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To support the UABgrid2 pilot we purchased a few Dell systems that arrived in April: two [Dell 2950s| http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_2950?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] with dual 3.0Ghz Xeon, 8Gb RAM, and 300Gb SAS disks (Perc5/i-based mirrors), a [Dell 1950|http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1950?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] with dual CPUs and some local storage, and an [Dell/EMC 6TB SAN|http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_ax150?c=us&cs=RC956904&l=en&s=hied] to connect to the 1950. The 2950's will host various aspects of the UABgrid2 infrastructure including the identity management (VO, CA, and MyProxy) and application support (GridWay, Gridsphere, and other collaborative apps) systems. The 2950s will be hosting VMware-based virtual machines to carry out most of these tasks, with the goal of easing application deployment when conflicting system requirements arise. The 1950 will act as a quasi-NAS device, supporting traditional network shares locally and high-bandwidth file transfers via GridFTP (and potentially other protocols) for UABgrid job management. Together these systems will form the UABgrid infrastructure cluster.

I've installed cfengine on a few of the desktops just to better get an idea of how it does the configuration management. Prerequisites to the install were Berkeleydb and Openssl. The latest versions of the Berkeleydb aren't configured properly with the cfengine version 2.1.21 that I used, the latest version that is compatible was version 4.0. You will also need to install the db40-devel and openssl-devel tools for build completion.

There also seems to be some incompatibilities with yacc that are only noticed in the make, so in order to get around this you can install both bison and flex to handle the parsing and compiling.

Well I've done the groundwork to get the development environment going using eclipse and drupal. It was a bit of a struggle, but I think I have a handle on it now. I just happen to stumble upon an easier way to get another development environment up and running with much less headache and mess. The secret?? Xampp!! You go to that site and see a groovy chic having fun on the page! She's probably happy because xampp is soooo easy! Basically, you download the xampp package, install it, and start it. That's it! It's simple instructions for anybody from Linux to Windows.

Remember the problem I had here:

Search for the line beginning with APACHE_MODULES, which should look like:

APACHE_MODULES="actions access alias auth ... php4 php5 rewrite"

Well in the galaxy of Linux, planet Ubuntu, a way was found! Since Ubuntu is the spawn of Debian, we must adhere to the Debian way! As root, I had to add a rewrite module so apache could work properly.

Ok, I've been following the instructions given by IBM on the developerworks area in their site. They created those tutorials using Suse and they said that other distributions can work as well; one of them being Ubuntu. Well things seem to go well and I've experienced some slight differences, but I've run into a small problem with the Apache configuration. Their main config file on Suse is found in /etc/sysconfig/apache2 while Ubuntu doesn't have a sysconfig folder. When you download all of the software you need for apache2, it creates it's own apache2 folder so it's path is /etc/apache2. The main config file is apache2.config, but IBM tells you to do this:

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For those of you who don't know, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005 that changes the start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) as of spring 2007. Linux distributions all over have been working on this because other countries have decided to change their daylight savings times as well! Well I've done a little bit of research to get everyone up to speed on this and I've compiled a list with websites to go to so you can update yourselves! I'm still researching so I will be updating this list periodically so check back! Side note: these sites I'm posting will lead you to where you officially need to go if what you need isn't already there!

Well after completing "The Unix Philosophy," I realized just how much power and freedom Unix gives the user! So much power that the user, myself included, doesn't even realize and, as a result, doesn't even see the full potential of it! Peter Parker's uncle, shouts out to Spiderman, said "that with great power comes great responsiblity." Can users be responsible? Can we handle something so small yet so great? Can we open ourselves up to even learn a small piece of it?? After reading this book on unix, I think that we can! Unix has been on the cutting edge since day one, but the world overlooked it because of it's simple complexity!

When first picking up this book, I thought "yeah I know a little about unix, but I know a little more about linux so why read this book?" Well, even though I've only gotten to the fourth chapter, I see that to go forward one must know the past and that's exactly what this book has started for me. For it to be so thin, there are loads and loads of knowlege packed inside and, best of all, a person can't possibly get lost in it! The technical jargon is kept to an absolute minimum and, yes, I've actually found some humor in it!

When Mike Gancarz talks about programmers constantly building massive programs, I saw myself in that statement already! My favorite concepts right now are small is beautiful and portability over efficiency.

Installing the Globus Toolkit on both Suse 10.1 and 10.2 machines, I encountered one major difference. Using the latest stable release, 4.0.3 source code version, installation for 10.2 went without trouble. However, installing for the 10.1 distribution gave me a bug during the make and was fixed using an update from the GTK advisories. The problem originated from a buggy gcc that 10.1 doesn't address. From the advisories page simply download globus_js-0.5 which corresponds to the fix for bug 4315.

Linux Provisioning Systems - Posted by jpr to provisioning sysadmin linux on Thu Jan 11 2007 [@lab Bookmarks]

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Came across an article today in [NetworkComputing| http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/storageandservers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=194300555&pgno=11] (of all places. nothing quite like boardom induced browsing) that caught my interest. I've been scratching my head for a while on how to manage the desktops, servers, and hpc systems in a reasonable way. The best way to do it is some ROCKSish like way, essentially having some configuration management tool. ROCKS and OsCaR are nice but a little too geared to the HPC cluster environment and don't seem adaptable to general purpose system administration with out a lot of cross platform (non-redhat) headache. I've toyed with the idea of roll my own via the grid but don't like the isolation of it.