[TriLUG] good news & bad news

[Tanner Lovelace]

I see Chris has stolen my thunder. :-) That's ok, this is too good
news to hold onto.  I will expound, however.

This morning, my employer (Oculan) donated a super micro 1U
server (PIII 800Mhz, 18GB SCSI hard drive, 1GB ram).  Credit
Mike Johnson for thinking of this idea.  The initial idea
was to use this for the kerberos/ldap server.  Looking at
the specs, however, we thought that with 1GB of ram, if we
could put the 60GB ide drive in it, it would make a great
e-mail server.  So, this evening we tried to install the 60GB
drive into the machine with abysmal results.  We thought it
was just that it didn't like the machine, but when the same
thing happened when we tried to install it back into stonesoup
we realized the 60GB drive had completely died. :-(  The good
news, however, is that we looked up the serial number and found
out the drive is under warranty until about 2004, so we should
be able to get it replaced.  Jon? Where exactly did that drive
come from and what would you suggest we do with it?  RMA it 
through Western Digital?  Try to take it back to where we bought it?
Let me know what you think.

So, after that happened, we decided to go back to our original
plan of putting the kerberos/ldap server on the 1U machine.
This happened in parallel with Jeremy and Chris trying to make
some sense of the drives in the machine that was donated by
John Turner and the Center for the Public Domain.  This machine
came to us with 4 9GB drives and we've added 2 other 9GB drives
and 4 other 18GB drives that were donated by various companies.
The idea is to move the mirrors over to this machine and make
it the ftp server.  Unfortunately, we had a few problems with
the first scsi card (reference my e-mail about LVD/SE drives)
to begin with.  Those were pretty much solved before this evening,
so Jeremy and Chris went about trying to get six of the drives
hooked up to the Mylex raid card up and working.  when we got
the machine, 3 of the drives were hooked up and working (although
it was saying one of them had died) and we wanted to add 3 
of the 18GB that were all the same.  Unfortunately, the mylex
card comes up and says something like "Press Alt-R for raid
configuration" and when we do that, it says configuration will
happen after initialization and then either does nothing of the
sort or hangs. :-(  John Turner, do you have any information 
on the Mylex card?  Does anyone else?  William Ward, you said
you had another Mylex card you would donate?  Is that offer
still open?  It would be interesting to try a different mylex
card and see what happens then.  Anyone else have any ideas?
Jeremy and Chris seem to think that we might need to boot
to a floppy drive and run a particular program, but we also
seem to be having problems with the floppy drive. :-(

So, anyway, while all that was happening, I was working on
getting kerberos and ldap up and running.  Getting kerberos
up and running was a cinch.  I had done that before and
there wasn't anything different.  Getting ldap up, however,
was different.  When I had tried it before, I couldn't even
get the server up and running.  I think, however, that
had more to do with the fact that I had to compile it 
to run on alphas and couldn't just use the default rpm.
Since the 1U is an intel machine, I just installed the
default rpms and set about configuring it based on the 
incredibly good howto at http://www.ofb.net/~jheiss/krbldap/
I ran into a couple of snags along the way, the main
one being that when the howto specifies "hostname"
in italics, it refers to the actual fully qualified
domain name of the machine (the one returned by dns).
Once I figured that out, everything just fell into place.
It all came together when I deleted my account information
from /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and was able to log in! :-)
Yay!  So, we have single sign-on up and running.  We won't
be able to put it back into the rack until monday morning
because inflow isn't open this weekend (But, btw, they
should be back to 24/7 by the end of the month.).  And,
we won't be able to get the mail server up until either
1) we replace the drive or 2) we get another drive.  So,
it isn't all good news, but the major bottleneck has been
removed!  Hopefully things will go more smoothly from 
here.

Thoughts?

Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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 This would be a very good time to hang out with the Open Source 
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