September 2010 - Sans - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

[Sans] /sans/: Meeting #4: 2010-09-29, Monitoring & puppet follow up
by Steven Armstrong 29 Sep '10

29 Sep '10

Hi Sysadmins On Wednesday, 29th of September the next sysadmin meeting will take place! You can find more information on http://sans.ethz.ch/meetings/2010-09-29/ Hope to see you all there. Cheers & happy kernel patching ;-), Steven -- Steven Armstrong Institute of Computational Science, ETH Zurich IT Management & Support Universitaetsstrasse 6, CAB/H/88 8092 Zurich, Switzerland Phone: +41 44 632 25 24

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Call for Datacenter Management/Troubleshooting Scenarios
by Simon Peter 03 Sep '10

03 Sep '10

Hi, I am writing to the list to ask for input from real sysadmins on datacenter management and troubleshooting scenarios. The context is a research paper on a comprehensive datacenter tracing framework I am writing together with Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. The framework allows you to write concise queries that can execute over the whole datacenter and trace detailed information across all layers of the software stack down to the operating system kernel. Tracepoints are automatically deployed and trace data is automatically aggregated and stored with low overhead for (real-time) presentation. In the paper, we would like to include case studies of datacenter management and troubleshooting scenarios that really occurred and which could be done easier with such a tracing framework. Examples of cases I am looking for are (all of these really occurred): * Troubleshooting misconfigurations or software bugs. Eg. DHCP server overloaded as an unknown host in the datacenter is generating lots of traffic through a misconfigured Ethernet bridge driver. * Detecting known problems. Eg. An application periodically hangs because glibc tries to communicate with a credentials caching daemon that doesn't respond. * Analyzing the impact of changes. Eg. have to find out which applications are affected by the new kernel patch I just installed because something is running mysteriously slow. Especially cases where multiple hosts were involved and the answer wasn't obvious are interesting. If there's something really crazy that happened, I'd like to hear about it as well. I'd be very glad for some of your experiences. Thank you! Simon

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Kerberos / CIFS / nethz
by Nico Schottelius 01 Sep '10

01 Sep '10

Good morning sysadmins, I'm currently in contact with ID to get the cifs mount working from nas-nethz-users.d.ethz.ch using root@sgv-ubuntu-01:~# mount -t cifs -w -o sec=krb5,user=nicosc,domain=d.ethz.ch,uid=0,gid=0 '//nas-nethz-users.d.ethz.ch/share-n-$' /mnt though still without success, although the kerberos tickets seem to available: root@sgv-ubuntu-01:~# klist Ticket cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_0 Default principal: nicosc(a)D.ETHZ.CH Valid starting Expires Service principal 08/30/10 17:52:10 08/31/10 03:52:13 krbtgt/D.ETHZ.CH(a)D.ETHZ.CH renew until 09/06/10 17:52:10 08/30/10 17:52:52 08/31/10 03:52:13 cifs/nas-nethz-users.d.ethz.ch(a)D.ETHZ.CH renew until 09/06/10 17:52:10 If anyone of you had success or knows someone who had success in mounting the cifs home via kerberos, please let me know. If you're interested in getting that stuff to work, a ping would also be great, because ID is quite unaware of any possible users and presumably not very motivated if only one party is interested. Cheers, Nico -- Systems Group Sysadmin Tel: +41 (0) 44 632 76 09 D-INFK/ETH Zurich

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S and SGE goes 90-day trial license S
by Mosebach Kai 01 Sep '10

01 Sep '10

FYI, http://scalability.org/?p=2519 S and SGE goes 90-day trial license S SGE, aka, Sun Grid Engine, is the latest bit of HPC collateral damage in the Oracle digestion of Sun. This is not to say its going away, Dan Templeton has a nice post on his site indicating that they have a roadmap and a future. Its just that it is no longer open source. You can¹t use it for more than 90 days w/o a paid license from Oracle. Whoops. This said, the GE community is stepping up to do something about this, though my concern is that Oracle could lean on them a little. This isn¹t a good thing for SGE users (we are/have been one) who use the open source version. I need to check a few other products we¹ve been using in a similar view. If we need to convert to something else, we will. Torque isn¹t terrible (my bad experiences with its predecessor from years ago not withstanding), and there are a few others. Best Kai

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