UGCS 4.0 buildout
2007-08-22 05:11 - ugcs geek
I spent Friday through Monday back at Caltech with the other sysadmins participating in the full push to get the next iteration of UGCS finished. SURFs ended this past week, so the other three sysadmins were leaving after the weekend, and the next time we’d all be in one place would be after school starts in October. So, it was a choice of getting it done now, or waiting until Thanksgiving break to get it done. Ideally, my goal is to have things substantially ready by the first week or two of school so that we can push UGCS usage to the new freshmen and encourage a much higher cluster adoption rate among the undergraduate population.
Things went fairly well, although we had some snafus with regard to getting our hardware delivered; regardless, we made substantial progress towards having the cluster up and running. We came into the weekend with only two finished servers, each with 6 750gb hard disks in RAID 5, that had been configured to run AFS, LDAP, and a Kerebros KDC. We had an early setback when we discovered one of the hard disks had failed and that the machine would need to be taken down to prevent any additional failures that would result in data loss. I got very little sleep over the weekend and was so focused and engaged that I neglected certain bodily needs.
We finished up with three Cisco switches (2× 2950, 1× 2970) configured as a cluster, segregation of servers by VLAN and automatic VLAN assignment based on MAC address, transparent bridging, firewalling, intrusion detection, and filtering on a new bridge machine, a temporary mailserver with Postfix, Dovecot, Spamassassin, and Mailman running and delivering to AFS Maildir folders with the help of some very small patches to Postfix, working DNS and DHCP/Netboot, a partially set up new Kerberos/LDAP isolation machine, and a much better understanding of what is left to be done. With luck, we’ll be able to get to the stage of performing the actual switch-over the weekend before classes start.
I’m intending to write up what we’ve done after the build-out is complete so that others building similar clusters will benefit from the pitfalls we fell into and extricated ourselves from – I definitely found other blogs and HOWTOs extremely instructive throughout the entire process and want to reciprocate.
Cleaning up UGCS
2006-01-29 14:06 - ugcs geek
I’m now, among way too many things, a sysadmin at UGCS – a unix cluster run entirely by students, and operated without funding from the administration (our current stash of money comes from the Moore-Hofstadter fund, which contributes to Caltech student organizations to benefit student life). The problem with the lab as it is right now is threefold:
- Our hardware is at minimum 3 years old, mostly castoffs from other departments, or from a large grant of computers Intel gave us a few years ago.
- Nobody uses the lab, because the Caltech-funded ITS labs across campus have much nicer hardware.
- The lab has gotten cluttered and dusty, because nobody but sysadmins use the lab any more, and there are chairs/spare parts/unplugged in monitors all over the place.
- Return to step 2, since the lab is cluttered and unusable (only 3 working shell logins available to users at last count, and only one machine with working X).
The solution to break the vicious cycle? Clean up the lab. I’ve been working on this my first day as sysadmin (who knew that being sysadmin would involve lugging lots of heavy computer hardware around and scraping myself on things?). We’ve taken the armrests off the chairs, so they can be tucked under the desks, so that the aisles will be walkable; we’re hooking up all our systems to monitors and keyboards, and removing the rat’s nest of wires. Next week, optimistically, we’ll redecorate – put the LED net up on the ceiling, and buy some lamps so that the place doesn’t look so dingy. We can probably budget some money for some new systems, as well, and return UGCS to a state where a large number of undergraduates come to the lab in person to work. Yarr.
Hopefully this project will be completed within a month or so, and then we can possibly invite people to some kind of grand-reopening.
Words? [2]
And we're having a budget crisis?
2005-12-20 17:25 - caltech geek
I went to the Center for Student Services earlier today to find out why I had received no grade for Chamber Music, and was listed as having attempted 3 units but not received any (the answer was that the instructor hadn’t turned in first term grades yet). On my way out, I saw a guy sorting through a huuuuge pile of monitors and printers recording serial numbers. He mentioned that the hardware was being disposed of that afternoon, and that he was logging the serial numbers for inventory, when I asked him what was going on. I figured there must be something worth salvaging among the dozen monitors and four printers being thrown out, so I inquired as to whether undergraduates could haul some of them away and received an affirmative response.
I sent out an e-mail to Dabney and Blacker. Josh Z. came, and we tested a couple of the monitors, and plugged in the printers to see if any of them were functional. I ended up taking back two perfectly fine 17” Sony/Dell Trinitron CRT monitors and a hp deskjet 5550 injet printer, which also works brilliantly, albeit slowly (hotplugged under linux using hplip/hpijs and cups).
Surely, if we’re in the midst of a couple million dollar budget deficit, can’t the administrators just continue to use their 17” CRT’s instead of buying new hardware? We students are having enough money squeezed out of us as it is, but the waste of the administration just horrifies me.
Since I lack a dual-head video card, I’m probably going to end up using one monitor for the new blacker webserver, and reserving the other for some later usage, or wiring up to my laptop. At least the monitors were saved from destruction, though.
