I've added a couple of sites to the [Site Cloud|http://lab.ac.uab.edu/cloud]. This is a simple tool to help track changes to websites. We can use this tool for a general sense of a "what's new" feature from the different sites. We want to be watching the page for the site that contains their news items. This is typically the site's home page. Feel free to add other sites. Consider it our "links to projects we depend on" container.

I've updated the wiki.module with a minor fix that allows it to cooperate with the admin pages. Mainly it doesn't just barf it's help text into every admin window. Outside of that, the module appears to still work it's filtering magic. You can read more about the markup rules on the [phpwiki site|http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/TextFormattingRules]. I'll leave it in place for now to see if there are other areas that need updating.

We've updated the website to Drupal 4.3. This is has some significant improvements over the 4.2 release and represents a nice level of feature refinements for the 4.x series. You can find out more about the 4.3 release at the Drupal website.

Along with this upgrade, several features have been added to the site. In general, we've opened up the site considerably. Anyone interested in taking a more active role in the activities of the lab is encouraged to register for an account. Annoymous users aren't shut out though, they can create static pages or submit stories. This helps us capture the free spiriti of the wiki world with some of the extra features of a CMS.

We wired up the the beowulf cluster today. The head node and all cluster nodes have power and booted successfully into RedHat 9. All systems responded successfully to pings from the head node. A new root password was been set.

The next steps are to attach the head node to the network and begin the system configuration: bring up Portland, hook in the auto provisioning system, install globus toolkit, and bring up a grid interface.

There was a problem booting node2 and node6. node2 came up on it's own after several resets during the BIOS tests (didn't see which test was failing). node6 failed consistently during the memory test, it didn't detect any memory. We opened the node and reseated the apparently loose memory card, which fixed the problem.

Backing up a mysql databes is pretty easy. In the simplist case, you can just backup the files that make up the database. Ideally you want to lock the tables first so other processes don't change the data (mainly indexes) while your doing the backup. It's ideal just to lock the database you are interested in but you can be broad and lock all the databases for now. We don't have a lot of simultanous access or independent databases for now, so locking them all should not do much harm. Once they are locked you can backup the database files of interest using tar. When you are done, remember to unlock the database.

The website needs to be easier to use and maintain. I added the wiki.module to help with that. At least now the formating can be a little easier and has some structure independent of HTML. Need a lyx.module. Oh, well.

In the spirit of wiki, anonymous users can now create content, see the [submit|node/add] link at the top right.

Also enabled the "Title" module so pages can now be linked by title, eg. the [Projects|title/projects] page.