• LocalInformation

Gelato Machines at UNSW

Machine Names

All the gelato@UNSW machines are named for ice cream flavours, or things related to Gelato.

A list of flavours is at [/MachineNames]

lemon

lemon.gelato.unsw.edu.au does all the work -- web/mail and anything else we might need. It's an HP ZX2000 Itanium-2 running Debian Linux, configured with 200G discs and 4G memory. It is confined in a DMZ and you probably don't need to access it unless for system administration. You can push your home directory to lemon with a system-wide cronjob. See instruction for details.

You may also want to setup passwordless authentication for all machines (see sshauthorization).

All the machines authenticate to the ERTOS LDAP server by default, and have home directories served via NFS from paulaner.ertos.nicta.com.au.

General use machines

The Gelato project currently owns nine IA64 machines, and has access to a number of others. Please book any machines you wish to use (see booking).

There are two dual-processor McKinley machines, each with a 36G disc and 4G memory: tartufi and cassata. And there are two single-processor McKinley machines, each with a 36G disc and 1G memory: berry and tiramisu. Also four dual processor madison machines, each with at least 73G disc and 2G memory.

As set up, each machine has home directories mounted from paulaner; and uses ldap for password information. The machines can be set up for NetBooting, or can boot from local disc.

Configuration

Other Information

Consoles

Most machines are available from the console command on consoles.

To access the console on these, ssh to consoles, and use the console command (see conserver). Or, if you wish to, you could set up your console client to connect to the console server on consoles.

Note* If your console client is getting conection refused, then you will need to have the client machine placed on the allowed list on consoles, and have an account on lemon.

Note** The other machines are slightly different; these machines are fitted with management console hardware. To access it, telnet to machine-mgmt (i.e. tartufi-mgmt or cassata-mgmt) and give the appropriate user-name and password (most people around the lab know it, otherwise see PeterChubb or IanWienand).

Partitioning

Currently, each machine is partitioned as follows:

Note that home partitions are NFS-mounted from paulaner except for tutti.

Of course, any machine can be repartitioned and reinstalled if necessary for a particular project, so all data on any machine is not guaranteed to be long lived, so backup often.

Please comment here on proposed new partitioning scheme

System Image

Several machines can be automatically reformatted and imaged from our imageserver.

• At the elilo prompt just select 'SystemImager' for the process to start

  Please select a boot option
  
      Debian GNU/Linux
      EFI Shell [Built-in]
      SystemImager
      cd
      Boot Option Maintenance Menu
      System Configuration Menu
  
  

Backup

The Gelato McKinley and Madison machines are not backed up. They should not be used for development, only for testing and benchmarking. Do not store anything you'd be sorry losing on those machines --- they run experimental kernels, and we have lost filesystems in the past.

Critical data on lemon is backed up nightly; (e.g., WIKI contents and mailman archives) to an account on another machine where it's grabbed by CSE's backup scripts nightly.

Vacation Scripts

As it currently stands, the on|report|off@vacation scripts don't appear to work for Gelato members. I have a simple script

#/bin/zsh -l
 
if [ -n "`ps -ef | grep username | grep checkmail | grep -v grep`" ]; then
        exit;
fi
 
killall -HUP checkmail 2>&1 >/dev/null
sleep 2
checkmail -N

that I run from a cron job on lemon via ssh to a CSE server. It ensures checkmail keeps grabbing my mail, and passing it through to procmail where I manually invoke the vacation program. Only thing to be careful is you use a login shell; checkmail needs all sorts of environment variables to check the mail.

Administration

Creating new mailman groups

If you are creating a new mailman list on lemon, be sure to add the domain name after the group when you use the newgroup command. e.g.

sudo /var/lib/mailman/bin/newlist thelistname@www.gelato.unsw.edu.au

This ensures everything gets created correctly.

Alternatively, use the web interface

General Assets List

The list of the rest of the machines available to the group is available only to group members, at https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~disy/local/assets/

Updating the website

Please checkout the website from CVS with

cvs -d:ext:lemon.gelato.unsw.edu.au:/home/ianw/cvs/ co gelato-www

See the README file, but the gist is to edit .tmpl files which will get made into the html files. Make sure anything you need copied is in the inventory.txt file and use make install to put it in the main directory.

Restoring a System Image (Reinstall debian onto tartufi)

1. Telnet to the management card and select SystemImager

2. At the prompt press tab which will give you a list of choices. Chose re-image