corrupted mbr

redid the boot loader on 126 and 129.  I had a couple of machines earlier in the semester that it happened to, and at the time I considered the possibility that they had gotten corrupted because the bios wasn't locked down.  It is now though, so it is either the hardware or the OS corrupting it.

used sysrescue to boot into the os and then manually ran grub2-install, running it through yast does not work.

10/10
121 and 122 also  were corrupted, and I need to reset pam.d after fixing grub2

1/22
128 was corrupted and repaired

monarch

reinstalled the boot loader for centos, it booted ok this time

working on ldap
- installed openldap and openldap-clients using yum
- edited nsswitch.conf
- backed up /etc to an nfs drive
- copied over ldap.conf
- verify with getent passwd
   - no luck yet
- install pam_ldap.x86_64 nss-pam-ldapd.x86_64 openssh-ldap.x86_64
- copy krb5.conf
- copied ldap.conf to pam_ldap.conf
- copied pam.d/
- rebooting
   - fail, could not login at all
- reverted /etc
   - still bad
       - ssh does not work, but can login at terminal
       - must have been temporary... ssh working now
 - disabled selinux
 - recopied ldap, krb, nssswitch
 - testing ssh with root
 - trying to work with authconfig and sssd to get the proper settings in place
 - trying to reboot again to flush out any cached stuff

bios options

list of bios options to set in 309
- storage options, disable cd rom boot
- boot order
- setup password -
- network boot - disable
- virtualization technology - enable
- num-lock on
- amt - disabled

fall upgrades

so trying to migrate the student wiki on www remotely, and rebooted the machine so it could come up in the new operating system, and nothing...

the new server doesn't seem to like openSuse either. it hangs on loading the initialization ram disk, I'll try centos on it next.

student is now a regular machine without xen

files is almost ready to upgrade, I moved files off of md1 so I could repurpose sdb1 for another operating system

server needs upgrading

I'm considering what to do with database, I was going to use it for the faculty wiki, but if I migrate the student wiki to sqlite also, then I can run them both on www without any significant overhead, perhaps I'll continue to use it as a database server, or maybe just a backup for server.cs and unix.cs both of which are old themselves.

unix.cs is fragile and hard to upgrade do to a bad cd rom drive, maybe I'll rename it license, use it for mathematica and ntp and use the database machine as a generic gateway machine

I bet www did not shutdown all of the way, there was a bios issue with some of the dells...

for most of the server machines I'm not running any gui

for server I need to back it up and then migrate. The disk is small though, maybe using database for that would be the best thing, and then I can reuse that machine for whatever later.

I talked with Jim today and we got the network going.

Need to finish imaging the new machines and get them distributed. Then get monarch going

Fall upgrades

There were a bunch of bad sectors on the old db server. I think I have those cleaned up now and am repurposing it to be the faculty (intradepartment) webserver. Created a custom boot image and am loading it, it only has a cd drive and all of the standard ones are dvd now. After I get it set up I'll migrate the faculty wiki to it. I'm not sure if I want to use it as the database server still or migrate that to www

I've installed a new os for www, but need to go through, move the student wiki, setup the users, certificates, and everything else to get it back to normal.

I haven't started on monarch yet, I want to get the old machines going first.

Started configuring the new lab and project room machines. They are having networking problems though.

the db/faculty machine seems stuck

Working on backups

working on student's networking... it does not want to recognize the card and set the route on boot up...

I'm looking to convert the faculty wiki to regular webpages, the wiki was overkill, I backed up the data in case though

2013 Fall upgrades

The database server looks like it might be having disk problems. I'm going to back up the data and then try running badblocks on it check it out. If it goes well I'll upgrade it and probably reuse it, otherwise I'll try to get a different machine.

I had been running xm on student to allow virtual machines, it seems like an annoyance though, so I'm considering not continuing it.

Need to upgrade files, server, and www. I'm not going to touch unix, but it'll have to be upgraded at some point.

Then I also need to set up the new machine, monarch.

rescue chroot

Occasionally a machine won't boot well. When chrooting in a rescue environment the following commands are useful


mount --bind /proc /CurrentMountPointofRootPartition/proc
mount --bind /dev /CurrentMountPointofRootPartition/dev
mount --bind /sys /CurrentMountPointofRootPartition/sys

dying hardware

The hardware in the hawkins lab is dying. One machine H32 lost its hard drive. As the machines are out of warranty CMS did what they could and found another old drive. The problem is that, that drive may also be bad. I get an error when formatting the hard drive for the operating system. Running badblocks on it now.

possible network issue

In the redcay lab 3 of the 6 machines were stuck booting up. They were complaining about networking errors, but didn't get any further, not even timing out. After 3 hours of trying to find what was happening, they started working again. No changes had been made to the software. Early on I actually had ruled out networking, since that was my first suspicion, but I had swapped the cable with an adjacent working one, and it still misbehaved.

The only other thing that I did to two of them is boot them up with a rescue cd and manually configure the networking.

The other problem is that Pam was refusing local logins because it couldn't contact the ldap server. It is unclear to me what the problem is in the configuration files.