[SAC] New Blades - Initialization and tasking

[John Graham]

All

Page 38 explains the differences between Kickstart and Jumpstart 
(Solaris os install)
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0205/819-1692.pdf

I had a bad macro in the DHCP server that needed deleting.

These blades are pretty snappy they are on a GigE on a clean network.
I am moving storage around on bucket ... there will be ~1.2 TB of fast 
storage.
There is an additional 18 TB storage not linked into the system yet...

Backups can be improved.. the data center has a backup scheduling system 
i can take advantage of.. in the past  i have just kept duplicates of 
data on several machines and on the blades there is a mkflash script 
that snapshots the blade and stores it in a way that the system can be 
restored to that point in about 45 min. these flash archives were stored 
on bucket also.

The Agami has been touchy going across the network... I will look into 
why NFS mounts were getting stale.

John

Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> Benjamin Thelen wrote:
>
>> Hello Frank,
>>
>>
>> Frank Warmerdam schrieb:
>>
>>> Folks,
>>>
>>> John has a bunch of shiny new blades setup now that kickstart is 
>>> working
>>> again.  /me ^5's John!
>>>
>>
>> What is kickstart? I found this on wikipedia
>> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstart. You'll directly see that
>> telascience seems to use Amiga ;-))!?
>>
>> Well, it must have something to do with bootstrapping?
>
>
> Benjamin,
>
> The kickstart problems seem to have been fixed.  I don't know any details
> about it though.
>
>> You suggest to install "FOSS GIS Book Wiki" on .219. I'd like to 
>> "resuggest" - you didn't have a real chance to read my last mail, yet 
>> - to use one machine, e.g .217 for all the wikis. Or are the blades 
>> to powerful, that it would be wasted power to use just one blade for 
>> some simple wikis? Don't know.
>
>
> I hadn't expected that we would use a whole blade exclusively for just
> wikis.  We basically have five blades, and so I'm hopeful we can run
> serveral "medium security" services like wiki, svn, etc off one server.
>
>> I assume that "FOSS GIS Book Wiki" is the same as "freegis book 
>> wiki", which was asked by edu at osgeo.org to setup?
>
>
> Sorry ... my mixup.  I mean the freegis book wiki.
>
>> I wonder, how the backup works for all these blades. Is there already 
>> a solution?
>
>
> I don't believe there is.  I am thinking we could use a two part
> strategy.  One is to have a frequent backup of some services to another
> blade, or to the big NFS drive on "bucket".   But I also think we ought
> to identify key services and data to backup off-site.   I wonder if
> "rsync" would be useful for network backup or if someone has a better
> idea?
>
>> Is it possible to install a FreeBSD on one blade? That really would 
>> be cool. I'd like to setup WMS services, mapserver, GeoServer on it.
>
>
> I'm not sure how easy this would be.  Would FreeBSD be better because
> of better "jail" support"?  Generally speaking, I would prefer to keep to
> one platform as much as possible so it is easier to move stuff around.
>
> > What about something like jails, used in FreeBSD, XEN or something like
> > that, to segregate things? I don't know, if there is something else
> > besides XEN similar like jails in Linux.
>
> I have little experience with virtualization solutions like XEN or
> jails, so I'm open to some advice.  It *seems* like XEN might quickly
> use up memory and disk space to operate several virtual machines at
> once.  My understanding of jails was that they were primarily useful
> to prevent users from being able to impact each other by having almost
> distinct directory trees for the jails.   How does this work in practice?
>
> > Could you find a possibility to use LDAP together with mediawiki? I
> > could't at first sight.
>
> I haven't had a look yet, so I have no suggestions.
>
> Best regards,