Bruno Back (Feb 01 2011)

Message boards : Technical News : Bruno Back (Feb 01 2011)

Author	Message
Matt Lebofsky Volunteer moderator Project administrator Project developer Project scientist Send message Joined: 1 Mar 99 Posts: 1375 Credit: 74,079 RAC: 0	Message 1073248 - Posted: 2 Feb 2011, 0:13:35 UTC
	So bruno is back, and synergy is free to get back to bashing on it with some actual science analysis stuff. We'll still keep a constant rsync of the result uploads happening in the background from bruno to synergy, so synergy can be a "hot backup" for bruno if it comes to that again. Today during the usual outage we took care of that swap, but I also attempted to get thumper converted (as I mentioned yesterday) to its new role as internal-use mega file server. However, this system has funny disk controllers which renumber the drives upon every boot, making installing an OS quite difficult, being as there are 48 drives in the system and it's hard to tell which ones are the boot drives. By the way, the lab-wide outage tomorrow (which I also mentioned yesterday) will indeed affect all traffic including uploads/downloads, so expect an hour or two of silence from us in the morning. - Matt ____________ -- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person -- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude
	ID: 1073248 ·

Claggy Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 5 Jul 99 Posts: 3363 Credit: 25,950,143 RAC: 1,098	Message 1073256 - Posted: 2 Feb 2011, 0:26:55 UTC - in response to Message 1073248.
	Thanks for the update Matt, Claggy
	ID: 1073256 ·

Black Squirrel Prime Send message Joined: 29 Jul 07 Posts: 8 Credit: 7,738,424 RAC: 8,115	Message 1073280 - Posted: 2 Feb 2011, 2:14:16 UTC - in response to Message 1073248.
	thanks matt!
	ID: 1073280 ·

kaseychief Send message Joined: 3 Dec 07 Posts: 1645 Credit: 416,781 RAC: 1	Message 1073281 - Posted: 2 Feb 2011, 2:19:45 UTC
	Thanks Matt, and everyone else that helped. ____________
	ID: 1073281 ·

RottenMutt Send message Joined: 15 Mar 01 Posts: 929 Credit: 182,409,298 RAC: 199,400	Message 1073312 - Posted: 2 Feb 2011, 4:36:12 UTC - in response to Message 1073248.
	... Today during the usual outage we took care of that swap, but I also attempted to get thumper converted (as I mentioned yesterday) to its new role as internal-use mega file server. However, this system has funny disk controllers which renumber the drives upon every boot, making installing an OS quite difficult, being as there are 48 drives in the system and it's hard to tell which ones are the boot drives. ... - Matt don't boot off a raid array. attach a drive to the native controller on the MB. ____________
	ID: 1073312 ·

ML1 Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 7133 Credit: 3,684,543 RAC: 940	Message 1073522 - Posted: 2 Feb 2011, 19:43:01 UTC - in response to Message 1073312. Last modified: 2 Feb 2011, 19:44:48 UTC
	don't boot off a raid array. attach a drive to the native controller on the MB. Boot off a USB memory stick. By far the easiest and you can easily change it. Just take care that whatever leads don't dislodge it! You likely already know this... Also, assign all your mounts by LABEL or UUID. Then it doesn't matter what gets moved around onto what array. (It also lets you deliberately move things around without having to worry about the mounts!) Good luck, Martin ____________ Mandriva Linux A user friendly OS! See new freedom Mageia2 The Future is what We make IT (GPLv3)
	ID: 1073522 ·

Jeff Mercer Send message Joined: 14 Aug 08 Posts: 89 Credit: 60,291 RAC: 0	Message 1073662 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 1:35:47 UTC
	Thanks for the update ! Glad to hear that things are working out. Hope that all goes well Friday !!!
	ID: 1073662 ·

Andy Lee Robinson Send message Joined: 8 Dec 05 Posts: 615 Credit: 36,748,983 RAC: 2,080	Message 1073669 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 1:54:44 UTC - in response to Message 1073522. Last modified: 3 Feb 2011, 1:59:22 UTC
	Seconded. I boot my 6x1TB raid 10 from a cheap 1GB pendrive. It works beautifully, but an old machine like Thumper may not support booting from USB in its BIOS, so this little avenue of joy would be closed off... Another option is to make a 500Mb boot partition on all drives, and create a 48-way mirror with them.. then all and any of the drives become boot drives, and quick! :-)
	ID: 1073669 ·

DJStarfox Send message Joined: 23 May 01 Posts: 1040 Credit: 485,117 RAC: 71	Message 1073818 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 15:18:19 UTC - in response to Message 1073669.
	Another option is to make a 500Mb boot partition on all drives, and create a 48-way mirror with them.. then all and any of the drives become boot drives, and quick! :-) I'm not sure they can afford to be out 24GB of space.
	ID: 1073818 ·

Andy Lee Robinson Send message Joined: 8 Dec 05 Posts: 615 Credit: 36,748,983 RAC: 2,080	Message 1073837 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 16:26:02 UTC - in response to Message 1073818.
	500Mb is a bit generous - 200Mb would be enough for 2 or 3 kernels, and tiny in comparison. I'd go for the usb stick or even a custom live cd, and have all the disk space.
	ID: 1073837 ·

Cheopis Send message Joined: 17 Sep 00 Posts: 126 Credit: 6,757,240 RAC: 8,291	Message 1073859 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 18:39:41 UTC Last modified: 3 Feb 2011, 18:51:45 UTC
	Looking at the stats on Bruno, I'm not 100% sure the machine will support booting from a USB device. I'm looking at this through the eyes of someone who knows mostly personal PC's. My experience with servers is slight. I'm not sure whether BIOS boot configurations on servers would be typically more or less robust than personal computers. Bruno's old. With a decent RAID array, there are many personal computers these days that would have the same, if not more capacity. It's a dual single-core machine. 2.66G individual cores is technology that predates USB2.0 if I recall correctly. This is why I am unsure if it will take USB as a boot source. Having said that, a boot CD would almost certainly be doable.
	ID: 1073859 ·

arkayn Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 14 May 99 Posts: 3088 Credit: 40,320,382 RAC: 65,950	Message 1073874 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 19:08:58 UTC - in response to Message 1073859.
	Looking at the stats on Bruno, I'm not 100% sure the machine will support booting from a USB device. I'm looking at this through the eyes of someone who knows mostly personal PC's. My experience with servers is slight. I'm not sure whether BIOS boot configurations on servers would be typically more or less robust than personal computers. Bruno's old. With a decent RAID array, there are many personal computers these days that would have the same, if not more capacity. It's a dual single-core machine. 2.66G individual cores is technology that predates USB2.0 if I recall correctly. This is why I am unsure if it will take USB as a boot source. Having said that, a boot CD would almost certainly be doable. This is not Bruno though, it is Thumper: Sun Fire X4500 (2 x dual-core 2.6GHz Opteron, 16 GB RAM). Slightly newer. ____________
	ID: 1073874 ·

ML1 Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 7133 Credit: 3,684,543 RAC: 940	Message 1073884 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 19:43:42 UTC - in response to Message 1073669.
	Seconded. I boot my 6x1TB raid 10 from a cheap 1GB pendrive. It works beautifully, but an old machine like Thumper may not support booting from USB in its BIOS, so this little avenue of joy would be closed off... Another option is to make a 500Mb boot partition on all drives, and create a 48-way mirror with them.. then all and any of the drives become boot drives, and quick! :-) Ooooo... Now that is a sneaky work-around! Very good apart from the x48 wasted space... As others have mentioned, you don't need much diskspace for a Linux boot. I usually allocate a mere 64MBytes for a boot partition. Of that, typically only a few MBytes actually gets used. So why a full 64MBytes?... That's so I can upload/install a small Linux distro in its entirety into the boot partition for whatever emergency if I need something a bit more than just Grub after a remote reboot! Keep searchin', Martin ____________ Mandriva Linux A user friendly OS! See new freedom Mageia2 The Future is what We make IT (GPLv3)
	ID: 1073884 ·

Andy Lee Robinson Send message Joined: 8 Dec 05 Posts: 615 Credit: 36,748,983 RAC: 2,080	Message 1073942 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 22:45:57 UTC - in response to Message 1073884. Last modified: 3 Feb 2011, 22:49:33 UTC
	[quote]So why a full 64MBytes?... That's so I can upload/install a small Linux distro in its entirety into the boot partition for whatever emergency if I need something a bit more than just Grub after a remote reboot! Martin, my speciality is Fedora. yum keeps a configurable number of previous kernels in /boot after a kernel update to avoid burning bridges, so need the extra space. Having identical partitions on n drives becomes easy to administer when adding replacement drives to the array I don't have 48 drives to play with, but in theory, make source partition layout on /dev/sda, then copy partition table to all drives: for d in {a..z} a{a..v}; do sfdisk -d /dev/sda \| sfdisk --force /dev/sd$d done; create 48x mirror on small partition 1: mdadm --create --raid-devices=48 --chunk=64 --level=mirror /dev/sd[a-z]1 /dev/sda[a-v]1 create raid6 on big partition 2: mdadm --create --raid-devices=48 --chunk=64 --level=raid6 /dev/sd[a-z]2 /dev/sda[a-v]2 replacing drive sdx: mdadm /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sdx1 mdadm /dev/md1 --fail /dev/sdx2 mdadm /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sdx1 mdadm /dev/md1 --remove /dev/sdx2 [swap in new drive] sfdisk -d /dev/sda \| sfdisk --force /dev/sdx mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdx1 mdadm /dev/md1 --add /dev/sdx2 and then watch -n30 cat /proc/mdstat or something like this... works great with a USB2 hub stuffed with cheap pendrives! :-)
	ID: 1073942 ·

Robert Ribbeck Send message Joined: 7 Jun 02 Posts: 644 Credit: 5,236,782 RAC: 875	Message 1073956 - Posted: 3 Feb 2011, 23:11:14 UTC
	Sos they post what they want us to know Service is WELL ??? it is what it is It's down again at least they can't say its equipment any more or will they ____________
	ID: 1073956 ·

Cheopis Send message Joined: 17 Sep 00 Posts: 126 Credit: 6,757,240 RAC: 8,291	Message 1074004 - Posted: 4 Feb 2011, 2:09:58 UTC - in response to Message 1073874.
	Looking at the stats on Bruno, I'm not 100% sure the machine will support booting from a USB device. I'm looking at this through the eyes of someone who knows mostly personal PC's. My experience with servers is slight. I'm not sure whether BIOS boot configurations on servers would be typically more or less robust than personal computers. Bruno's old. With a decent RAID array, there are many personal computers these days that would have the same, if not more capacity. It's a dual single-core machine. 2.66G individual cores is technology that predates USB2.0 if I recall correctly. This is why I am unsure if it will take USB as a boot source. Having said that, a boot CD would almost certainly be doable. This is not Bruno though, it is Thumper: Sun Fire X4500 (2 x dual-core 2.6GHz Opteron, 16 GB RAM). Slightly newer. O.o I feel silly to some degree at least. Still an older machine, but nowhere near as old. I'd bet it can take a USB source for booting, but it's still a bit in the grey area of age for that particular feature I think. Wouldn't take more than a couple minutes in BIOS to say for sure though.
	ID: 1074004 ·

Link Send message Joined: 18 Sep 03 Posts: 671 Credit: 1,184,620 RAC: 654	Message 1074315 - Posted: 5 Feb 2011, 10:07:35 UTC - in response to Message 1073859.
	Looking at the stats on Bruno, I'm not 100% sure the machine will support booting from a USB device. (...) 2.66G individual cores is technology that predates USB2.0 if I recall correctly. This is why I am unsure if it will take USB as a boot source. Can't say much about Bruno's mainboard and how old it is, but my both AthlonXP boards (1x ASRock, 1x ESC -> Low-End 2002 or 2003) have USB 2.0 ports and IIRC can boot from USB. ____________ .
	ID: 1074315 ·

Siran d'Vel'nahr Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 23 May 99 Posts: 5623 Credit: 3,515,051 RAC: 3,080	Message 1074742 - Posted: 6 Feb 2011, 15:41:32 UTC - in response to Message 1073956.
	Sos they post what they want us to know Service is WELL ??? it is what it is It's down again at least they can't say its equipment any more or will they Why do you act like they owe you something? They don't owe any of us anything! WE are volunteers here. No one is twisting your arm to make you stay here. If you're that unhappy, Robert, I suggest going to another project and complain there. See ya in PM, I would imagine. It seems to be your M.O. Keep on BOINCing...! :) ____________ CMDR Siran d'Vel'nahr XO USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187 Siran's website: [ ONLINE! ]
	ID: 1074742 ·

Chris S Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 19 Nov 00 Posts: 22736 Credit: 4,516,630 RAC: 5,672	Message 1074752 - Posted: 6 Feb 2011, 16:05:52 UTC
	Hi Siran! Most of us here know, that the poster you referred to, gets his kicks from making deliberately provocative posts, and then basking in the attention that he gets from it. If no-one replied to him he would probably get bored and stop. Back on topic, Bruno does seem to be a bit of a liablilty, but as I have said elsewhere, with three new servers in the setup, the next levels down the chain are going to get stressed. The lads will get it sorted out as soon as they can. Keep on Boincing! ____________ Damsel Rescuer, Kitty Patron, Raccoon Friend, Uli Fan, Julie Supporter, ES99 Admirer, PETA Member, 1st Childhood
	ID: 1074752 ·

John McLeod VII Volunteer developer Volunteer tester Send message Joined: 15 Jul 99 Posts: 22343 Credit: 439,209 RAC: 396	Message 1074922 - Posted: 7 Feb 2011, 1:33:12 UTC - in response to Message 1074752.
	Hi Siran! Most of us here know, that the poster you referred to, gets his kicks from making deliberately provocative posts, and then basking in the attention that he gets from it. If no-one replied to him he would probably get bored and stop. Back on topic, Bruno does seem to be a bit of a liablilty, but as I have said elsewhere, with three new servers in the setup, the next levels down the chain are going to get stressed. The lads will get it sorted out as soon as they can. Keep on Boincing! In other words, don't feed the trolls. ____________ BOINC WIKI
	ID: 1074922 ·

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Message boards : Technical News : Bruno Back (Feb 01 2011)