Difference between revisions of "Pumpkin"

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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.
 
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.
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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 ==
 
== To Do ==

Revision as of 21:03, 28 December 2007

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.