Working in Panera I have been working on a paper with one of our students. To make things more bearable for us both, rather than using my office in the CRC I have moved into Panera. Panera has coffee, baked goods and WiFi. Pretty much perfect for us :)

How to configure a NIS server on Centos 5.6 The headnode of our test cluster runs NIS. This is how to set it up. Make sure you have the tools yum -y install ypserv Set the NIS domain and make it persistent ypdomainname dori.cs.vt.edu Edit /etc/sysconfig/network NETWORKING=yes NETWORKING_IPV6=no HOSTNAME=dori.cs.vt.edu GATEWAY=128.173.236.1 NISDOMAIN=dori.cs.vt.edu Configure the NIS make script to use the correct maps Edit /var/yp/Makefile MERGE_PASSWD=false MERGE_GROUP=false all: passwd shadow group hosts rpc services netid [...]

How to install a Dori compute node Now we have our cluster back in working order I have written the instructions for configuring a new compute node. Installing Boot the Centos 5.6 Net install CD. Some screen shots of what you will see are here: http://www.chrisgountanis.com/technical/45-centos-netinstall.html When it gets to "Installation Method" choose HTTP The cluster LAN Ethernet is on eth0. Set [...]

Old users Whlist restoring user accounts to our test cluster I had a quick look to see when everyone had last logged on. 2005 x 1 2006 x 4 2007 x 20 2008 x 4 2009 x 7 2010 x 11 2011 ... We should proabably automatically lock accounts after a while. It's not like at a company where you [...]

Fugly kernel I was working on our test cluster Dori today when I noticed the name of the kernel the headnode was running: This kernel was one of the ones hand rolled by Matt Tolentino to prototype memory offligning in Linux. Supposedly it was not the most beautiful bit of code ever written [...]

Fast SSH file copy with tar I have been reinstalling one of our research clusters and had to copy around 200GB of data over the network. The data was mostly tiny files and I half remembered an old trick using tar to speed up the transfer. After some googling I refined it down to this: $ tar [...]

Granola Earthday release MiserWare (the company that was spun out of SCAPE lab research) has been celebrating Earthday with a new release. MiserWare makes Granola which is software for saving energy on your PC, this is what the SCAPE lab pioneered a few years back. The new version has an interactive portal for [...]

PowerPack tutorial One of the things the SCAPE lab is famous for is building PowerPack. PowerPack uses software and hardware to monitor the power consumption of a computer at the component level. For instance you can see how much juice the CPU or hard drive are using. PowerPack is a tricky bit of [...]