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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Warm and sunny here in Saskatoon today. Given that this could potentially be the last such day for many months, I'm heading out to the garden to clean up the dead plants, turn the soil, etc. etc. Tonight we're off to a corn roast just out of town, so WYSIWYG. Tomorrow I'll post an update on my clustering adventures.
My friend Svenson posed an interesting question to me this morning... [paraphrased] "Why run a cluster on a home network?"
Short answer: Because like Everest, it's there. Long-ish answer, why not?
(1) Enabling a system to support clustering is drop-dead simple thanks to the hard work of the devs at openMosix. Fetch the appropriate RPM, install, configure /etc/mosix.map, add in the user tools, and reboot. Viola. One node present and accounted for. Total time: 10 minutes, tops. Granted, if you want to roll your own kernel the time investment is longer, but anyone with a modicum of kernel-building experience should be able to crank out a mosix-enabled kernel in 1/2 an hour. In short, with a minimal amount of effort, you have clustering capabilities.
(2) Running a mosix-enabled kernel does not -- from personal experience -- impact system performance one iota. So you can choose "to cluster or not to cluster" without impact on your system.
(3) I don't run an "average" home network ;-) I'm constantly building new products or kernels. Why not utilize the processing power at hand to assist the process? I have two dev boxes that, for the most part, sit idle 90% time. Might as well exercise all those electrons.
Onward for me... I'm having a heck of a time building an openMosix kernel on Phaedrus, my Dell notebook. And given this is the system I use most for building new programs/kernels, it's the one I want openMosix running on the most. I'm carefully documenting everything and I'll pass along my experiences when complete.
We had an unannounced visitor last night. Mr. J Frost. Took out my prized pepper plant, our tomatoes, peas, and left a huge pile of leaves under our poplar trees in the front yard. Sigh. Oh well... it is almost October.
My Gentoo install died sometime last night with a "sandbox error" compiling procps. Piffle. The first Gentoo install I've done to date that didn't finish the base install. What's a "sandbox error"? Damned if I know. Something to do with where GCC "plays" when it's compiling a program. Anywhoo... I asked a question or two on the Gentoo-user/-dev list, got back one reply pointing me to a bug reports stating it was a "showstopper" (high priority) problem, and a fix was in the works. Mmm. Showstopper? Whaazzatt? Don't have time to stop shows around here. So I manually emerged all the remaining ebuilds one by one, finished up the configuration, rebooted, rsync'd, realigned my chair, and re-emerged system. procps compiled as advertised. Heh. Showstopper my ass ;-) Phoenix is now offically fully operational once again.
Phoenix is also the first cluster-capable system here at Syroid Manor. Yep. Built it with an openMosix kernel (2.4.19-r5). Of course, a cluster isn't a cluster without one or two playmates... sooo... I surfed over to the openMosix Sourceforge repository, downloaded the RH 2.4.18 RPM's, and installed them on Janus. As Moshe would say, two steps (well, actually three) and Bob is indeed yer Uncle. Download and install the kernel, the user-land package (rpm -ivh blah-blah), edit /etc/mosix.map, and reboot. Simple Simon. If I had known clustering was that easy, I would have implemented it a long time ago. Really folks -- it took all of 5 minutes (excluding download) to "cluster-ize" Janus. Remarkable stuff. There's an excellent HOWTO on installing and configuring an openMosix cluster here. Kudos to Moshe and his development team for an excellent, and useable product. Tomorrow I add my notebook to the fray...
Night all. Time to count some sheep.
Three hours ago, my office looked a lot like Arafat's compound. CPU's, motherboards, SCSI cables, power supplies, and a nice assortment of screws lay scattered all over the floor. My desk was covered with MB specs and printouts of jumper settings. Several "build log" journals lay open on my desk. A mini Chaos Manor Greatroom. I'm pleased to say that order has been restored. All systems have been re-assembled, Janus is playing The Best of Chicago, and Phoenix is merrily compiling a new install of Gentoo 1.4-RC1. Praise be to the gods of all things computer related.
Phoenix is probably the most aptly named system at Syroid Manor. Rising from the ashes indeed. Several times over. A few months back the system started to give me all kinds of WTF-kinda-grief. After some probing and proding I determined I had major motherboard foo-bar happening, and shut the box off until I could deal with the problem in a measured way. Last month I stumbled upon a dual P2 motherboard on e-Bay, complete with a GB of EDO RAM, two P2-300's, and SCSI onboard. I bid on it and won. Total bill, about $150 US. The board arrived a few days ago, and I tucked it away outa-sight-outa-mind until I had time to do things properly. Late this afternoon I cleared my desk, and decided the time had come for Phoenix to get a heart and lung transplant. I installed the new board, dry tested it sans CPU's and memory, and when everything looked right, plugged in all the appropriate pieces. Short story: it refused to find a boot device. Couldn't boot from SCSI CD, nada floppy. After two hours of head-scratching I was becoming perplexed. I'd swapped, wiggled, and jiggled everything I could think of. In an act of desperation, I stripped the motherboard tray from Phoenix (complete with CPU's and memory) and transfer the whole kit-and-kaboodle to Janus (same case, so the task was relatively easy). Presto-pocus, the unit booted, albeit without floppy support. Mmm. OK, back to the drawing board. Power supply? Cables? Orientation to Mecca? Whatever the case, the motherboard, CPU's, and memory were "good", which was a huge relief. I fell back on Pournelle's Law, jumped in the car, drove to my local computer store, and found a new 80-pin SCSI cable. Moved the MB back into Phoenix, connected the new cable, and POOF -- lights, camera, action. We'll sorta. The MB refused to boot from the SCSI CD-ROM, so I added a ATAPI CD-ROM to the fray for "bootability". Low-level formatted the SCSI drive, dropped in a bootable Gentoo 1.4-RC1 CD, and achieved nirvana. Floppy still doesn't work (I suspect it's the MB plug), but that's not significant to me -- I haven't relied on a floppy to get a system up and running in over two years. But I do need a CD-ROM that recognizes a bootable CD, and I have that. As the saying goes, "Good 'Nuff". Onward and upward. Phoenix will serve as a second dev box. The OS will be "hands-off" (that is, critical updates only); it will be a CVS server and a place to experiment with a new web design/layout.
On the AIX front, I've decided to hold-off any updates for a few weeks. Rumor has it AIX 5.2bL ('b' for the release after 'a', which never saw the light of day; 'L' for "Linux compatible") will be released mid-October. I'll take a wait-n-see approach. If 5.2 is problem-free, I'll take that approach; if it has problems, I'll go with ML02.
Finally, after years of harping about it, I've finally made a full and complete transition from Quicken to GNUCash. I spent the last week updating/transfering entries. After using the product for a few days, I can honestly say I'm very impressed with GNUCash. I didn't bother to try and import my existing Quicken records, as I wanted to cull and set up some new categories. But I like the interface, and its useability. Recommended. Check it out if you have a chance...
Be well. Time to check up on Gentoo's progress on Phoenix.
05:30 hrs... The weather of late is similar to Landon standing in the bathroom furiously turning the bathroom light on and off... The weekend brought wind, rain, and cool temperatures. Yesterday was sunny and warm. Last night it rained. This morning it's clear again (as near as I can tell at oh-dark-hundred), but cool enough to warrant a sweater. Welcome to fall on the prairies.
'Twas a busy weekend here at Syroid Manor. We harvested most of the remaining vegetables from the garden, moved several of my favorite herb plants inside for the winter, cut the grass, swabbed the deck, cooked a scrumpous roast, and generally got our house in order for another week. For Mother's Day Leah got a new lawn mower. For her birthday last week I picked up a near-new Bissell carpet cleaner from a local garage sale. So we had to try that out. Works splendiferously. We're pleased.
Sunday I updated my Samba installation on Hydras to the latest CVS code. Like the previous 3.0 alpha code I'd been running for four or five months, this new update -- at least so far -- works flawlessly. Top drawer stuff, folks. When Samba 3.0 is finalized, it's going to be a kick-ass release.
Speaking of updates, I've got a minor conundrum on my hands... Last week IBM released a new Maintenance Release (ML) for AIX 5.1. Unlike some of the MLs Big Blue's released for 4.3.3, the MLs they've posted for 5.1 have all been rock solid. And while ML02 contains a bevy of fixes targeted at the p690 (my box is an "antiquated" RS/6000 F50 ;-), there's several key system updates contained in the service pack. Enter my quandry... Hydras has been "up" for 147 days, which incidently, corresponds to the exact number of days we've been living in our new home (if anyone can tell me how to move a server across town without unplugging it, I'm all ears). ML02 demands a reboot when complete. As Pooh would say, decisions decisions. I'm still pontificating.
Everything else is as it should be. Danielle's busy with school, Leah's busy with her new job, and Landon's busy destroying our house and testing the limits of everyone's patience. Phaedrus, my Dell notebook, continues to delight. I'm running XP and SP1 (so far, so good) on one partition, and Gentoo 1.4 with all the latest-greatest "emerges" on another. Janus is loaded up with RH 8.0 ("Null", beta 2). I've to hand it to the devs at RH -- this is one stable, useable release. If I wasn't so enamoured with Gentoo's flexibility and the power of Portage, I'd probably be running RH 8 on my notebook. Ah well. Variety is the spice of life, no? As it is, I will no doubt be updating Janus to the "final" as soon as I can lay my hands on a copy, which I've heard rumors, may come as early as this week.
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