news

One of the sunfire 280's is in place. Stubborn little thing didn't want to slide nicely along its rails. It's heavier than a beast and won't need securing in the rack since it won't slide without an army pushing it. Don't know how many tons they weigh but it's a lot for 4Us of space. They'll need to do more that just suck power and make noise for all that effort.

We started work on building up the new rack. First we need to get the rack joined to the old one. The annoying part is getting the feet on the old rack. We need to unload it, at least partially, to get the feet in place. The extra work will be worth it to finally have the lab fully unpacked from the move and in fully operational order. Then the fun stuff can start...

I have created an APT repository for RedHat 9 at apt.lab.ac.uab.edu (CNAME'd to thing2). Currently the only package provided is a configuration package (uab-atl-config) that encapsulates our standard lab configuration files. This will allow us to push configuration files on to our workstations, instead of manually updating each system.

My Grid project will involve creating a Globus Client and Server RPM package, and will be placed in the repository soon (I hope).

To use, add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

    rpm http://apt.lab.ac.uab.edu redhat/9/i386 lab

A collection of small improvments were made to the site.

* Figured out how to create blocks that only show up on specific pages: add a "path" string (regex) to the block's definition. The regex needs to be surrounded by "<" and ">" symbols but can be quite complex. See the [block help|http://lab.ac.uab.edu/admin/help#block]. There's also an entry in a [Drupal Forum|http://drupal.org/node/view/3371] on some addition options. (They forgot to mention the <> delimiter's importance...syntax error!)

* Found out about a mailing list to news gateway service for many popular mailing lists called [gmane|http://gmane.org]. This may help us avoid the need to set up our own news gateway, at least for public lists. There are still some advantages for our on supplied lists (read cms integration interfaces).

Finally got rewrite rules to work. The key was to properly define the rewrite condition so that just the portion of the path that I intended to rewrite was rewritten. I probably need to add extra args if I want to replace the path. In anycase, the old metric project namespace now works with the lab web site, eg http://lab.ac.uab.edu/projects/im/doc/im.html and http://metric.it.uab.edu/projects/im/doc/im.html are equivalent.

As an added bonus, the new project namespace is also gaining support. The project page is now reachable via http://lab.ac.uab.edu/project.

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.