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 …
Category: Linux
Articles specifically about Linux Systems.
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 – …
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 …
Core Files in CENTOS 7
Since Centos 7 came out there has been a significantly growth in the number of core files appearing on machines I look after. Since these machines are all package built and maintained with YUM from the CENTOSrepositories then that is a bit of a worrying trend. As an aside, I’ve also noticed the number of package …