Server Dell PowerEdge T410

Manuals

• here, online version of the main manual here with chapter on LED status here

Install notes

BIOS

• • Activate Virtualization support
  • Power Management -> OS Control
  • Report kbd errors: NO

Debian Squeeze

Still testing at time of writing but frozen so almost stable ;-)

• Installing squeeze from daily image (17/08/2010)
  • Complains about missing bnx2/bnx2-mips-09-5.0.0.j3.fw & bnx2/bnx2-rv2p-09-5.0.0.j3.fw
    • Get it on another machine and put it on USB stick: aptitude install firmware-bnx2 ; cp /lib/firmware/bnx2/bnx2-*-09-5.0.0.j3.fw /media/XXXX
    • Actually I had also an additional Intel network card so I could have skipped this step...
  • Partitionning:
    there is a first primary partition for Dell Utilities (FAT16), I left it just in case...;
    there is also a second primary partition: 2Gb of FAT32, empty, so I deleted it.
    partition #2: primary 10Gb ext3 / label=ROOT
    partition #3: primary 16Gb swap
    partition #5: logical 2Tb physical volume for LVM
    Configure LVM / ok to write table / Create VG with sda5, called vg0 (will be used by XEN)
  • Tasksel: SSH & standard utilities
  • Reboot
• SSH: PermitRootLogin no / ssh-copy-id ...
• Install mc, screen, sudo (adduser xxx sudo)
• Renaming interfaces (always easier to remember what's plugged where...)
  • à la ifrename
    • aptitude install ifrename
    • Create /etc/iftab then reboot

intelG mac 00:1b:21:xx:xx:xx
intelD mac 00:1b:21:xx:xx:xx
bcm1   mac 84:2b:2b:xx:xx:xx
bcm2   mac 84:2b:2b:xx:xx:xx

• • à la udev
    • actually we don't need ifrename because udev is now doing the same, see /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, you can simply change the NAME key
  • Be sure the old name is not used anywhere else in your config, typically in /etc/network/interfaces

Xen

Sagemath guest

• xen-create-image --hostname=sagemath --memory=12288 --swap=12288 --vcpus=20
• WARNING strangely the default root password was disabled with a '*' in /etc/shadow so impossible to log in. I had to mount manually the lv (/dev/vg0/sagemath-disk) to remove the '*'
  One may prefer to setup the password interactively when creating the image with xen-create-image ... --passwd (or setup passwd=1 in /etc/xen-tools/xen-tools.conf as I've now shown in the above diff file)
• lvm> lvcreate -L 1000G -n sagemath-data vg0
• /etc/xen/sagemath.cfg: add data volume:

root        = '/dev/xvda2 ro'
disk        = [
                  'phy:/dev/vg0/sagemath-disk,xvda2,w',
                  'phy:/dev/vg0/sagemath-swap,xvda1,w',
                  'phy:/dev/vg0/sagemath-data,xvda3,w',
              ]

• xm create -c /etc/xen/sagemath.cfg
• Hook the data drive as /home
  • mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvda3
  • In /etc/fstab: /dev/xvda3 /home ext4 noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
  • mount /home
• Install sage
  • apt-get install aria2
  • cd /opt
  • aria2c http://www.sagemath.org/mirror/linux/64bit/meta/sage-4.5.2-linux-64bit-ubuntu_10.04_lts-x86_64-Linux.tar.lzma.metalink
  • tar x --lzma -f sage-4.5.2-linux-64bit-ubuntu_10.04_lts-x86_64-Linux.tar.lzma
  • cd sage-4.5.2-linux-64bit-ubuntu_10.04_lts-x86_64-Linux
  • Edit sage and set SAGE_ROOT="/opt/sage-4.5.2-linux-64bit-ubuntu_10.04_lts-x86_64-Linux"
  • ./sage
  • sage> notebook.setup()
    Provide FQDN for TLS certificate generation

Misc notes

Boot & DHCP

I've still sometimes some issues at boot time when the xenbr0 bridge doesn't catch its IP...
In those cases I find dhclient still hooked to the non-existing bnx1 IF (which was renamed pbnx1 by XEN). I've to kill it and start a similar dhclient on IF xenbr0.
Finally I renamed the default interface as eth0 and called the xen bridge script without parameters: (network-script network-bridge)

Hyperthreading

I'm not sure if in the long run it'll help but given that there are already 12 CPUs, I've disabled the logical CPU support in the BIOS.