Server Dell PowerEdge T410

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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

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.

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