September 2003 - admins-discuss@lists.redbrick.dcu.ie

[Admin-discuss] innd and other newsy things
by Aidan Delaney 30 Sep '03

30 Sep '03

Hey all, I've been "reconstructing" our E450 a fair bit lately, however I'm having a difficult time with innd. Simply put when I start it from our start script it gives a bunch of directory permission errors. I know very little about innd, but it _must_ be set up for tomorrow. Now to the question part.... Do you use innd or cnews (or some other news server)? Do you guys have a Solaris package for your news server (I'll trade you a c- hey and a slrn Solaris package :)? Lastly, as I'm under considerable time pressure and iff you guys don't have a Solaris package, am I better off starting from scratch than modifying the existing config (the admin who set it up is uncontactable and the config files are not liberally commented)? -- Thank you, Aidan Delaney. Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

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[Admin-discuss] /etc/system
by Colm MacCarthaigh 29 Sep '03

29 Sep '03

I'm putting these in /etc/system ; set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=0x2000000 set shmsys:shminfo_shmmin=1 set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni=256 set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg=256 set semsys:seminfo_semmap=256 set semsys:seminfo_semmni=512 set semsys:seminfo_semmsl=32 set semsys:seminfo_semmns=512 for PostgreSQL, as I remember we also had: set noexec_user_stack = 1 can anyone remember what else was a good idea ? -- colmmacc(a)redbrick.dcu.ie PubKey: colmmacc+pgp(a)redbrick.dcu.ie Web: http://devnull.redbrick.dcu.ie/

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[Admin-discuss] MiNDS> considering Debian GNU/Linux on E450
by Aidan Delaney 21 Sep '03

21 Sep '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hey, Most of you know that I'm one of those rabid GNU folk. So for those of you...well I am one of those. MiNDS> are considering installing Debian GNU/Linux on our E450. This suggestion didn't come from me and I'm currently the only person holding this up. The decision was made after our recent downtime. We've had a lot of it lately, some of it not our fault due to routing difficulties (at a layer between HEAnet and MiNDS> :). The solaris package manager is awful, and we end up installing most apps manually. Furthermore we don't trust Sunfreeware. We want to be able to install binaries (except Apache :) and to have a stable system. Debian are a fantastic organisation. We've used Debian on sparc before, but we're wondering what the general feeling of us installing Debian on Sparc is? Is there any serious reason to stick with Solaris, considering we can take anything up to a 20% performance hit? - -- Thank you, Aidan Delaney. Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/Z4R7R5d8aoUiMO0RAhxiAJoDlrnLpLT8jkg8Vpzp4J0/3IpVhgCgmr49 21xZ1/J5bFEfxoqJGp2ut1g= =8PjQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[Admin-discuss] IDE RAID thingy
by Colm MacCarthaigh 21 Sep '03

21 Sep '03

Having suffered a Motherboard turning into a brick problem over the weekend, I've gotten myself a new motherboard and it has on-board RAID, and stuff, this time. Which now means that I've got an PCI IDE that I no longer need. Have we any use for this ? before I go and give it away. It will do raid 0, 1 and 5; has two IDE controllers , two channels each, doesnt to serial ATA or anything like that, it's just ultra ATA 100. It's 32 bit card, but has the magic slot that will make it bit in a 64bit pci bay. All connectors are internal. It'd slow down any new disks we got for enigma, and software raid 1 is better than hardware anyway. Anything else ? -- colmmacc(a)redbrick.dcu.ie PubKey: colmmacc+pgp(a)redbrick.dcu.ie Web: http://devnull.redbrick.dcu.ie/

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[Admin-discuss] Prodigy Reinstall
by Dermot Duffy 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

Prodigy reinstall will take place sometime after Monday 22nd, probably Tuesday. Installation ============ A fresh install. Not using LiveUpgrade since it relies on the Package/Patch DB, which we have mostly ignored in the past. (And the Patch database is severly screwed up). We also need to completely duplicate the "boot environment" (/ /usr /var /opt). It'd be messy to allow LiveUpgrade to copy these without significant reshuffling. Finally, LiveUpgrade upgrades all the packages currently on the system, several of which should never have been installed in the first place. (i.e. lots of crud that needs to be removed). The initial installation will be Solaris core only, which will eliminate all the crud, except what we specifically add at a later stage. All software on the system will be packaged using standard SolarisPKG format (SV datastream). /usr -> Core Solaris Components (SUNW*) /usr/local -> Our own packages (RB*) /local -> Non packaged software Using tools such as pkg-tools makes package creation pretty simple, even for complicated packages. The only non-packaged software will be Apache since it tends to get recompiled/restructured a lot. Disks ===== Software RAID5 has a very bad reputation, particularly when the number of disks is large and the hardware is an E450 ;) Sun recommend only using RAID5 when the percentage of data written is < %20. During weekdays, on average (on /webtree), 12% of our data is write. On weekends this drops to 5%. We're not short of space in /webtree, but that's really irrelevant, we could use less disks in a RAID 5 volume and use the remaining disks for some other purpose, or increase the total capacity of /webtree significantly. At the moment we're not using a hot spare pool (although we do have 2 unused disks!), so with these two disks in a pool we could add some extra redundancy. (One of the two disks may be damaged, will have to do some tests). Once the core system is installed, I'll run some benchmarks on a RAID5 volume and compare those to benchmarks on the current system. (Could we use ab as part of this, since it's supposed to be a webtree..?). Basically, if RAID 5 write performance is so bad as to slow things down significantly with the 12% writes, then we'll stick with the mirrors. The existing partitioning scheme is pretty good, we need a larger /var and maybe a dedicated /var/tmp, but apart from that it should stay mostly the same. Might be a good idea to reshuffle some of the disks, so that busy disks are now quiet disks, aswell as ensuring that all components in mirrors are of the same manufacturer (where possible), unlike our current setup. FTP/Telnet ========== Will be disabled after the reinstall. OS == Solaris 9 Update 4. Hopefully we can use a tool such PatchManager (which doesn't seem to have an S9 version ATM) to patch the machine fully, before bringing it online. I've already reinstalled Laser with the same OS version. Backups ======= Backup (almost) everything to Enigma/Deathray. (Including database dumps). That's about it, Dizer. -- Dermot Duffy System Administrator DCU Networking Society http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie

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[Admin-discuss] huh ?
by The Unknown 02 Sep '03

02 Sep '03

huh is still broken on carbon : x@carbon:~$ huh huh: error opening /var/log/local3.log Somebody has to package / install swrite and setup syslog.conf to log it to /var/log/local3.log. Any takers ?

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