Gourd

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Gourd is a 2 quad-CPU server in a 2U rackmount chassis put together nicely by Microway. It arrived at UNH on 11/24/2009. The system has an Areca RAID card with ethernet port and an IPMI card with ethernet port. The motherboard is from Super Micro.

This is the page for the new Gourd Hardware. The old Gourd is described here.

Gourd now hosts Einstein as a VM. The previous einstein hardware is described here

Gourds

Hardware Details

  • Microway 2U Storage Chassis with 8 SAS/SATA-II Hot-Swap Drive Bays with SAS Backplane
  • 500W Redundant Hot-Swap Power Supply (2)
  • Navion-S Dual Opteron PCI-Express Motherboard (H8DME-2);
  • Two AMD "Shanghai" 2.4 GHz Quad Core Opteron 2378 (Socket F) Processors
  • (8) 4GB DDR2 800 MHz ECC/Registered Memory (32GB Total Memory @ 533MHz)
  • Dual Integrated Gigabit Ethernet Ports; = "Nvidia" ethernet.
  • Integrated ATI ES1000 Graphics;
  • Six Integrated SATA-II Ports;
  • Two x8 PCI Express slots;
  • Two 64-bit 133/100MHz PCI-X slots;
  • Two 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X slots;
  • Up to 6 USB 1.1/2.0 ports (2 on rear);
  • PS/2 Mouse & Keyboard connectors;
  • Areca ARC-1220 8-Port SATA II Raid (256MB) - Low Profile PCI Express x8
  • Sony Slim CD/DVD 24x Black (IDE)

Network Settings

In Centos 7 there is an issue with the drivers for the Nvidia ethernet, which was previously provided through the forcedeth driver. The forcedeth driver which is disabled in the CentOS 7 kernel. You can use the kmod-forcedeth driver from elrepo.org:

http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el7/x86_64/RPMS/kmod-forcedeth-0.64-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64.rpm

The config files are located at Gourd network config files

  • IP address UNH: 132.177.88.75 (eth1)
  • IP address Farm: 10.0.0.252 (eth0)
  • IP address RAID: 10.0.0.152
  • IP address IPMI: 10.0.0.151

Software and Services

This section contains details about the services and software on Gourd and information about their configurations.

Software RAID

Gourd has a (somewhat simpler) ARECA RAID card. The / system and /scratch are on a RAID created by the card. This was NOT chosen for /home and /mail. Instead /home and /mail are on a software Raid, so that if these services ever need to be moved to other hardware, there is no issues with incompatibility due to Raid card.

The config can be found from /etc/mdadm.conf (least reliable!), but better from /proc/mdstat or mdadm --detail --scan, madam --detail /dev/md0

The drives are passthrough drives on the ARECA card. The association between passthrough drive and device name is established by looking at the SCSI channel number (web interface of the ARECA card) and the Linux /sys:

ls -l /sys/bus/scsi/drivers/sd/0\:0\:0\:0/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 May 19 21:38 block:sda -> ../../../../../../../block/sda/

for each of the 0:0:0:x scsi channels.

NFS Shares

Gourd serves two volumes over NFS

Home folders: /home on Gourd contains home directories for all npg users. The NFS share is accessible to all hosts in the servers, npg_clients and dept_clients Netgroup lists, and to all 10.0.0.0/24 (server room backend) hosts.

Mail: To reduce the size of the size of the Einstein VM the /mail directory on Gourd stores mail for all npg users. The nfs share is accessible only to Einstein and is mounted in /var/spool/mail on Einstein.

/etc/exports

# Share home folders (copied from old Einstein)

/home                                         \
         @servers(rw,sync)   \
         @npg_clients(rw,sync) \
         @dept_clients(rw,sync) \
         10.0.0.0/24(rw,no_root_squash,sync)

# Share /mail with Einstein 

/mail						\
	132.177.88.52(rw,sync)	\
	10.0.0.248(rw,no_root_squash,sync)


IPTables

Gourd uses the standard NPG iptables firewall. Gourd allows ssh, svn, icmp, portmap and nfs.


Subversion

Gourd our subversion code repositories stored in /home/svn/. The subversion service runs under xinetd. Its configuration is located in /etc/xinetd.d/svn

/etc/xinetd.d/svn

service svn
{ 
	port        = 3690
	socket_type = stream
	protocol    = tcp
	wait        = no
	user        = svn
	server      = /usr/bin/svnserve
	server_args = -i -r /home/svn
	disable     = no
}

VMWare

Gourd is running VMWare Server version 2.0.2. It acts as our primary virtualization server. it is accessible at https://gourd.unh.edu:8333/ or from localhost:8222 if you're logged in or port forwarding from Gourd over SSH.

As of 6/9/2012 Gourd no longer runs VMWare!!!! We use KVM now.

KVM

Guest VMs on Gourd

UPS Configuration

Gourd is connected to the APC SmartUPS 2200XL. It uses the apcupsd service to monitor the UPS. Use the following command (with sudo, or as root) to see a detailed list of information about the status of the UPS, including battery charge and current load.

service apcupsd status

Shutdown Script

apcupsd allows us to do some other useful things, for example it runs the script /etc/apcupsd/shutdown2 which monitors the current battery charge and shuts down certain non-critical systems at specific points to extend battery life. First, when the battery reaches 50% it shuts down taro, pumpkin, tomato, and roentgen. Later, when battery is at 5% it shuts down the remaining virtual machines, einstein and jalapeno. Shutting down einstein and jalapeno at 5% battery isn't meant to save battery, instead this is designed so that these machines have a chance to shut down normally before the battery backup is completely exhausted. The contents of the script can be viewed here.

SSH Keys

In order to issue remote shutdown commands to other machines gourd needs to issue a command over an ssh connection without a password. It uses an rsa key for this purpose (/root/.ssh/shutdown_id_rsa) and each machine is configured to allow gourd to use this key to issue a remote shutdown command. This key can't be used for shell logins or any other commands.

The official Site and Manual

 Official Site
 User Manual

Disks and Raid Configuration

This is the post-migration Gourd disk setup (as of 03/01/10).

Disks and Raid configuration

Drive Bay Disk Size Raid Set Raid level
1 750 GB System/Scratch Raid1 + Raid0
2 750 GB
3 750 GB Software RAID Pass Through
4 750 GB Software RAID Pass Through
5 Empty None None
6 Empty None None
7 750 GB Hot Swap None
8 750 GB Hot Swap None


Volume Set and Partition configuration

Raid set Volume set Volume size Partitions
Set 1 System(Raid1) 250 GB System: (/, /boot, /var, /tmp, /swap, /usr, /data )
Set 2 Scratch(Raid0) 1000GB Scratch space (/scratch)
/dev/md0   sdc1 & sdb1 500 GB Home Dirs: /home
/dev/md1   sdc2 & sdd2 100 GB Mail: /mail
/dev/md2   sdc3 & sdd3 150 GB Virtual Machines: /vmware