Revision as of 18:12, 5 March 2012

Notes on the first Hall D PowerEdge 710 Dell server

General Notes

• We ordered this unit to learn more about Dell servers and their performers, how to install them in the rack-room, how to configure the software them. It cost us about $4.5K.

• The rails that came with it only worked with big square or bog round holes in the vertical rails of the racks. Sice our racks have small circular threaded holes we had to order adapters (~$45) to be able to install them in the racks. Randy gave us a set of rails for circular holes, but it did not match the holes on the sides of the Dell server. But Randy told us that we should be able to order the rails for threaded holes.

• I connected the PowerEdge to network using its Ethernet interface #1 and requested an IP address from the computer center based on the MAC address of the Ethernet port #1. But when I tried to connect to network the light on the switch would stop blinking indicating that the switch port got disabled. After checking with Brent Morris and Paul Letta we suspected that this must be the IPMI services are interfering with that Ethernet port. So I disabled the IPMI by rebooting it and pressing <CTRL>R just when IPMI stuff appeared. After disabling it the port on the switch did not get blocked. Note that this server does not have a dedicated IPMI interface. We will need to figure out how to enable IPMI services so that Vardan's scheme would work with this.

• I had to install 64-bit RHEL 6 from JLab on it since the 32-bit RHEL 6.2 would only show 16 GB memory instead of 32 GB which was on the system. Besides, everything at the lab was moving to 64-bit. We will need tp compile the 32-bit codes for controllers from the controllers themselves, or use 32-bit compat-libraries to build them on 64-bit machines.

• During installation I had an issues with the partitioning program on the JLab installation disk. The program was probably based on fdisk utility which only could create MBR partition table thus limiting the maximum partition size to 2TB. I had to partition the RAID using gparted utility from my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS flash drive. After partitioning I ran the JLab installation disk with "no-default" partitioning scheme and installed the 64-bit RHEL 6.2 on this server using the pre-existing partition.

Extra Linux Packages Installed

• In the /etc/yum.conf file add "proxy=http://jprox:8082" as the last line.
• Install yum-priorities

  sudo yum install yum-priorities

• Download EPEL RPM and install

  sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

• Change the EPEL repositories in epel.repo and epel-testing.repo by disabling the mirrors and changing the baseurl to a value that computer center proxy allows us to access:

  baseurl=http://download-i2.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/....

• We have a suspicion that the repository files are being overwritten by the computer center.
• It turns out that system-config-netboot has been deprecated in RHEL6. Probably will have to configure PXE booting manually.

• sudo yum install tftp-server xinetd syslinux dracut-network dhcp

Installing backintime

tar -xzf backintime-1.0.8_src.tar.gz
cd backintime-1.0.8
cd common/
./configure
make 
sudo make install
cd ../gnome/
make
sudo make install


=== Setting up TFTP server ===

* Edit <i>/etc/xinetd.d/tftp</b> and change "disable = yes" to "disable = no" 
* Restart TFTP server  <pre>sudo service xinetd restart