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

Thanks for the update Matt,

Claggy

thanks matt!

Thanks Matt, and everyone else that helped.

---

...
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.

---

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

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Thanks for the update ! Glad to hear that things are working out. Hope that all goes well Friday !!!

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! :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

---

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

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

[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! :-)

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

---

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.

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.

---

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...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

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

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.

The X4500 will boot CD/DVD and USB. If the upgrade hasn't been done to the x4540 (main board swap, and some firmware) then the boot drives are the first two from left to right looking at it from the front. The HPC center I was working at had the first two drives configured raid 1 and the other 46 as data and spares. If the upgrade has been done, then the boot drives will be the first two starting from the left, front to back.

The upgrade should be completed if possible. This was to address the fact that the boot drives where on the same controller. No controller no boot. With the upgrade you could still boot to the mirror and would be out the drives on that controller. Proper config would allow a controller failure and still leave the machine running. This pretty much requires a physical drive map...ie pen and paper to keep everything straight as multiple arrays means drives are scattered all over heck!!

I may still have the old drive maps for controllers to physical locations...

Kevin

---

"Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein