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. Because of this, it seems like we're going to have Corn be the big physical machine, and pumpkin be the virtualized machine.

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.
  • These may come in handy: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/rhel5/rhel5_xen_virtualization/rhel5_virt-install-wizard.html and http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/en-US/RHEL510/Virtualization_Guide/task-virt-lab1.html.
• 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.

To Do

• Setup Exports, so other systems can see the drives. There were issues with firewall, so I modeled the firewall after taro's.
• Setup autofs so that it can see other drives. What other drives? It's working for einstein:/home
• 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.
• Add the new systems to the lentil backup script
• There must be other things....

Done

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