We had a bit of excitement yesterday with one of the partitions on our main linux file server. It appears that the drive is beginning to fail. I’ll be testing it this week along with my other work.
This week I hope to move back to spending more time on Active Directory move testing. We also have some new matlab toolboxes to install.
The cluster downtime was avoided, thanks to some helpful advice from Dell. Our cluster uses a pair of PowerVault 220S enclosures which are configured in a RAID 5 array. When two of the drives in each enclosure went into predictive failure mode, we needed to replace them to ensure the integrity of our data. Since we’re running Rocks for the cluster os, the dell openmanage tools that would allow us to do the hotswap while the cluster was running weren’t available.
I didn’t want to install the openmanage software since it seemed to have a large number of modules and really looked like it might be work (which I try to avoid). A dell rep I talked to recommended DELLmgr instead. He told me to ignore the other rpms, and install only the following: Dellmgr-5.25-0.i386.rpm . It installs one file, dellmgr.bin, that talks to the PERC controller card and gives you an interface very similar to the one used in the card’s BIOS, no restart required. I was able to fail the faulty drives and do the rebuild without having to alter the cluster’s running state at all.
It’s a shame that dell no longer supports it and hasn’t released a version for the new controller cards.
A warning about some impending drive failures in our cluster on Friday means I’m going to need to schedule some downtime for it this week. We’re also having an orientation meeting today for lab students. The details are in your email.
I’ve been experiencing problems putting together a silent directx installation that will work with group policy. I can get it to run correctly when it is run silently but in an interactive session, only to have it fail when it is run as a startup script from a group policy object. It usually fails to copy some files from a temporary location into the system folder. I’m going to continue looking into this to see if a work-around is possible.
It looks like the strike at UofT has been avoided. The sony work and some other, grant related work ended up taking the majority of my week, so I’m still working on the Active Directory move.
This week will probably be concerned mostly with new student setup, although I hope to continue to make headway on the Active Directory tests I’ve been working on.