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Setting up a diskless garden

D

DatHak512

Gawd
Joined
Jan 8, 2004
Messages
743
Okay, so i'm going to somehow try to fit this in my dorm room. The way i see it, it's the ideal location for it. I've read the FAQ and the associated links, but i don't feel to comfortable in linux, and would appreciate the help in getting this thing folding as fast as possible. Right now the way i understand it, i put two NICs in the server, and have the dorm ethernet port going into one of them, and the the other NIC is connected to a 5 port switch. This is what i plug my boxen into, right? That way no other computers on the residential network will netboot off of my server? (That would just be terrible, now wouldn't it? :D). Let me know if this sounds about right, or if i need any other hardware. Thanks.
 
Venusprobe said:
Sorry I can't help you but I'm interested in how this works too. Anyone?
Click to expand...
Don't worry, i will keep you all plenty informed. I want this to work pretty badly. I know unhappy_mage has just refined the distro of linux that i'm gonna be running... so i'll look forward to being the first test-subject for that! ;).
 
DatHak512 said:
Okay, so i'm going to somehow try to fit this in my dorm room. The way i see it, it's the ideal location for it. I've read the FAQ and the associated links, but i don't feel to comfortable in linux, and would appreciate the help in getting this thing folding as fast as possible. Right now the way i understand it, i put two NICs in the server, and have the dorm ethernet port going into one of them, and the the other NIC is connected to a 5 port switch. This is what i plug my boxen into, right? That way no other computers on the residential network will netboot off of my server? (That would just be terrible, now wouldn't it? :D). Let me know if this sounds about right, or if i need any other hardware. Thanks.
Click to expand...
documentation.

Yes, your plan for how to connect the ethernet sounds right. The documentation is clear to me, but since I built the whole thing in the first place, I may be a bad person to ask :rolleyes: . There is a new web-based configurator, which will hopefully make it much easier to configure things. Any suggestions for configuration options for that are welcome.

If you have any questions, the best times to ask me are between 8am and 10pm (the internet goes off at 10 :( ). Hope you enjoy your experience.
 
Fair enough. Thanks. :cool: Yeah, i've been reading that documentation throughout the day when i've had time today, and i've just burnt your .iso to CD-RW, so we'll see how that works tonight, hopefully. I just got my Duron machine today, so as soon as i grab the FAH folder from my WIN2K machine i'll put that HDD in the new machine and fire it up. (i just have to find a monitor to do all of this on... . :rolleyes:.)
 
I'm just going to go ahead and make a new post here, no use in simply editing my last one.

I got one of my friends on this floor to let my use his massive CRT monitor. I had to bring my computer over to his room since the CRT is pretty heavey. I managed (after a few times typing in a non-existent device for the HDD) to partition and format the 80GB disk i had just put in the computer. Finally i got it to work. But then some error messages started to pop up:
Code: 
mounting root partition on /mnt/system: mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/system
EXT2-fs warning: mounting fs with errors, running e2fsck is recommended
uncompressing........

Then, when it tells you that you can go over to shell2 to watch the progress of the uncompression i got this. I don't know how far along through the uncompression proscess the installer was, but i know that it didn't uncompress anything more after this (in terminal 2):
Code: 
lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilterattempt to access beyond end of device
hda1: rw=0, want=148897816, limit=136729152
EXT2-fs error (device hda1): ext2_get_inode: unable to read inode block - inode=9306113, block=18612226

17091144 blocks <---reported physical size


So i went ahead and tried to reboot anyway, and it did load part of the OS off of the HDD (enough to give my a promt, anyway). I don't know much about linux, but i know it wanted me to run fsck (the hdd's first partition (hda1) failed some sort of a test-- didn't write down what it was. I think it was something about the superblock reporting a different size than the physical size of the disk? And therefore it was likely corrupted.)
Will fsck fix this, or just tell me what exactly is wrong? Do i need to just go ahead and delete hda1, recreate it, and format it? I know i'm asking a lot of questions that i could post in the OS forum, but this is aimed in particular at unhappy_mage since he has direct experience with it. (But anyone else can chime in too ;)) Wish me luck, i want to get this and the rest of my garden folding!

I think if i have any more time tonight i'll just take my computer down to the lab and use their screens.... no more getting kicked off of someone else's only monitor!
 
You did say "yes" to format the disk, right? It sounds like it didn't format correctly.

The other possibility is that you've got the wrong disk or the wrong partition set up. I assume this is an IDE disk, right? Here's the key:
Primary master: hda
Primary slave: hdb
Secondary master: hdc
Secondary slave: hdd
The installer prints a list of disks it recognizes right before asking you which one, hit alt-F2 to see the list when it says this:
Code: 
 First you must decide where to install to. If you hit Alt-F2 now, you'll see
a listing of the hard drives attached to your machine. Hit Alt-F1 to come back,
then any key to continue with instructions.


As for what the partition setup is, here's mine for a 4gb disk:
Code: 
Disk /dev/hda: 4223 MB, 4223729664 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         800     3225568+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2             801        1023      899136   82  Linux swap
Basically, you want a small swap partition of type 82 and a big root (/) partition of type 83.

Most of this is straight out of the docs, please let me know if they're confusing.
 
Hey, you're offline as i make this post but to answer your questions: yes i did format it the first time i figured i needed to use 'hda' and not 'hda1p1', but the second time i skipped the format because i had already formatted the 83 partition the first time. I'm trying it again and going through the whole process anew as i make this post. I'll let you know how it turns out. I'm not really sure what exactly is causing the problem, simple cause i'm such a noobie to linux, but i've got a much greater idea of what i'm doing now compared to last night. Anyway, one question, even though it might be better placed in another forum:

1. After i press 'W' to write the partition table to disk, the console freezes with this output:
"calling ioctl() to re-read teh partition table.
WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot.
Syncing disks."
Sometimes i don't get the error message; sometimes i get another error instead.
-->More instructions here would be appreciated, as i always get "Syncing disks" and i don't know if it's doing anyhting, or if it's done. (The HDD light is not on, though.)


What's goin on?



edit: okay i've tried it for the second time in the computer lab, and so far so good for the uncompression on virtual console 2...
edit2: VC2 shows that it uncompresed all the way to var/locks/unexpecte_ where '_' is the blinking cursor.... it would be nice to know if this is a good thing or not, as well. I'll reboot and see what happens...

edit3:Sorry if i'm making too many updates here... but, it booted up (i get a cmdline), but couldn't find fold.tar.gz: no such file or directory. :confused: Any help? Thanks.


edit4: i've gotten the same problem a few times in a row now: when uncompressing the server file, it just stops, and gives me no conformation whatsoever. I get the same error as in edit3. I'm gonna download this again from a diff. mirror, maybe that's the problem.
 
DatHak512 said:
edit4: i've gotten the same problem a few times in a row now: when uncompressing the server file, it just stops, and gives me no conformation whatsoever. I get the same error as in edit3. I'm gonna download this again from a diff. mirror, maybe that's the problem.
Click to expand...
Okay, that sounds like it may be normal... The way this works is that it writes the output from tar (like winzip, sorta) to a file, and then opens a program which reads off the end of the file on the second console. The difficulty is that it uses buffered I/O to write to the file. This is normally good and speeds it up, but here it means that the whole output file may not be written before tar finishes and the reading process is killed. So basically, the entire unzip happens, the entire log file gets written, just not all of it gets displayed. I should probably figure out a way to fix this...

Try alt-F1 and see what it says there. I think it should just go like this:
Code: 
 Uncompressing system: tar xvf /mnt/system/system.tar (progress on console 2)
Creating config files: made sed script...done making config files.
Running lilo: /sbin/lilo -r /mnt/system
Added dsl *
Done installing! Ready to reboot, type reboot to do so or Shift+PgUp/PgDn
to check for any errors in previous commands...
and then type "reboot" to finish it on up.

edit3:Sorry if i'm making too many updates here... but, it booted up (i get a cmdline), but couldn't find fold.tar.gz: no such file or directory. Any help? Thanks.
Click to expand...
This is normal for the first run. You haven't downloaded the folding@home client yet; it isn't included with the package for licensing reasons. There is a script to get it, though; just do this in a console:
Code: 
perl /root/getfold.pl
and it'll automagically get F@H, configure it, and package it up for you. Type carefully in the config part, it's tricky to regenerate the fold.tar.gz (other than by re-downloading the files).

Thanks for pointing out the errors and stuff; I should probably make it a bit more user-friendly...
 
unhappy_mage said:
Okay, that sounds like it may be normal...snippity snip
Click to expand...
Ahh... *the lightbulb goes on* okay, that makes pretty good sense. Good, cause i thought i was hopeless :rolleyes:. Sweet, i will do what you suggested. And thanks for answering all my questions :).
 
Glad to hear you got it worked out. BTW to start X type "su - dsl". Good stuff there.
 
Okay, well i know that i'm digging this thread up from it's grave, but i've got more progress, and a problem as well. The su - dsl command did the trick allright, but now that i'm running Knoppix, my PS2 wheelmouse won't work. Now it says that it's been recognized in the text while DSL is booting up, so i don't know why it won't work in Knoppix. I plugged in the USB mouse that i use with my laptop into the linux machine, and i can get the mouse to work that way, but i'm really wanting to be able to use one mouse on each machine. Any suggestions? Thanks.
 
Fold server made easy.

Step one- have Oldbenwa load the of the server
Step two- have unhappy_mage fix the thing
Step three- repeat step two about 50 times.... :D
Step three and a half- have Oldbenwa fix unhappy_mage's fixes about 51 times

Step four- order pizza

Got two more crappers on the pile mage! The 24 port switch has 2 ports open I think.
 
DatHak512 said:
Okay, well i know that i'm digging this thread up from it's grave, but i've got more progress, and a problem as well. The su - dsl command did the trick allright, but now that i'm running Knoppix, my PS2 wheelmouse won't work. Now it says that it's been recognized in the text while DSL is booting up, so i don't know why it won't work in Knoppix. I plugged in the USB mouse that i use with my laptop into the linux machine, and i can get the mouse to work that way, but i'm really wanting to be able to use one mouse on each machine. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Click to expand...
Holy thread revival, Batman!

I don't know if this is DSL-specific, but in DSL there's a program called "xsetup.sh". Run that, and tell it you have a PS/2 mouse and it should deal with it.

So are you on fold-server now or not? If so, grab 1.0 and upgrade. Lots of little problems were fixed. If not, might think about switching back. Like I said, lots of little things fixed. Documentation partially updated, I'm still working on it.

Oh, and as Marty says, I will fix it if it breaks. Even if it takes additional fixage thereafter. :rolleyes:
 
Must torment unhappy_mage

Or is he tormenting me with this... confusing world.
 
Ah, yes! It works now, thanks! Of course, now that it works, i'll have to go and upgrade to the april 1st version. Is there an easy way to upgrade, or do i just re-install this bad boy? (Yes, i am running fold-server ;)) However i'm not crunching any work units yet... i just got this up and running today, because i shipped my monitor from home and it got in today. Soo..... if upgrading won't kill any progress i'll have made on a work unit, i might as well start, but until i know for sure, i think i'll just play around a little, and try to get other computers to boot from it.
 
I'd definitely recommend upgrading to 1.0; it fixes a lot of really broken stuff in 0.9.
You can back up your progress by doing this:
tar cvf fold.tar /foldsave
and then get WinSCP from the bottom of the docs page and copy it to a Windows machine. Save it somewhere onto another machine. Then install 1.0. Make 3 partitions as recommended in the docs, and when it asks you where to mount the third, say "/foldsave" without the quotes.
Then when it comes back up, copy fold.tar back to the machine, and do this:
cd /
tar xvf fold.tar
and you're done! Email me if you run into problems.
docs
hardfolding@users.sf.net

HTH ;)
 
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