CS Setup notes
I checked out the CS department’s 4 new FS servers.
Here are my notes:
IBM e-server (made in China) hardware works. It was assembled painlessly by CS staff. No need for IBM engineers. It is expensive though, 100000 EUR for about 5000+ users. Typical concurrent users is 500.
The IBM console hardware is beautiful. They way it slid out. The black IBM keyboard with the red nipple. Sexy stuff.
So about 20EUR per user. Of course 100kEUR is one off cost for about 5 years I would imagine. Then again the average time it takes to graduate from my department is 7 years.
Tape drives are still the best way to backup terrabytes of information.
Sun hardware is expensive and isn’t neccessarily better quality than IBM hardware. It does better in hardware scalability. You can plug in more CPUs when the machine is running. SunOS is difficult to administrate compared to GNU/Linux based systems. I’d agree with that, as I remember them from when I worked with Siemens. Unimpressive to say the least.
Users are distributed amongst the four FS with a md5sum in a userpath script.
melkinpaasi$ sh userpath hendry
f4dfad803df83144a5be86d9bca87678
f4
/fs-3/4/hendry
It surprisingly seems to work. See the distribution:
melkinpaasi$ sh countusers.sh
/fs-0 : 1114
/fs-1 : 1098
/fs-2 : 1085
/fs-3 : 1175
Grand Total: 4472
I also liked the way auth is setup instead of the horrible LDAP:
melkinpaasi$ ls /etc/r
group lost+found passwd shadow
melkinpaasi$ mount
/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda4 on /home type ext3 (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
fs-0:/fs-0 on /fs-0 type nfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,bg,nfsvers=3,addr=128.214.9.55)
fs-1:/fs-1 on /fs-1 type nfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,bg,nfsvers=3,addr=128.214.9.56)
fs-2:/fs-2 on /fs-2 type nfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,bg,nfsvers=3,addr=128.214.9.57)
fs-3:/fs-3 on /fs-3 type nfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,bg,nfsvers=3,addr=128.214.9.58)
/dev/ram0 on /etc/r type ext2 (rw)
fs:/fs on /fs type nfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,bg,nfsvers=3,addr=128.214.48.121)
fs:/group on /group type nfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,bg,nfsvers=3,addr=128.214.48.121)
Quite a hack I’m told, but it works.