Posted on 12 March 2009 by Shawn
One of our esteemed members (Jason Katterhenry) is getting married this weekend and the majority of club members are attending. I imagine that we will all be too hung-over for a proper work day on Sunday. With that in mind, I am cancelling it straight away. Have a nice spring break everyone.
Posted on 08 March 2009 by Shawn
This is a basic summary, a more thorough post is available here.
The head node now has a POC nfsroot that boots into init (which it pulls via NFS). We are having some reliability problems after that (NFS time-out errors at different places in the init script). However, we learned a lot about how disk-less Linux works and we have a plan to fix it in the near future! The boot server can now boot the nodes, and give us BIOS, kernel, and (if we can sort out the NFS time-out) login on the serial server.
We also did quite a bit of work on the EVA5000 and come up empty handed. I tried to access the serial interface, only to learn that it was diagnostics only (no documented management interface) and Jason stalled on the Windows2000 management utilities. We’ll try again soon, I suppose that in the worst case we could use the one giant LUN as-is and not break it up… but let’s hope we can use the space a little more intelligently.
I also fixed the boot-time networking config on the server we made for the ua-developers club. I fat-fingered a conf file entry and the network didn’t come back after Jason power cycled the rack (QA testing I am sure 
).
Stay tuned, the fun stuff is on the horizon.
Posted on 01 March 2009 by Shawn
Head-node is up and serving dhcp, tftp and nfs. It took a while to work around a very broken old PXE stack on the cluster nodes (Tyan MPX). The nodes can boot, but not into anything really useful… memtest. I need to set up some NFS root fs areas for the nodes so that we can boot CentOS on them.
In other news, I got GM2 (Myrinet) compiled for 2.6.18. The kernel module loads and Ethernet emulation seems to work. As promissed I didn’t do any of the cluster integration with Myrinet, just got the kernel module compiled. It looks like OpenMPI supports GM, there is also MPICH-GM. Lustre has a custom driver for MX systems, but as we only have lowly GM boards… we’ll have to operate lustre over IP (over GM) if we want to implement it.
Posted on 11 September 2007 by Shawn
The new Compaq rack is in powered and wired and is currently housing a bunch of the Quad 700MHz Xeon boxes.
We also planned and started moving some of the other rack mountable servers into the IBM rack. The goal here is to eliminate on of the two post telco racks. This will, however, require that either the new Cisco switch or the [tremendously heavy, dense] VAX 4000-500 be moved. I am unsure which I’d rather move…
We had a lot of new members and old turn out for the work day, in fact it was the best turn out I’ve seen for a HACKS event since the anti-RIAA event on the mall a few years ago (and even then, it was mostly the AZsessions crew that showed for that).
