jumping back to hasufel, my XP workstation, I made the three-floppy install set needed to fire up Sarge. I used rawrite for windows (rwwrtwin.exe) to create the floppies and went back to snowmane. The boot floppy started fine, led to the kernel floppy, then the driver floppy, which mounted the CD. Go figure, I'm not going to puzzle out the boot issue on a low-rent machine, I'm just gonna boot it.

In terms of file system configuration, the box had W2K on it, so I let Sarge blow away the internal drive. The attached firewire drive was from an older box runing SuSe8, and was formatted as a reiserfs, so I let Sarg blow that one away as well.

I did a straightforward Debian install, having it install apache, BIND, NFS, samba, and local mail. No desktop stuff, no surprises for now, since the cluster is going to deprecate some things and modify others. Once the install was complete, the system re-booted, and I was logged in as root at the console, I manually did an apt-get to install sshd, and re-configured the network from the default DHCP setup the installation routine used to a static IP config for the two ethernet interfaces.

(rant)Side digresson here: One of the more frustrating things about shifting gears between flavors of UNIX has always been the use of each system's high-level utilities. If you're ever interviewing a UNIX/Linux geek for a job, don't worry that they've only used RedHat most of their career and you're a SuSe shop, or you've got the chance to hire a FreeBSD geek for your HP-UX shop. Just give the new guy a couple of weeks and a test box to play with your environment's high-level config stuff. Let him transition his thinking from YAST to sysinstall. Give him a chance to play with ifdown and ifup safely. Factor it into the new employee's start-up time. In the training biz, our best customers were the employers who know that it's OK to hire a Solaris geek for a Tru64 gig if you send them for a week to a System Administration class.(/rant)

OK, this is Debian, so that means ifdown/ifup, and the config file they use.

Here's what the /etc/network/interfaces file looks like:

snowmane:/mnt/fw# cat /etc/network/interfaces # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
broadcast 10.0.0.255
dns-search muffeletta.com
dns-nameservers 68.1.16.100 68.1.16.101
# The cluster interconnect interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 11.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 11.0.0.255

Once the file was edited, I did:

# ifdown eth0
# ifup eth0
# ifup eth1

Since eth1 didn't exist in the config until I edited the /etc/network/interfaces file, there was no need to bring it down.

Time to switch back to hasufel and do the rest via ssh, since sitting at my desk is easier than standing in front of the rack. OK, putty connects with 10.0.0.2 on the office LAN no problem. Let's verify eth1 while we're at it:

snowmane:/home/edward# ping 11.0.0.1
PING 11.0.0.1 (11.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 11.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.101 ms
64 bytes from 11.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.021 ms
64 bytes from 11.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.020 ms
64 bytes from 11.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.018 ms

--- 11.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 2997ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.018/0.040/0.101/0.035 ms
snowmane:/home/edward#

OK, we'll come back to that interface later.

Next step was to confirm that the firewire drive was attached and mount it:

# mkdir /mnt/fw
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/fw
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Huh? SCSI bus weirdness, no doubt. We always tell TruCluster students that, if you can get the shared SCSI bus to work, whether it was copper or fibre, you've done 80% of the class. I'm taking the same attitude here.

I remembered that Kurt Garloff from SuSe has a neat script to re-scan the scsi bus on his personal website. It should work OK on Sarge, so here goes. I put the script on snowmane, in /usr/local/bin, made it executable, and ran it:

# chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/rescan-scsi-bus.sh
# cd /usr/local/bin
snowmane:/usr/local/bin# ./rescan-scsi-bus.sh
Host adapter 1 (ide-scsi) found.
Host adapter 0 (sbp2_0) found.
Scanning hosts 1 0 channels 0 for
SCSI target IDs 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 , LUNs 0
Scanning for device 1 0 0 0 ...
OLD: Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: E-IDE Model: CD-ROM 52X/AKH Rev: A63
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Scanning for device 0 0 0 0 ...
OLD: Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: QUANTUM Model: FIREBALLP AS20.5 Rev: 0.01
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
0 new device(s) found.
0 device(s) removed.

snowmane:/usr/local/bin#

Lo and behold, the 20GB drive is now visible on the bus. Let's try the mount again:

snowmane:/usr/local/bin# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/fw
snowmane:/usr/local/bin# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 9471868 740936 8249788 9% /
tmpfs 63724 0 63724 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 19378244 131212 18262652 1% /mnt/fw
snowmane:/usr/local/bin#

Voila, we have an external drive with an ext3 filesystem, since that's what we told the install program to put there.

Allright, we have a box with a base OS installed and set up, now we can proceed to the cluster install.

Next - OpenSSI initial install.