Lost in Boston (Feb 08 2011)
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Lost in Boston (Feb 08 2011)
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| Author | Message |
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 Matt Lebofsky  Send message Joined: 1 Mar 99 Posts: 1444 Credit: 957,058 RAC: 0 
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My touring band arrived in Boston, MA, and we began hunting for the club we were scheduled to play at. Once in the heart of town we pulled over and looked at a map (i.e. 1998 technology). Lo and behold we were only two blocks away from the venue! However, it still took us 90 minutes (no exaggeration) to get there, due to an impossible sequence of non-right angle one-way streets. One false move, and you were forced to drive around the whole park and try again. On two occasions the club was in our actual line of sight but we still couldn't legally reach it from our current approach. Eventually we stumbled upon the correct permutation of traverses and suddenly landed in front of the building, much to our surprise. I mention this story as it is an exact analogy to me getting a bootable OS on thumper this whole past week. One false move, and I had to reinstall the OS from scratch. However, we seem to be done with that, and of course on hindsight the ultimately solution is simple enough. The main obfuscations were (a) funky linux drive enumeration, (b) weird unpredictable linux raid behavior, but mostly (c) grub installation via the fedora installer is a bit, well, confused. I'm thinking the installer isn't ever expecting a 48 drive system where the only available boot drives are #0 and #1 according to the BIOS, but #24 and #28 according to linux. I basically had to install an OS without a raided boot, then reinstall grub by hand on both drives (using the grub shell as grub-install wouldn't work), then replace the flat boot partition with a raided booted partition, etc. etc. ETC.! Of course I'm taking the day off tomorrow so I won't complete the configuration until Thursday. Meanwhile, the project is just now coming up from the regular weekly outage - sorry about the delay. Usual stuff, though we added some spike-time-index fragmentation performance tests (which we wanted to do during a quiet time). They weren't all that positive - unclear what the current bottleneck is, though it doesn't seem like either the database or disk/network i/o. Maybe some code somewhere needs optimizing. - 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: 1075427 ·  |
Gary Charpentier     Send message Joined: 25 Dec 00 Posts: 30933 Credit: 53,134,872 RAC: 32
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Thanks for the update Matt. 
ID: 1075434 · |
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eaglescouter Send message Joined: 28 Dec 02 Posts: 162 Credit: 42,012,553 RAC: 0
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Funny, he reports that the project is back up, just as the project reports that it is shut down for maintanence...... It's not too many computers, it's a lack of circuit breakers for this room. But we can fix it :) ID: 1075435 · |
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Big Bang Send message Joined: 7 Jan 10 Posts: 670 Credit: 28,481 RAC: 0 |
Just chill-out and enjoy your gig Matt. All the best. ID: 1075438 · |
soft^spirit  Send message Joined: 18 May 99 Posts: 6497 Credit: 34,134,168 RAC: 0
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Two wrongs do not make a right, but 3 rights make a left. Janice ID: 1075441 · |
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PhaserLogic Send message Joined: 21 May 99 Posts: 1 Credit: 24,887,672 RAC: 0
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That installation on thumper is epic, and the Boston analogy was perfect. ID: 1075442 · |
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Swibby Bear Send message Joined: 1 Aug 01 Posts: 246 Credit: 7,945,093 RAC: 0
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Funny, he reports that the project is back up, just as the project reports that it is shut down for maintanence...... I guess something still needs "optimizing" ID: 1075445 · |
RottenMutt  Send message Joined: 15 Mar 01 Posts: 1011 Credit: 230,314,058 RAC: 0
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somebody forgot to flip the switch, not the first time! seem seti staff is always in a hurry to not let the door hit them in the hind end!  
ID: 1075453 · |
Fred J. Verster  Send message Joined: 21 Apr 04 Posts: 3252 Credit: 31,903,643 RAC: 0 
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A time consuming and difficult way to BOOT........ Thanks Matt, for your explanation on your adventure :) 
ID: 1075455 · |
OzzFan  Send message Joined: 9 Apr 02 Posts: 15691 Credit: 84,761,841 RAC: 28
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Two wrongs do not make a right, but 3 rights make a left. ... and two (W)rights make an airplane! :-D ID: 1075486 · |
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justsomeguy Send message Joined: 27 May 99 Posts: 84 Credit: 6,084,595 RAC: 11
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Hey Matt, Just as an after thought...you could always pull 46 of the drives and install, then put them back in...it would be a pain due to the fact that the cover must remain on the x4500 or it powers down after about 60 seconds. Which is kind of funny since my best time start to finish with hotswapping a drive was 58 seconds. Feel free to shoot me a line anytime if I can be of any help with this thing. Worked on them for 3 years on the hardware side. Kevin ps...thanks for the updates and good luck in Boston! "Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein 
ID: 1075489 · |
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Black Squirrel Prime Send message Joined: 29 Jul 07 Posts: 8 Credit: 15,317,965 RAC: 0
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Bahaha! Good one - I needed a joke to begin my day...I'm going to start my lecture today with that.... Two wrongs do not make a right, but 3 rights make a left. ID: 1075492 · |
aaronh  Send message Joined: 27 Oct 99 Posts: 169 Credit: 1,442,686 RAC: 0
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Two wrongs do not make a right, but 3 rights make a left. ...except in Boston! ID: 1075501 · |
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Dirk Sadowski Send message Joined: 6 Apr 07 Posts: 7105 Credit: 147,663,825 RAC: 5 
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Matt, thanks for the news! What does this mean? A few project servers are down until Thursday? The server status page show UL/DL online, scheduler offline. But my BOINCs can't DL (still a few WUs in the transfers overviews). 
ID: 1075516 · |
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zii Send message Joined: 24 May 03 Posts: 7 Credit: 828,565 RAC: 0 
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...it would be a pain due to the fact that the cover must remain on the x4500 or it powers down after about 60 seconds. Hm.. The server world is unknown territory for me, but it sounds like it won't shut down if the cover is put back in time? Then perhaps a little piece of TAPE might be a cheap and well working SPD*? Just apply on the intrusion switch in an suitable manner... :P *Shutdown Prevention Device It was just a thought. ID: 1075517 · |
JohnDK  Send message Joined: 28 May 00 Posts: 1222 Credit: 451,243,443 RAC: 1,127 
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Matt, thanks for the news! I'm not sure what Matt means. He saying "Meanwhile, the project is just now coming up from the regular weekly outage - sorry about the delay", which I would think means things should work now, but maybe something haven't been turned on. ID: 1075520 · |
Andy Lee Robinson  Send message Joined: 8 Dec 05 Posts: 630 Credit: 59,973,836 RAC: 0 
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I've been down this route a couple of times, though with not so many drives. I copped out and used a pendrive. There was only so much pain I could take before seeing the light! /boot is only needed once in a blue moon, and any source pendrive, usb, cdrom, hd, net can be used to get the system up. Having a separate interchangable boot source removes dependency on a raid drive failure. Pendrives just don't break, at least for the purpose of booting, and they can be mirrored with mdadm too for the really paranoid! ID: 1075592 · |
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Dirk Sadowski Send message Joined: 6 Apr 07 Posts: 7105 Credit: 147,663,825 RAC: 5
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Oops, the forum style is broken. Or is this now the new style? The lines (up/down) which separated the - thread titles, messages, authors, views, last message - are away. Threads which I already read (no new message for me) are now marked as 'read'. EDIT: BTW. mozilla Firefox
ID: 1075611 · |
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Claggy Send message Joined: 5 Jul 99 Posts: 4654 Credit: 47,537,079 RAC: 4 
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Oops, the forum style is broken. Or is this now the new style? I think DJStarfox has worked out why: Panic Mode On (43) Server problems Claggy ID: 1075625 · |
Corvid  Send message Joined: 31 Oct 05 Posts: 15 Credit: 18,216,988 RAC: 11
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Two wrongs do not make a right, but 3 rights make a left. Or pretty much anywhere in Germany. ID: 1075965 · |
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