When building new Virtual Machines (VM’s) in a corporate environment, it’s preferred to built them with a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and while you can do this manually by attaching an ISO image and selecting options, it’s far more productive to do this using a kickstart script so you can achieve repeatability and adhere to …
Author: Admin
Using PVMOVE
LVM is one of the main stay storage technologies in almost all Linux installations and while adding a Logical Volume (LV) is common, migrating an LV is a task that many System Administrators baulk at. Over time, most Linux Systems that have growing storage needs tend to suffer from add-hoc storage allocation which results in …
Configuring a low memory VPS for NGINX, PHP-FPM and MariaDB.
I recently moved this web site and a dozen others to a new VPS, in the process I went from an Apache HTTPD server to NGINX with PHP being handled by PHP-FPM. The base OS is just a minimal build CENTOS 7 which is very much end of life, normally I deploy Oracle Linux 8.8 …
HPC Rebuild – 12 Months on
It’s great to be able to review work you have done in the past and then be able to re-factor it for the current climate and in 2023 we will be contracted to re-engineer and upgrade the HPC platform we designed and built for one of Australia’s most prestigious Medical Research Institutes back in 2020-2021. …
Programmatically add LACP
Implementing a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) that uses LACP to aggregate all the defined ethernet links is a well used and documented process. However under Redhat/CENTOS 7 and 8 the addition of NetworkManager can both throw a spanner in the mix and allow an easy way to dynamically add LACP during a kickstart install. During …
Build a Lustre High Performance Cluster
Coming Soon using v2.12.5 Overview Building a (Non HA) Cluster Todo – TCP LNET Overview Metadata Server Todo – Installing the Components – e2fsprogs, kmod, lustre Todo – Recommended Storage Needs (RAID-10 stripes) Todo – /etc/fstab entry for mount on boot. Object Storage Servers Todo – Installing the Components – e2fsprogs, kmod, lustre Todo – …
Infiniband Fat Trees
Overview Infiniband is primarily used in High Performance Computing (HPC) and provides a very fast network interconnect with an incredibly small latency. One of the most common topologies implented is the “Fat Tree” layout. The fat tree topology has host nodes connected at the end points of the network via PCI Infiniband cards. The Infiniband …
HPC Re-Engineering
Overview We have been tasked with proposing how we would re-engineer an aging SGI High Performance Computing platform. The platform is a 35 Node cluster running Red Hat 6.7 on each node with a Lustre file system mount and a /home file system presented via NFS from a Hierarchical Storage Node (over an FDR Infiniband …
LACP Implementation
Modern servers usually have multiple ethernet interfaces, and by combining them into an LACP trunk, you can pass VLAN’s over then to extend the amount of traffic over a bonded network link. Converting a Linux CENTOS server with 2 or more Ethernet interfaces to an LACP bonded network link couldn’t be simpler. The process is well documented …
Cloning to smaller Disks
A spate of failures of Samsung 850PRO SSD drives at a client’s site was the inspiration for this post. The SSD’s were used to boot the OS and were in a RAID 1 mirror when the second SSD had failed. Replacing the Samsung SSD would have been easy as its a hardware Raid, but the client …