Pumpkin

Pumpkin

Pumpkin is our new 8 CPU 24 disk monster machine. It is really, really nice. Currently it is only tied to the "corn" ip address.

Basic Setup

• We will run Xen on this so that it can have 2 personalies: Pumpkin, 64-bit, and Corn, 32-bit, RHEL5.
  • In order to do this right, Pumpkin should be the host, since you can't virtualize 64-bit under 32-bit, but you can do the other way around. See the bottom of http://www.redhat.com/rhel/virtualization/. Currently, all boot options in GRUB are 32-bit. The only difference between the first and second boot options is that the first (default) loads an initrd ending with _raid.img, which panics.
• The RAID is currently split. This allows for much easier maintenance and in the future possible upgrades.
  • Disk 1 to 11 is in RAID Set 0, which holds the RAID Volumes: System (300GB, RAID6, SCSI:0.0.0), System1(300GB, RAID6, SCSI:0.0.1), Data1 (6833GB, RAID5, SCSI:0.0.2)
  • Disk 11 to 22 is RAID Set 1, which holds the RAID Volume: Data2 (7499GB, RAID5, SCSI:0.0.3)
  • Disk 23 and 24 are passthrough (single disks) at SCSI:0.0.6 and SCSI:0.0.7. These can be used as spares, as backup, or to expand the other RAID sets later on.
  • The RAID card can be monitored at http://10.0.0.99/ login as "admin" with a password that is the same as the door combo.
  • To use this card with Linux you need a driver: arcmsr. This must be part of the initrd for the kernel, else you cannot boot from the RAID.
    • The kernel module can be build from the sources located in /usr/src/kernels/Acera_RAID. Just run make.
• Currently we have a temporary drive in the system on the onboard SATA which holds a RHEL5 distro and the original RHEL4 distro from the manufacturer.

It seems that right now, the only bootable install is on the temporary drive. From what I understand, you can use xen to create a guest os on a partition, and once it's all set up, you can even point grub to boot that as the "real" os. A possible plan of action seems like it could be to get raid working on the current install, use xen to put a rhel5_64 install (pumpkin) on one of the raid sets (probably system), boot that, and then xen-install rhel5_32 corn to the other raid set. At that point, we could pull the random drive we're using now and be close to done.

I tried rebuilding the arcmsr driver, but when I ran 'make clean' in the src dir, I got lots of errors. That's a sign something's amiss. According to the areca raid manual, I should be able to download the precompiled driver from their website. Problem is, what model raid controller is it? I can't access anything useful in the raid bios, since it's passworded and I haven't the slightest clue what the password is. Next step will be booting into the default install the server shipped with and see if I can find anything useful there. Also, on further research, it's not entirely clear if the xen trickery I was thinking about will work. No problem if it doesn't.

To Do

• Move the system to System drive and remove the current temp drive.
• Setup mount points for the data drives.
• Setup LDAP for users to log in. I started, but it's not working.
• Setup Exports, so other systems can see the drives.
• Setup autofs so that it can see other drives.
• Setup sensors so that we can monitor the system.
• Setup smartd so we will know when a disk is going bad. This can be done inside the RAID card using a system to send SNMP and EMAIL. but it needs to be done.
• Setup the other system with Xen on the System1 drive
• Setup SNMP for cacti monitoring.
• There must be other things....

Done

• Setup ethernet.
• Setup RAID volumes.
• Setup partitions and create file systems.