Linux-Blog 3.0 http://www.linux-blog.com/ Making UNIX and Linux work for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast en Copyright 2008 Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:25:07 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.01 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Walk like an Endymion The Brother Martin High School Marching Band was in three parades this Carnival season. The first two were the Krewe of Caesar, last Saturday in Metairie, and the Krewe of Alla in Algiers last Sunday. Their third parade was last night, the Krewe of Endymion. It's a huge parade, so I figured the best way to see my 8th grade trombone player was to walk with the band as one of their adult escorts.

Endymion first paraded in 1967. At this time, Carnival was nowhere near the huge celebration it is today. Prior to WWII, parades were held by krewes "old-line" organizations made up of members of various downtown luncheon clubs, such as the Boston, Pickwick, and Louisiana Clubs. After the war, however, many New Orleanians felt that if the rich Uptown men could parade, why not them? Endymion joined the ranks of startup krewes when they rolled out from Trafalgar St. onto De Saix Blvd., rolling through Gentilly to downtown. The parade was an unqualified success, and the mostly Ninth Ward men who made up the original krewe soon found that a lot of other men wanted to parade with them. The krewe reached "super krewe" status in the mid-1970s, when the local media began to consider Endymion as an important part of the Carnival package, along with Bacchus and Rex.

Endymion has grown from a neighborhood parade of 70 men rolling mostly through gentilly and Mid City to over 2000 riders and dozens of bands and marching units. My son's band was one of those units last night.

The modern route of Endymion has the parade starting at Marconi Blvd. and City Park Ave. From that step-off point, the parade rolls down Orleans Ave, makes a right-turn onto N. Carrollton, rolls on that street to Canal, where it turns left and rolls down the city's main street until St. Charles Ave. Endymion turns into the CBD there, going up to Lee Circle, rounding Robert Edward's statue. The krewe then makes its way to the Superdome, where its "Extravanga," a huge after-parade party/dance/all night bash is held.

We got to my son's school around 2pm on Saturday afternoon. The boys got changed into their uniforms and loaded up their instruments. We took two school buses over to the staging area on Marconi Blvd., and were out there by 3pm. The krewe had some technical issues getting several of the huge floats from their den in Metairie to the start of the route, so they were late getting started. By 4:45pm, the boys had stepped off into the street on Marconi, in front of the king's float.

Orleans Ave. and Mid City was very happy to see Endymion. This was the first year since the storm that Endymion took its usual route, having been forced to use the Uptown route in 2006 and 2007. With enough of Mid City rebuilt and returned, it was time. And did the neighborhood ever show its appreciation! The crowds were huge, all yelling, cheering, dancing, and clapping. The city had barricaded the Orleans segment of the route, so there were no issues with the crowd interacting with the band.

We turned onto N. Carrollton Ave. around 5:15pm, making our way to Canal St. Things were going fairly well, in spite of the massive size of the parade, until a tractor breakdown behind us forced the front of the parade to stop and wait. We didn't finish the seven blocks from Orleans to Canal for another 45 minutes. It was slow going, but the crowds were glad to have the boys playing. Once we made the turn onto Canal Street, our timing improved greatly. The eight blocks from Carrollton Ave. to Jefferson Davis Pkwy. had heavy crowds who had come out to catch the massive amounts of beads, doubloons, cups and other trinkets Endymion are well-known for throwing.

The make-up of the crowd changed a bit once we passed Jeff Davis, because the neighborhoods that come together in this part of Canal are more Latino and African-American. The white folks from the suburbs usually congregate in the beginning of the Canal leg of the route, so they can make a faster escape home once the parade has passed. The boys received a lot of cheers from the crowd, along with some good-natured taunting from some St. Augustine band alumni (one of their biggest rival schools), as well as from folks at Warren Easton High School, whose band was two floats behind them in the parade.

Once we got to Broad Street, the parade route got a good bit darker, and that's not a reference to the ethnic makeup of the crowd. There were a lot of streetlights out from Broad to Galvez. That's not a problem for the floats with all their fibre-optic and regular electric lights strung from one end to the other. It's not a problem for the flambeaux carriers that were marching in between the band and two lines of "riding Lieutenants" on horseback. Still, there were minimal stops and soon were were past Galvez, walking up to Claiborne Ave.

I don't have many memories of Claiborne Ave. before the construction of I-10 destroyed what was one of the loveliest boulevards in New Orleans. Now, Claiborne Ave. is home to an elevated expressway that has become a boundary between Mid City and Treme. The area under I-10 has also become a "tent city" for hundreds of homeless New Orleanians.

My memories of crossing under Claiborne into downtown from when I was marched in high school and escorted a band as a teacher in the 1980s were totally different from last night. The crowds this were were very light and very white. I noted this and immediately knew the answer--the residents of public housing in the area are still not back from the storm. The crowd from Claiborne to Loyola was incredibly light and consisted mostly of tourists who had made their way from the Quarter out to the parade.

The crowds began to thicken on Canal as we walked from Loyola Ave. to St. Charles. Here the mix of locals and tourists was fun, and the boys enjoyed the cheers and support. We made the right-turn onto St. Charles Ave., passing under the balcony of the Pickwick Club, where the young heirs to wealth and power clapped and waved at the boys. The band was a popular feature in the Central Business District, as we passed reviewing stands set up in front of banks and office buildings. This is the workplace of thousands of middle-class New Orleanians and suburbanites, many of whom sent their boys to Brother Martin, so the band was a big hit.

Of the many places for a band to march in a parade, the boys were in one of the best for both exposure and fun. They were the "king's band," marching right in front of the king's float. There were half a dozen marching units in front of them, including bands from the USMC, Southern University, St. Augustine High, St. Mary's Academy, and Xavier University Prep. Our boys were in between the Queen and the King. In parade terms, these are "quiet" floats. The monarchs don't throw stuff off the floats, and they're not celebreties like the floats carrying The Doobie Brothers and Kevin Costner. The crowd hasn't converged on the float in front, so they don't need to push back to make room for the band; all they have to do is enjoy the music.

We had a few stops in the CBD portion of St. Charles Ave., as the float with Grand Marshal Kevin Costner stopped at Gallier Hall to toast the mayor. We crossed Poydras and entered the Arts District, marching past the massive reviewing stands in front of Lafayette Square, as well as Mayor C. Ray Nagin and his guests at Gallier Hall. Gallier Hall, named after its architect, was City Hall for New Orleans until 1952, when the current municipal government complex Poydras and Loyola was completed. C. Ray wasn't all that impressed with the boys, but nobody's overly impressed with hizzoner these days, either.

The walk through the Arts District was fun, as crowds in stands erected in front of the various architectural and law firms along the avenue cheered the boys on. We reached Tivoli Place (the name of the circle separating the CBD from "Uptown" until the large column with a statue of Robert E. Lee was erected in 1881. We circled the Virginian in a 3/4 clockwise turn, coming out on Howard Avenue, where we marched up to Loyola Ave.

There were still crowds on Loyola, mostly folks from Tulane and LSU Medical Schools. We made our way past the federal buildings and US Post Office, turning to approach Da Dome. Only the band marched into the Extravaganza; us low-rent parents weren't welcome. It wasn't long before the boys circled through the big party, passing by all the teevee cameras and performing four songs for the crowd.

The boys marched around the corner and officially ended the parade at 10:30pm, almost six hours after we stepped out in Mid City. We all made our way back to the buses for the ride back to school.

There are a lot of boys at the school who just don't understand why the band marches in parades. It's a lot of work, but these guys are musicians. They love to play, and this is the biggest audience many of them will every play for, and they love every minute of it!

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2008/02/walk_like_an_endymion.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2008/02/walk_like_an_endymion.html Administrivia Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:25:07 -0600 Moveable Type 4.0 OK, here we go.  There was a minor delay in this project, mainly because I was looking for a new blogging client that would cross-platform between Linux and Windows, but that's a story for another time.  

There are a lot of people fussing about the documentation for MoveableType 4.0.  I'm of two minds on this.  One comment was that the current docs are too sparse, that, for example, the section on mysql was a missed opportunity to expound on the many things one could do with mysql.  I read that comment after successfully setting up mysql 5 with a database that is now ready for MT4, so what the heck, it worked for me.  Sure, the docs could have been fleshed out more, but they worked.

<lj-cut text="if you thought the previous linux-blog posts were geeky, this is worse">

OK, at this point, we've got a working Apache/PHP5 configuration. MySQL is up and running.  The database has been created.  The mod_proxy config is working, and the tarball for MT4 is extracted and set up.  Here we go.

mt-static is the first question/issue.  I did a linux mv to push the mt-static directory under the site's root rather than the cgi-bin directory.  First step complete.

Second step is perl check.  All the modules needed are there.  They bloody well ought to be, since I have all the mods from the abortive scoop config.  Jeez...oh, wait, it says I don have XML::Atom.  I find that atom RSS feeds are solid, so let's add that. 

So, we do a quick:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell;

cpan> install XML::Atom

which demands several prerequisites.  And is taking forever, so we'll move onward.  We'll have an Atom feed by the time this exercise is complete.

Continuing through the install process, next screen looks for the database.  This is easy, name the host, database, user, and password.  I'm no expert DBA (DataBase Analyst), but I'm proficient enough with mysql to be dangerous.  I've managed to create a database, and assign a user account to it.  We can connect to the database, horray, it's done.

Now it's asking for mail configuration.  I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the qmail configuration on shadowfax once upon a time, so this is no problem.  Test e-mail goes off and back, we continue.

wow, that's it?  it wants to save the config.  Now it's asking for my first user.  Successfully completed, and now I'm in the MT4.0 blog screen. 

It worked!







Powered by ScribeFire.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/moveable_type_40.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/moveable_type_40.html Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:44:58 -0600 Re-configuring snowmane We're starting a new consulting project that will require a robust web presence. I spent the better part of two days messing with Scoop, the community-based package that runs sites such as DailyKos and TalkLeft. It's a wicked frustrating package to install, however, requiring Apache 1.3 and a lot of perl mods. After spending hours trying to get the configuration straight, my colleague in this venture, Mark, suggested we just use the community features of MediaWiki.

Good idea, says I. By now, snowmane has Debian 'Etch' installed with Apache 1.3 and all this perl. It was easier to just blow the whole thing away, re-install Debian and go from there.

OK, fresh start, fresh server. I downloaded Apache 2.0.59, MySql 5.0.45 and php 5.2.3, from their sources. Since I've got only one static IP address here at casa de seashell, I set up mod_proxy on the Apache server on shadowfax, so the new domain kicks over to snowmane. That works very nicely.

After getting shadowfax straight, it was time to get snowmane moving. Here are the steps:

1. install Debian with a base configuration.

2. use apt-get to install programming/development tools
3. compile and install Apache using a config for php5.
4. test Apache server, making sure mod_proxy works.
5. install linux binaries for mysql and test
6. compile and install php5

All this is done with minimal complications. Since this is a clean install, I'm going to take a shot at MoveableType 4.0 beta (release candidate 4). Since the wiki will be doing the heavy lifting for this project, if this is a bust this afternoon, I can always front the site from the wiki.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/reconfiguring_snowmane.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/reconfiguring_snowmane.html Debian Linux Sat, 11 Aug 2007 12:31:28 -0600 Ubuntu on hasufel It's time to put aside windows as much as possible. I've finally acquired licenses to VMware workstation and server, so now I can install Linux as the base/boot operating system on hasufel, then install VMware so I can create virtual partitions to play with Mac OS X and also to run Windows for those things that just won't run on Linux.

I downloaded and burned both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu's "feisty feline" release. The original plan was to put the i386 version on arod (just a re-install), and the 64-bit on hasufel. The install went off without a hitch, other than the vaunted "Ubuntu migration wizard" that is supposed to read your "documents and settings" folder on XP and import it to a linux user didn't work. Still, the 64-bit version went on just fine.

I ran into a complication pretty quickly, though. Two of them, actually, almost at the same time. I'm enjoying iGoogle, the customized version of a Google home page. I set it up on Windows the other day, but hit a snag, because Google Talk requires the Flash add-in for Firefox. Unfortunately, Adobe doesn't make a 64-bit version of Flash. Neither does Real make a 64-bit version of their player (nor does the Helix project, which is the open-source media player upon which the linux version of Real is based).

So, I back-tracked to the i386 version for hasufel. Install went smoothly, flash is working nicely, and I'm blogging under linux just fine.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/ubuntu_on_hasufel.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/ubuntu_on_hasufel.html Ubuntu Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:49:21 -0600 seashell software computer update The problem with being on the road so much is that I get torn between wanting to be out in new places and working on new computer projects. Since it's summertime, you can guess which one wins out. There will be plenty of cold evenings when I'm hotel-bound and will play with stuff. So, my Ubuntu installation on arod (my Acer laptop) has languished in default. Since I'm unexpectedly home for a couple of weeks (class cancellations), I decided to get back to it.

I decided to re-do the server rack, so it looks like this:

top shelf is a 1ghz system that has no name. Next to it is roheryn.

Next is snowmane, who is currently running Debian "Etch." Upgrading a 1U machine is trickier than I suspected, so the hardware makeover hasn't happened yet.

Below snowmane is shadowfax. This system is way behind in terms of FreeBSD upgrades. Ideally, what I need to do here is get another 1U or 2U box, install everything fresh, then migrate production over to there. Then I can take the parts originally intended for a snowmane upgrade and do it to shadowfax's box.

Finally off the floor and into the rack is windfola, the proliant behemoth. He's also running Debian, and now that I have VMware server, that project will go forward.

On the desk are three computers at the moment, hasufel, arod, and stybba. hasufel has just been upgraded to Ubuntu Feisty, dual-boot with XP Media center. arod is dual-boot Ubuntu Feisty and XP Tablet Edition, and stybba is exclusively XP. stybba runs soulseek peer-to-peer file sharing, and downloads files from USENET binaries groups.

First project, Ubuntu on Hasufel.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/seashell_software_computer_upd.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/08/seashell_software_computer_upd.html Ubuntu Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:35:57 -0600 our eyes see what they want to... ...this is the geek version of French Connection UK. This one from The Register:

:-)

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/05/our_eyes_see_what_they_want_to.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/05/our_eyes_see_what_they_want_to.html General UNIX/Linux Mon, 07 May 2007 16:44:11 -0600 Updating and continuing this blog... over a year since I've updated Linux-Blog.com, but here goes. I've been doing some overhauling of the systems here in the office, as well as on my personal system, so we'll begin the return of Linux-Blog by chronicling these.

I'll start with the current state of the systems here at seashell software:

hasufel is your basic compaq desktop system with an AMD Athlon 3800 processor and a gig of RAM. He's my desk workstation, so he's got the scanner, laserjet, etc., attached. Hasufel also has an ATI All-In-Wonder video card, so the cable tv is hooked to him as well, and he has an external 80GB hard drive dedicated to video-capture. Hasufel runs Windows XP Media Edition.

shadowfax is the primary mail/web server. He's a generic 2U rackmount system with dual-700mhz Pentium III processors. Shadowfax currently runs FreeBSD 5.1. This is where qmail resides to handle my e-mail, and Apache/MySQL/PHP/Movable Type run my blogs. He's also got PHPbb installed, but we're really not using the forum software at the moment.

arod is my primary portable system. He is an Acer TravelMate C310 tablet PC. Windows XP Tablet Edition came with him pre-installed, and arod's had SuSe 10 in a dual-boot configuration for over a year now. This week, I've replaced his SuSe 10 with Ubuntu "Feisty." I decided to give Ubuntu a try so I can keep up with all the kool kidz, and because it's based on Debian. Debian's package installer is easy to use, and Ubuntu is supposed to be more desktop-friendly than other distros.

snowmane is a generic 1U rackmount system with a single 800mhz Pentium III. My original intention with this system was to buy two of them and work on an OpenSSI cluster, but that project got back-burnered for other things. He had Debian "Sarge" installed, but now is running FreeBSD 6.2. That may or may not change, depending on how things go with getting the infrastructure set up to run the Scoop collaborative blogging package.

windfola is a Compaq Proliant 6500 with 4-1ghz processors, 4GB of RAM and an internal SCSI shelf with 5-18GB drives configured as a RAID5 array. He's a 4U behemoth. My intention with windfola is to use him as a platform for VMware testing. Currently, he's running Debian "Etch."

roheryn is a Digital Equipment Corporation AlphaServer 600au running Tru64 UNIX 5.1a. At some point, roheryn will enter the Linux world.

Projects:

arod will be getting new applications to see if Ubuntu will cut it on my portable.

snowmane will be getting a major overhaul, with new motherboard/cpu/ram, then a new install of either Debian "Etch" or FreeBSD 6.2, whichever turns out to be more stable for Scoop.

hasufel ain't broke, and I intend to keep him that way for a while.

windfola will get VMware as soon as I can download the eval. I also need to contact those folks and see if they'll give me a full, legal, copy. Given my relationship with EMC2, it would help promote their product in my classes.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/04/updating_and_continuing_this_b.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2007/04/updating_and_continuing_this_b.html Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:43:29 -0600 Low-Rent Cluster - Part 3 Addendum 1 LiveJournal user suppressingfire pointed out that 11.0.0.1 isn't a private network address. My first reaction was that it didn't matter, since it was just for cluster interconnect. Still, best to keep things by the book, so we'll change it to keep it in side the 10 network.

# ifdown eth1

Then edit the /etc/network/interfaces file so the eth1 section now says:

# The cluster interconnect interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 10.1.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 10.1.0.255

then bring the interface back up:

# ifup eth1

In the TruCluster world, we used to have a configuration option to totally block anything coming from the memory channel cards (the cluster interconnect) from getting out onto the outside network. I don't know for sure whether OpenSSI has such an option, so better safe than sorry.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/lowrent_cluster_part_3_addendu.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/lowrent_cluster_part_3_addendu.html Low Rent Cluster Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:26:39 -0600 Low-Rent Cluster - Part 3 - Installing Debian Sarge 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.


]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/lowrent_cluster_part_3_install.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/lowrent_cluster_part_3_install.html Low Rent Cluster Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:57:57 -0600 Low-Rent Cluster - Hardware and OS I picked up a 800mhz Pentium III server in a 1U case on eBay for $175+shipping to kick this project off. It's got 256MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. I already had an external firewire drive enclosure, which currently has a 20GB IDE drive in it. Keeping with my tradition of server naming, this box was christened "snowmane."

Here's what snowmane looks like in the rack:

The box has two USB ports on the motherboard, but no firewire. I picked up a basic PCI firewire card from the local CompUSA. The system's single PCI slot had a Freevision capture card in it, so that came out, in goes the firewire card.

There are two Intel-chipset ethernet ports built into the box. I'll use eth0 for the regular connection, and eth1 will be for cluster interconnect. Video is basic XGA, and snowmane is hooked up to my kvm in the rack.

next - OS install

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/lowrent_cluster_hardware_and_o.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/lowrent_cluster_hardware_and_o.html Low Rent Cluster Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:52:49 -0600 The Low-Rent Cluster Project - Introduction One of the problems with working with AlphaServers for so long is that one ends up with champagne tastes. The catch is that I operate my office network in a beer budget. Relatively speaking, it's more like a Milwaukee's Best budget. Linux is good about working on servers that fit my budget, particularly since I don't plan on using X.

Running standalone Linux systems on low-rent equipment is one thing. Making that low-rent equipment highly available is a totally different issue. For openers, older, inexpensive systems often need upgrades to get them to a point where they can be clustered. Then there's the issue of shared storage. Storage Area Networks (SANs) aren't supposed to be low-rent. SAN users want good quality equipment and are willing to pay for it. I want something that will work in my rack here in my home office, and I'm not willing to pay for it.

This isn't an original thought on my part. Others have looked at what can be done to make systems highly available without a true SAN. The obvious solution for low-rent is to forget doing a shared bus configuration in the first place, opting for a Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) configuration. But that's where my champagne tastes come in. I'm used to TruClusters, and a TruCluster requires a storage system on a shared SCSI or fibre-channel. Both of those are way out of my beer budget. My two tried-and-true BA350 storage shelves got trashed in the flood, so starting a shared SCSI configuration from scratch was going to be expensive. In the grand scheme of things, iSCSI isn't expensive, particularly when compared to a fibre SAN, but it's still more than I wanted to pay.

I put the dilemma to the folks in the Debian community on Live Journal, and got back an interesting suggestion: use firewire! Sure, why not, I've got an external firewire enclosure (I use it with my Acer TravelMate C104 tablet PC), so it was worth a try.

The choice of which cluster solution to go with for this project was a no-brainer. I want a low-rent TruCluster, so that means an OpenSSI system. OpenSSI's Cluster File System (CFS) is a kindred spirit to TruCluster's CFS; it's no surprise that the leaders in the OpenSSI community are HP employees. There are downsides to OpenSSI, most notably that it's not as mature a product as the Linux-HA project. As a result, my choices for Linux distro are much more limited. That may present more challenges, but we'll see.

]]> http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/the_lowrent_cluster_project_in.html http://www.linux-blog.com/2005/11/the_lowrent_cluster_project_in.html Low Rent Cluster Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:17:01 -0600