EDG System Administration

Setting up a new ldap server. Since this will replace an existing server, it’s being set up under a different name. Files in bold will need to be changed when the name is changed.

1. Make sure openldap-server rpm is installed. Use up2date -i openldap-server if it’s not.

2. Make new /usr/share/ssl/certs/slapd.pem with 10 year time period.

3. Check ownership of file /usr/share/ssl/certs/slapd.pem. Should be 640 and group ldap.

4. Edit /etc/openldap/slapd.conf and /etc/openldap/ldap.conf to reflect our location.

5. Start ldap with /etc/rc.d/init.d/ldap start

I’ve exported the big disk on the server to everyone on the subnet. I’ve also mounted our old exported disks and am starting to copy data over. So, if the new raid system is mounted under /net and our old disks are mounted under /edg. I can copy files with this command:

in /edg/sw,
find IHP -print|cpio -dupmV /net/sw

Now I just have to do this for all of our data.

I finally received the ip address for our new server. I edited the config files to set the address and reboot the machine and it came up correctly. However, the route tables were wrong. I manually fixed them and reboot and the fixes I made didn’t stay. I forgot to add them to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-eth0, which would have made them permanent. So, I could have done that, but then decided to just reinstall everything. When setting the ip address during the installation, the routes all get set up fine and they don’t use the route-eth0 file. So where is this information stored? Since it was bugging me that I didn’t know, I decided to reinstall and hopefully find out.

Lines in /etc/modules.conf that I want to keep track of:

alias eth0 forcedeth
alias eth1 forcedeth
alias scsi_hostadapter 3w-9xxx
alias scsi_hostadapter sata_nv

I decided to simply put the latest version of RHEL on the server. This is because this machine is not really going to be running any design software, so it really doesn’t matter what version it has of anything. The latest version will have the latest drivers, which should help.

For some reason, when booting from the cd, I have to add “linux noapic” when starting the installation.

First sort of problem. The raid was coming up as /dev/sda and the system disk was coming up as /dev/sdb. Ideally, I usually like the system disk to be the ‘a’ disk and the data starts at ‘b’. I decided this wasn’t going to be a problem, (I’d just have to get used to it) and I started the installation. This did turn out to be a problem when I was installing grub. It wanted to put grub on the master boot record of /dev/hda, which is NOT where it should go. I wanted it on the mbr of /dev/hdb. So, I stopped the installation and went back to look at the bios. I found a place where I could specify the boot order of the drives. Great! I set the system disk to one and the raid to two. Unfortunately, this had absolutely no effect on the installation. I returned to the bios and found another spot where I could say that the raid is NOT a bootable disk. This did the trick. It still comes up with the raid as /dev/sda and the system disk as /dev/sdb, but now grub says it will install on the mbr of /dev/sdb.

I’m currently installing our new fileserver. The machine is a Supermicro AW-4020-CTB with 4GB of memory and two Opteron 246 (I think) cpus. It has a 160gb sata disk for the system and eight 250gb data disks, configured in a raid 5 array.

First problem. My RedHat Enterprise Linux version 3 install disks didn’t recognize any hard drives. I found that our motherboard has nvidia nForce Pro 2200 and 2050 SATA controllers. I tried downloading the latest driver from both Supermicro and NVIDIA and I couldn’t get either one to work. The solution was to download RHEL3 update 4 which automatically recognized the sata controller.

Second problem. 3ware raid card ignored. I went to the 3ware website and downloaded 3w-9xxx-linux-src-2.4-9.3.0.4.tgz, which is the driver for linux 2.4 kernels. I copied the file Makefile.rh to Makefile and ran “make all”. This created a file 3w-9xxx.o, which I copied to /lib/modules/2.4…./kernel/drivers/scsi. In /etc/modules.conf, I added the line scsi-hostadapter1 3w-9xxx. I had to put a 1 on the end because there already was a line with scsi-hostadapter for the nvidia sata driver. I reboot and it still wasn’t recognized. I did a “insmod 3w-9xxx” and that did it. Now I need to make sure this gets loaded on each boot.

I could then make a filesystem on the raid disks.
fdisk /dev/sdb
mkfs /dev/sdb1

I reboot the machine to see if it would come up automatically and now, it hangs right before loading grub. I don’t know what I did.